Conan the Barbarian: It's not actually that shit!

I finally succumbed to the phage. I saw the all new Conan film on sale in a video rental store for under a tenner and had to have it. Until that point I had resisted the temptation as, anticipating the shitness, I'd promised myself that I would only buy it once it was under seven quid. I paid eight so once again my utter lack of self-discipline prevailed, as it so often does. That, no doubt, is the reason why I tend to live unhealthily, have a huge library of really quite crap films and only twenty minutes ago nipped out for some ciabatta so I could wolf an enormous sausage sandwich rather than eat the healthy, low GI muesli my erstwhile other half painstakingly sourced for me from an extortionately expensive farm shop (thanks babe). On the whole this personality quirk is a self-destructive defect but I reckon in the right circumstances it could make me a pretty awesome tory MP. A shame then that I consider them all to be a bottom-feeding gang of blood-sucking slags.


So then, Conan the Barbarian. It was evident from the first announcement of the pre-production of this film where it's core values would lay. Robert E Howard, the complex and doomed creator of Conan, never wrote a story with that name, or in fact any that included the name of the titular character in their title. It was coined by Roy Thomas for the popular 1970s comic line and later adopted by John Milius for his legendary Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle in 1982. It's a curious phenomenon in modern cinema that we as an audience are considered too stupid and lacking in concentration that stand-alone titles a la the Bond series are no longer considered appropriate. In the case of Conan however the habit was started by the editor of the 1960s paperback collections of Howard's Conan stories and henceforth we read Conan the Warrior, Conan the Freebooter, Conan the Usurper etc. What readers weren't fully aware of at the time was that this editor, L Sprague de Camp, actually had the temerity to rewrite some of Howard's prose (something which has thankfully been ejected from the most recent collections).

The books proved hugely popular, largely thanks to their luridly painted covers by Frank Frazetta (and later by his successors like Melvyn Grant), leading De Camp and fellow pastiche author Lin Carter to pen their own Conan novels. Within twenty or so years a host of other authors had added to the Conan mythology and Howard's original output of just twenty-one short stories (and four fragments), collected in four or five paperback volumes, had been utterly dwarfed by a parade of mostly terrible sequels and prequels to the existing canon (to date their have been a staggering fifty additional Conan novels by a number of authors, of variable quality). The biggest problem with the Milius adaptation, as well as the Marvel comics, is that it is not really a film about Howard's Conan, but a film based upon Frank Frazetta's paintings of Conan. Milius and screenplay writer Oliver Stone rejected any of the Howard background or plots, opting instead for a Conan that grew up a muscled slave and is motivated by a hackneyed 'You killed my famileeeeeeee....' plot device. It was utter bollocks from a purist perpsective but still managed to be massively entertaining thanks to Ahnuld's unique charisma and Milius's bombastic, ultra-violent eye for capturing the sword and sorcery genre. A risible sequel, Conan the Destroyer, veered further from the Howard roots and firmly into Marvel territory and, depite abortive attempts to continue the franchise, Conan disappeared from cinema screens in 1984 (although not from televisions thanks to increasingly lame attempts to exploit the property).


Imagine then the delight of Robert E Howard fans when the announcement was made around 2009 that an all-new big budget Conan movie was in the offing. That very year there had been joy and disappointment in equal measure as Michael J Basset's Solomon Kane movie, based upon the lesser known Howard character, had achieved some success. Bassett's take on Howard themes being a modest success was a good sign, after all it was slick, had a reasonable budget behind it and was a well crafted fantasy film with a pleasingly dirty, muddy and bloody take on a 16th century puritan avenger's quest for redemption in the face of creeping death and evil. Unfortunately it had FUCK ALL to do with Howard's stories. Bassett, seemingly in love with the image of the character, like Milius and Stone before him, ejected the entirety of Howard's actual story output in favour of an invented backstory and a 'You killed my surrogate family and later my faaaaather....' plot device. There is definitely a theme developing here. Is it really impossible to garner emotional investment in a heroic, sword-wielding character without 'You killed my famileeee/faaaather/haaaaamster' angle? Even when the original source material managed quite successfully without it? As it happens, no it isn't impossible.


The very afternoon of the day I bought the all-new Conan the Barbarian, Philippa and I saw John Carter at the cinema. Apart from the utterly distracting and gimmicky 3D, which we did not have the option of eschewing, it was a grand and warmly faithful adaptation of a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, an early 20th century contemporary of Robert E Howard (although older, Princess of Mars predated the bulk of Howard's output by a good fifteen years and was in fact an inspiration on the Texan's approach to adventure stories). Most impressively the film-makers did not feel pressured to preface matters with a cheap gimmick designed to 'short-hand' the protagonist's motivations.


With this freshly in mind I felt justified in blowing my allowable Conan film budget by a whole Earth pound. Despite it having the Ron Perlman 'seal of quality'. And despite the direction being handled by Marcus 'Pathfinder' Nispel and Conan himself being played by the muscle-bound wooden dolt who was Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones. And even despite the decision to film it in 3D, ensuring that any number of action scenes will, to the 2D viewer, lack any logic, common sense or believability. None of these things were a challenge to me, although Philippa's reticence to watch it given my previous months of declaring my belief that it will be utter rubbish certainly was. She relented and in the event it wasn't rubbish, in fact the first half was really encouraging, despite the 'You killed my faaaaather...' hook. The father in this case being Ron Perlman. Who will literally be in absolutely anything. I should point out here, once again, that there is never any expicit mention in any Robert E Howard story of Conan's father, let alone the manner of his death. What we do know is that Conan was a formidable fighter, even as a youth, and an acknowledged, respected and battle hardened warrior by fifteen. In this respect this film gets Conan the character right from the offing. Our introduction to young Conan sees him brutally dispatch a number of villains in a breathless and exhilirating display of prowess. At this point, very early in the movie, my hopes for the film soared. I even forgave the death of Perlman/villain introduction and, once I saw Jason Momoa as grown Conan for the first time I was pleasantly surprised. He looks good, muscled yet lean and athletic, has an engaging manner and raw charisma, and is believable as a shrewd operator. All the things a good Conan should be and the polar opposite in many ways from what we have seen before. This Conan has already had adventures, is a seasoned sailor and leader of men and has a set of pirate buddies to fall back on. Great stuff. Unfortunately things steadily begin to fall apart thereafter. The villain is appropriately villainous but lacks any real believability in his motives and his crazy magic, once implemented, seems to do precisely nothing. Rose McGowan's turn as his bizarre, witchy daughter has more substance but she is sparsely used and eventually falls as a foil for Conan's love interest, a female monk whose name and general value to the story I have managed to forget already. There are some fun fights here and there, although the violence never lives up to the promise and sheer viscerality of the first half hour, and the overall look of the film is rather attractive, if somewhat generically fantastic. Sadly, in the third act it becomes largely a dark, cave-bound affair and the final confrontation between Conan and his father-killing nemesis is a big disappointment, concentrating as it does on exploiting the 3D gimmick rather than a suitable, cinematic climax to what began as a fairly epic and bloody affair. The sooner 3D just fucks off the better cinema will be.


In conclusion then Conan the Barbarian succumbs to the same pitfalls of previous adaptations, but it does manage to be its own film. It is not a remake of Milius's Conan and, in Jason Momoa, manages to create a likeable Conan character that is as close to the Howard original as we have yet seen, but it is not all the way there. As a hard core Howard fan I am not nearly as disappointed as I expected to be and there are signs that, should another installment get made, this franchise could go some way to really doing justice to Howard's vision.

From the archives: Halloweens 4 & 5

Here is another old, old review. At the time Rob Zombie had just burst onto the horror scene with his muddled but entertaining House of 1000 Corpses. His zenith, The Devil's Rejects was a couple of years down the line, meaning that his rapid decline to the nadir of his output, the hackneyed and distastefully lascivious Halloween remake, was still some years away.
There are certain conceits in american movies that I truly adore. One is that of the avenging posse of drunken, shotgun wielding , blue collar 50 year-olds in pickup trucks. Another is the cheating boyfriend whom seeks redemption through heroic action only to get his skull crushed. All of which brings me nicely around to this review of Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers. In actual fact I'm going to review Halloween 5 too as I watched them back to back this evening (about nine years ago) and they are perfect examples of how sequels can contribute to and detract from a series. For irst up is no 4, which is actually the third Michael Myers movie as Halloween 3 was some weird departure that had bugger all to do with the the first two.

HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS.

Ten years have passed since Michael Myers was consumed in flames, along with his arch-enemy Dr.
Loomis . Naturally the  loopy killer survived and is being transferred between secure hospitals the day before Halloween. Dr. Loomis isn't happy, and not only because he is sporting some fetching scarrage.  Myers kills his escorts and is off back to Haddonfield to do serious injury to anyone unfortunate enough to get between him and his niece (daughter of the now dead Laurie Strode) Jamie.
Chaos ensues and many people die, so no surprises there then. What IS surprising however is just how good this film is. Danielle Harris is great for such a young actor effectively having to replace Jamie Lee Curtis as the main protagonist and Donald Pleasance is characteristically enthusiastic in his portayal of the battered and almost crippled Dr. Loomis, never forgetting for a moment to signal pain in his movements and exasperated fatigue in his face.
The photography is crisp and the foreground and background are equally well regarded by the camera and other than the 1.85:1 aspect ratio director Dwight Little crafted a worthy homage to Carpenter's style. POV shots are not used gratuitously and enhance the tension, and the relative lack of gore is adequately compensated for by the movie's effectiveness as a thriller. Alan Howarth's music is low key and efficient and the first instance of only sparing usage of the Halloween theme punctuates a moment of recognition between Loomis and Myers at a dust blown gas station, and when it kicked in it genuinely gave me goose bumps. In fact the movie's greatest strength is in its ties to the original; the theme, Donald Pleasance and the eponymous villain, the familiar, signature  Carpenteropening titles, and a lack of the gratuitous nudity which is all too common in the rest of the slasher genre. This is far from a simple copycat however and the familiarity does not breed contempt, largely thanks to the characterisation of the stricken town of Haddonfield. The aforementioned pick-up posse are well drawn and contribute to the picture of Haddonfield as a scarred town with a traumatic past. The film moves with a sharp pace and builds to a surprising conclusion that reprises one of the key scenes from the original Halloween and is sold beautifully by Donald Pleasance.

In conclusion this is a good example of how, if you're thematically consistent with the original and respect those things that made it a classic then you don't need to reinvent the wheel. When confronted by Myers a plucky victim warns, 'Don't try that Halloween shit with me!' and that's what the audience say, only half meaning it but hoping 'that Halloween shit' will still work, and in this case it does. I actually preferred this to Halloween 2, the neat ending being especially satisfying but, as we well know, any original twist introduced in a sequel can be easily demolished and devalued by subsequent episodes, which brings me nicely on to Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers.

HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS.

There is one great scene in this installment. The sight Of Dr. Loomis laying into Michael with a 2x4 is particularly satisfying, but not even Pleasance's delirious penultimate turn as Loomis can save this ill-considered sequel from utter mediocrity. The chilling uncertainty of the previous climax is swept away as that scene is 'ret-conned' in a fashion all too common in uninspired sequels.
Obviously Michael is up and about again but this time the crux of the plot is that he and Jamie have a psychic link. Yawn. All the things that identified 4 as a respectful and carefully crafted sequel are absent. The music is intrusive and the Halloween theme is battered senseless to the point of having no meaning (despite the score being by Alan Howarth), even lowering itself to the depths of comedy whistles and honks to accompany a slightly goofy pair of policemen. The director uses POV like it's going out of fashion, thereby eliminating any tension as you almost always know where Michael (in his new, slightly rubbish mask) is. The psychic link storyline gives the director an excuse to throw in a 'Nightmare On Elm Street' style dream/reality crossover to no purpose whatsoever. The cleverly constructed 'Traumatised Haddonfield' characters are conspicuously absent, replaced with hugely annoying teenagers who run around waving knives dressed as Michael Myers and DON'T get turned into human colanders by  nervous policemen with good memories. The only positives are that the performances from Pleasance and the one year older Danielle Harris are first rate and there is an attempt to introduce a new direction for the series.
The new direction takes the form of a mysterious stranger (you know he's mysterious as he wears a long black coat and a hat) with a tattoo on his wrist matching one (which has miraculously appeared) on Michael's wrist. This is not expanded upon until part VI (and when it is it is predictably crap).
In conclusion then...

[The Good] Halloween 4

[The Bad] Halloween 5

From the archives: Children of the Living Dead

The curious thing about blogging is that I feel under pressure to come up with a new post all the time. Unfortunately I only have one thing to really vent spleen about at the moment and I haven't yet formulated my thoughts about the issue so here is a 10 year old crap film review from the Stimpson archives:

Children Of The Living Dead

Where to start with this movie...

I'll start with John Russo.

He was credited as co-creator of the seminal sixties horror film 'Night Of The Living Dead' and, following his spat with Night director Romero in the early seventies, it was decided that he could keep the rights to 'The Living Dead' as a title, and off he went and wrote the frankly appalling novel 'Return Of The Living Dead' (which I actually own and, gods help me, have read). Russo's own script based upon the same novel was later adapted into a great film by Dan O'Bannon who sensibly threw out 90% of Russo's script and started afresh, although Russo still has producer and storyline credit. Meanwhile Romero knocked out some great movies, continuing the saga of the Dead rising to inherit the Earth, and proving that he was the talented one. (Note from 2012: Romero also went on to make Land, Diary and Survival of the Dead, meaning that in retrospect he is now responsible for as many excrutiatingly shit zombie films as good ones, and fully two more than Russo himself. Bummer.) Eager to flog his pony a few miles further down the dirt road Russo eventually returned to the original source of his fame for a reprehensible re-cut of 'Night' complete with new score, new scenes and Bill Hinzman reprising his role as 'graveyard zombie'. If you've seen this then you have a good idea of the total amateurs Russo is hanging with but hey, you ain't seen nothing yet!
If you thought 'Dawn' and 'Day' were the official sequels then you're wrong. We were ALL wrong because in black and white on the back of the DVD case 'Children Of The Living Dead' proudly proclaims itself the rightful sequel!
Anyhoo I stuck it in the player and LO... BEHOLD the GREAT SAVINI! It's true, the first ten minutes is purely Tom Savini versus the walking dead in a field. And a barn. And what a load of crap. It looks like a fan movie, no sync-sound, Savini lines are ADR'd over choppy edits to cover the fact that there was no dialogue whilst shooting the scenes. I guess they thought the tension and drama would override the need for dialogue, until they noticed there was no tension or drama. Savini looks and sounds embarrassed to be there but he gives it a valiant go anyway, even getting out the line 'Hey.. you know they're not attracted to children!' Hallelujah, they may be undead but at least they're not paedophiles! This begs the question as to how the little girl in Night ever got bitten, perhaps they mistook her for a 42 year old trucker. I don't know about you lot but if you said to me 'there's this movie right and the first ten minutes is Savini getting it on with a load of zombies' I'd think, "I HAVE TO SEE THIS MOVIE." If you agree then save yourself the effort and stick a fork in each eye instead. Even better watch 'Slugs' which is hilariously incompetent, rather than just dogshit on a pole.

Q. Can you tell me where to find a diner that serves breakfast? (Asked by our hero of old man at motel)
A.What's that you say? You want to find a miner with a black vest? (old man)

The old man is deaf you see. Thus I provide an example of the rank stupidity of this movie.

I've already touched upon how crappy it looks, sounds and generally is but before I offer any conclusions I wish to address a bugbear.

Day for night filming has been a well used method throughout the history of cinema but when it's badly utilised it's just really really bad. Anyone who saw 'The 4400' will know what I'm talking about. 'Children Of The Living Dead' is right up there with the Timothy Hines 'War Of The Worlds' for taking day for night to a new and wholly pointless level of mediocrity. (Note from 2012: I may be the only person who survived the Hines version as I suspect every other unfortunate who took the plunge may well have eaten their own head in disgust. If this is the case I apologise unreservedly for the obscurity of the reference. well, to the two and a half people that are even reading this of course.) In every other scene the upper third of the screen is so dark that it feels like your ultra-cool sunglasses which you always have perched on the top of your head just keep slipping down and ruining the movie.
WHY?

Time for another great line. One subplot of the movie is that a greedy company hired to move a graveyard down the road is so cheap and cynical that they decide to remove the headstones, dig up the coffins and move them twenty feet to a large trench. (You'd think a slightly smarter cynical company would just move the headstones and not even bother digging up the coffins but that would have denied the opportunity to slip in the gem that you're about to read.)

Whilst moving a coffin it breaks open and.... it's empty!

Work guy consults a piece of paper and says 'According to the sitemap there should be a body in this coffin...'

One more bit of nitpicking before I give a brief outline of the plot, the foley work is beyond poor. Boots on straw sounds like tap shoes on floorboards.

The Plot:
The original outbreak chronicled by 'Night Of The Living Dead' was contained, the movie opens in the closing stages of the extermination of a more localised outbreak in a small town in Pennsylvania where ex-deputy turned survivalist Hughs (Savini sporting a natty hairdo) is doing his Rambo thing while his cowardly ex-partner avoids any trouble by sitting in his car saying randomly to no-one in particular 'Nothing going on here!' He actually says that without moving his lips too!
Finally he meets up with Hughs and they go to clear out a barn which, unbeknownst to our heroes, is occupied by the zombie of Abbot Hayes, evil dead rapist and murderer. For some reason some kids are hiding out there and our first major plot point is highlighted, 'Zombies don't go for kids!' Hmmmm. Let'spaper over this and move on, long story short, kids rescued, Abbot Hayes does for poor Hughs and we skip forward 14 years.
14 years pass.
14 years and Abbot Hayes is still in the barn.
The barn that had the kids in.
The kids that zombies don't 'go for!'
Cue those very same kids, now looking like teenagers and riding a VW van on their way to a gig.
Abbot Hayes steps in front of their van and...

LOOK OUT...

CLIFF...

Yes they drive off a cliff into a randomly placed quarry and they all die.

(Note from 2012: At this stage I should perhaps apologise to the person reading this who doesn't know who Cliff Richard is. And of course anyone offended by the idea of a jeebus-member.)

At their funeral zombie Hayes goes round their coffins and gives them all a bite, apparently turning them into his private little gang of teen zombies! Why? I neither know, nor care.

So that is the setup. Hayes has his children, even though they're not children any more. Or something. The film skips another year and we get the graveyard/contractor subplot, a mini romance and the movie hurtles towards its stunning climax... a siege at a diner. I'm not even going to go into the colossally stupid, continuity gaff filled battle but as I was watching it I laughed. I had a positive response which almost made me think I wasn't robbed after all... almost. In actual fact I was robbed, this movie is a festering turd on the backside of one of the (once) greatest movie sequences of all time. It's a sceptic anal wart. But I think everyone should see it.

[The Good]
Tom Savini's hair.

[The Bad]
Everything else.

It's the internet stupid

T'interweb, and by extension social media is a wonderful thing. Facebook in particluar has tremendous utility value when it comes to meeting folks and getting utterly mullered. Like text messages before it, the ability to co-ordinate disparate groups and individuals in order to successfully meet in The Whalebone for some of their splendid Neck Oil, and perhaps a pickled egg, has consigned to the shredder the old memories of sitting in a boozer in the 80s and wondering what everyone else was up to whilst sobbing into a pint of sloppy 70 pence mild at the sheer, numbing isolation of life as a man in the high suicide risk factor age group of 18-35 in Thatcher's Bloody Britain.

Unfortunately, like all good things, Facebook and the like have inevitable drawbacks. Amongst the worst are the ubiquitous posts that make an irritatingly illogical statement about some stranger's political/moral/ethical/mind-numbingly-fucking-irrelevant beliefs before adding 'Re-post this if you agree.'

In the early infancy of Facebook there were also the posts regarding a syphillitic, blind, quadriplegic baby girl from Grantham who would get vital self-esteem saving surgery if a million people reposted. Fortunately enough annoyed users idiot-slapped the re-posters enough times that the message sank in to their thick, porridgy, retrogressive brains and they appear to have vanished, at least from my pages.

Not so the urban myths.

A while ago I had the fairly chirpy story of an air hostess whom, when faced with a bigoted passenger complaining about sitting next to a ginger or gay biker or something, turned the tables in hilarious fashion by being very nice to the target of said bigot's complaints. Oh how delicious, and brave a stand on her part, such action was to the 73 tits who read it without thinking that it sounded too bloody twee to be true. Of course 30 seconds and the power of google reveals that it was not true at all but was an internet myth that originated in South Africa and has been doing the rounds for years in one form or another. In a way this particular post is harmelss enough, after all it reflected an agreeable sentiment. Unfortunately the same goes for a much more problematic breed of 'viral' internet myth.

Today came a post by someone on my friends list, under the title 'this is disgraceful', that purported to be a scanned image of a letter (comprising lots of angry capital letters) sent to an MP demanding investigation into why the Great British Pensioner is undervalued by the Deparment for Work and Pensions to the tune of around minus 300% in comparison to, and I quote, 'IMMIGRANTS/REFUGEES LIVING IN BRITAIN'.

Cue the subsequent outpourings of disgust at the state of Britain...

'it's what this pathetic country has come too'

and

'weak,weak we used to be called great...not anymore'

and not forgetting

'tell me about it. they gettin more in benefits than i get paid'


Naturally, to anyone with an even slightly inquisitve brain, this letter seemed rather suspiciously to be a stinking pile of bullshit. And it is, as evidenced by just 30 seconds  of effort and a bit of google power. This is deeply annoying and the kind of thing that is seriously irksome, to the point in fact that it suggests, nay DEMANDS that the original poster should be condemned to a life of emotional pain and ignominy via a carefully considered sentence only fitting to the crime... the Facebook 'unfriend'. For a split second I did consider this may be an over-reaction, but no. This kind of spurious, ignorant ersatz patriotism and rabble-rousing is nauseating, and such a cynical and utterly fictitious diatribe can only 'go viral' if some witless chimpanzee not only buys it, but spreads it around like so much disease-ridden guana.

So Ian Hollis, you're an idiot. Get the fuck off my list.

Vice - A Big Night Out in Hull

This is a great gallery of pictures that reminds me why I rarely go into Hull city centre on a Saturday night. It's fine to sit in Pave and declare that the article is unfair to Hull but the fact that any newcomer will check out the city centre and find the social equivalent of the slow readers group is a sad indictment of council policy. The city centre has been dying for years and is much like the CBD of any other small run down northern city or town on a Saturday night. All have areas of vibrancy and slightly more salubrious venues but to outsiders these towns are not defined by such, but by their city/town centres. Blame the council, not Mr Breen, for fucking up the quayside and marina development plans and ensuring that the only drinking holes that can survive in the city centre do so by pursuing the lowest common denominators in terms of both clientele and promotions. Additionally there are plenty of people around, most of East Hull in fact, who have a completely different view of what constitutes a good night out to the Princes/Newland Ave goer, and while this Vice article may be designed to bring out the smirking, sanctimonious arsehole in its average reader (the 'cool kids' perhaps), most of the people photographed would be happy to own it, tag it on facebook and stick it in their family album as a memento of a brilliant night out. Who's to say they are wrong? Incidentally the free newspaper Hull Advertiser many years ago had a Big Night Out section much like this one and the results were much the same.

Ah Pook the Destroyer - The Silver Key

Album review:

Ah Pook the Destroyer - The Silver Key

I happened upon this well crafted and rewarding Lovecraftian concept album after hearing a glowing review on a Call of Cthulhu/RPG themed podcast. Naturally I took this praise with a healthy dose of salt as RPG podcasts are not necessarily the most reliable form of musical criticism but in this case the geeks were spot on.
Ah Pook the Destroyer is essentially an adaptation of Lovecraft's final (if memory serves) Randolph Carter story, the tale of a man seeking to restore something lost to him as he grew older and more 'scientific' in focus. I won't spoil the story but it is definitely one of Lovecraft's more poignant and possibly personal stories, and as such is perfectly suited to such an evocative and mellow suite of music as is presented here.
The mixture of narration and soft vocals intertwine lovingly with the progressive rock stylings of the principal musicians to create an experience that bears little comparison with most modern 'prog rock' and it has little in common with the traditional giants of the genre like Yes, Rush or even the more contemporary holders of the mantle Muse. The Silver Key, if anything, sounds like an hypnotic blend of elements ranging from early Moody Blues epic Days of Future Passed, the choicest cuts of The Alan Parsons Project and King Crimson, and the magnificent soundtrack album to The Virgin Suicides by the super-versatile and restless french experimenters Air. It is necessary to point out after these comparisons that the album is not a self-absorbed, pretentious exercise in self-indulgence but a cohesive collection of tracks that feature not only evocative soundscapes but catchy hooks, great musicianship and well-balanced production.
For lovers of Lovecraft this should be an essential buy as it is easily as vital and refreshing as any host of Lovecraft inspired movie/comic-book/audio play adaptations and for fans of progressive rock Ah Pook the Destroyer has something genuinely rewarding to offer.

If you fit the above criteria then for the paltry price you owe it to yourself to check it out here.

Ramsay - 1981

Around two or so years ago a group of friends and I decided that, for the first time in 14 years, we would play a role-playing game. All keen gamers back in our younger days we convened here in Bradford from as far afield as Hull and Manchester and proceed to get utterly langered on manhattans, port, pork pie and brooklyn bombers. Needless to say a combination of the degree of inebriation and my appalling rustiness in the GM's chair resulted in a far from satisfactory gaming experience, although it was a whole heap of fun. It did not deter us and we tried again a while later, this time with Loz in the hot-seat and one man down on the previous session. This shedding would occur again following another entertaining but somewhat painful WW2 based Call of Cthulhu idiot-fest. After things tumbled into oblivion, accelerated on the part of a colossally inebriated GM, the second man jumped ship on the grounds of being too old/cool/disappointed (delete as necessary), in the process taking no responsibility whatsoever for the fact that we were all half-cut getting underway due to his appalling punctuality and then even more so once the game was in full swing thanks to his hour and a half preparation and insistence that parachuting into WW2 Greece disguised as a monk replete with fake beard was more than reasonable. That left Loz, stalwart drinker Yarky and myself remaining from the initial regrouping.

I love RPGs and despite not having gamed for 14 years I had continued to amass various games and supplements of all shapes and sizes, as well as managing to sell a few on amazon (for good money too in some cases, £189.99 for a Delta Green supplement*), and my appetite remains undiminished for gaming action. Thanks to Mr Cameron I have had the time recently to contemplate more regular sessions.

Despite the casualties we continued unbowed and for the past year or so we have, once every 4-6 weeks, engaged in a Hawkmoon game with some more old friends from way back. We're all scattered over the country but make the effort once in a while to get together with a pile of booze and some dice. It's been an inspiration to me that one guy I had only seen twice in the last 14 years was, for the sake of his love for the hobby, prepared to accept a 130 mile round trip, including an overnight stay, to reconnect.

So the Hawkmoon/Moorcocky weirdness game continued once every six weeks or so, capably handled in the GM seat by latter-day pioneer, fop and all round iron balls Loz, until a point where he wanted very much to play again, I took over and it just kind of ran out of steam, largely I think due to a lack of investment in the setting on the part of the majority of the players. Bizarrely we have ended up with 6-8 players every session and we actually have a waiting list of folks wanting to get involved. This is more than we had way back when, in those golden days of yore. Unfortunately they are all mostly 'along for the ride' types who generally need to be spoonfed. This may well be due of course to the fact that we're all adults from 38-45 with families, children, rats, credit cards, keys etc so researching the entire Eternal Champion canon for the sake of a drunken game night once every six weeks is a tall order.

As a result I decided on a radical course of action (that did not involve introducing Mrs House into the game, just in case any Moorcock nerds were wondering/fearing)**.

A wee while ago I came across a scifi RPG called Diaspora. Diaspora uses the Fate system introduced in Spirit of the Century and further developed for the likes of Starblazer Adventures and sister game The Legends of Anglerre amongst others. Apart from being a really good, folio sized read (excellent bathroom book) it also details a communal method of developing the in-game environs, in this case a number of star systems and planets. This struck me instantly as a brilliant and, thanks to the rules-set, elegant way of investing the players in a game whose genre is perhaps unfamiliar to them beyond mainstream media and a background that is developed by the group in little pieces, rather than an expectation that they either do extensive background reading or that the GM has to drip feed everybody and shoulder the majority of the burden every time we play.

With this in mind I decided a basic premise. First of all the background needed to be familiar, but different enough to excite the imagination of the players. As we all originate from fairly small towns in the North of England, and as everybody likes a bit of horror and weirdness I came upon the idea of Ramsay, a small fictional town and surrounding area on the fringes of Cumbria, Lancashire and North Yorkshire. It is 1981 and the players are generally fairly normal with one exception, they all have an experience of something strange (thank you Unknown Armies), a glimpse of the weird and barely seen underbelly of society. Henceforth I invited the players to join me in fleshing out the bare bones which I had established and to generate characters using the Unknown Armies system, thanks to its enormous flexibility and excellent passions/stability mechanics. We now have an increasingly well fleshed out background, a number of developing NPCs (including the characters' in-game BoL Dungeon Master Clive) and a beautifully realised A3 map of the town and surroundings courtesy of particularly creative and artistic Sarah.

We played for the first time properly a couple of weeks ago. I ran a modified version of the scenario Crook's End from Pelgrane's tremendous Book of Unremitting Horror with some decent success. It was generally a haunted house game with some added elements and I was a little bit rusty as it is some time since I've GM'd anything like it (ie relying on pace and mood rather than moral dilemmas and fighting). The real success of the endeavour though was that nobody questioned any element or said 'what's a falchion/eldren/off-moo'.

Bingo.

Next installment takes place in late March. Ramsay continues to grow and develop. GAME ON!

*I later bought it again for £55, ker-ching.

**Of course due to the extremely limited readership of this tract that Moorcock nerd will probably only be me anyway