What did Graeme watch over Christmas?

Funnily enough, after a good few months of looking forward to it, I never got round to watching the Christmas or New Year’s Day episodes of ‘Doctor Who’. Other things got in the way (that’s the way Christmas goes!) and although I wish I’d watched it I never found myself missing either episode at the time. Did you watch it? If so, what did you think?
There was plenty to keep me occupied whilst eating chocolate and drinking beer though. My Christmas viewing went a little something like this…



‘Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus’

And I thought that ‘Hard Rock Zombies’ was the worst film of all time… This ‘stocking filler’ sure proved me wrong! This DVD was fun to watch but very much in a ‘we all had a good laugh at how rotten it was’. The title promised much but what it delivered was the same shot of the giant shark used over and over again and a ship set that gave new meaning to recycling. If that wasn’t bad enough, the director seemed to think that having scientists nodding meaningfully over test tubes was a great way of showing experiments happening; I was left wondering why he missed Debbie Gibson clearly not spending enough time getting her make up done… We did get to see the ‘Mega Shark’ tear up the Golden Gate Bridge but by the time it got round to fighting the octopus the film was practically over! Like I said, it’s a fun film to watch but if you’re anything like me you’ll come away thinking that you could make a better version in your kitchen sink…

‘The Day of the Triffids’

This was more like it! I may not agree with the TV licence but I’ll happily watch TV at someone else’s place :o) ‘Day of the Triffids’ was well worth watching although I wondered if the slightly adjusted ending was really all that necessary. You can’t adapt everything that’s in a book but some things don’t need changing at all (I don’t want to say too much for fear of spoilers…)
Apart from that one small thing though, it was all good and a real ‘no holds barred’ look into the post apocalypse and how people adapt to their new circumstances. Eddie Izzard made a surprisingly good Torrance, Dougray Scott’s ‘Bill Masen’ took a while to get going but once he got into his stride Scott gave us a lead character that drove the plot nicely. Any TV adaptation that makes me want to read the original book again has to be doing something right! I’ve got vague memories of seeing the other BBC adaptation back in 1981 but haven’t seen it since. Anyone here have any preferences between the two?



‘Pterodactyl’

If things had gone our way I’d be writing about having seen ‘Sherlock Holmes’ right now. It wasn’t to be though (stupid not being able to get a parking space…) so we ended up flicking through the TV channels until we came across this little gem. I say ‘little gem’ in the loosest possible way…
‘Pterodactyl’ sees a group of scientists teaming up with a special ops unit (as you do) to escape from a flock of Pterodactyls that have somehow hatched in a dormant volcano. Now I don’t know about you but what I’d do is stay under the trees and keep moving, not run across the same meadow (filmed from different angles) and get swooped on. Having said that, if you’re in a special ops unit with Coolio as your commanding officer then you can kind of understand people wanting to offer themselves up to prehistoric flying reptiles! You know what though? Despite all that (and some rather obvious CGI work) I ended up really getting into this one. ‘Pterodactyl’ knows exactly what it is and makes no apologies for it, preferring instead to get on with the business of throwing loads of Pterodactyls at stupid people who ought to know a lot better. It’s not demanding at all but it is a whole lot of fun :o)

I also picked up a few odds and ends while flicking through the channels… ‘Ice Spiders’ looked like it could be fun until I saw the actual spiders. Films like that leave me wondering why people bother making them when they obviously don’t have the budget to do it justice… ‘Audition’ is a film that I’ve always meant to watch and this Christmas I learnt that it’s very obviously a film that you can’t come in half way through and just pick it up. What I did see was bloody good though!
Talking of ‘bloody’, I can’t remember the name of the horror show on the Bravo Channel (‘House of Horror’ or something like that…) but what I will remember is watching a plastic surgeon skin his mistress alive in order to give her skin to his badly burnt wife. There isn’t a lot that makes me retch but this one did it! What a thing to see at four in the morning…

Edit: It was 'Masters of Horror' :o)