{"id":1794,"date":"2019-04-12T21:18:21","date_gmt":"2019-04-12T21:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/?p=1794"},"modified":"2019-04-12T21:18:21","modified_gmt":"2019-04-12T21:18:21","slug":"from-the-archives-of-essex-terror-some-film-reviews-of-some-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/2019\/04\/12\/from-the-archives-of-essex-terror-some-film-reviews-of-some-films\/","title":{"rendered":"from the archives of Essex Terror: Some Film Reviews Of Some Films"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Notes: This is an incomplete collection of various film’s review on the Essex Terror! website (but not in the Essex Terror magazine). They are in no particular order, due to laziness on my part. And also a large number of images are missing. I am sorry.]<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

The Trip To The End Of Southend\u2019s Pier<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 1987
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: German
\nCert (UK): Unrated
\nRuntime: 124 mins
\nDirectors: Sir Terald Vaakenheim
\nCast: Ted Vaaak<\/p>\n

Ted Vaak\u2019s The Trip To The End Of Southend\u2019s Pier, from 1987, is now getting a re-release and it\u2019s pretty scary and entertaining stuff, though I always get the feeling that nothing in it lives up to the tremendous opening section. It begins with Ted Vaaaak (credited inexplicably as Sir Terald Vaakenheim for his role as director, but as plain Ted Vaaak for his acting and his writing) wandering muttering and confused down Southend Pier, early morning mist lending everything an unreal and apocalyptic air. Filmed in one unbroken 25-minute sequence, Ted\u2019s stuttering, near heartbreaking, waltz along the deserted Essex landmark is a thing of genuine beauty, reminiscent of the climactic scene in Tarkovsky\u2019s Nostalghia, and it is so affecting it often threatens to remove the very air from your lungs and constrict the muscles in your chest. From then on, things tend to slip away and get a little broad for my tastes, and the scenes featuring his tortured internal dialogues with a benevolent celestial Margaret Thatcher seem astonishingly dated, though it always remains watchable. 3\/5<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian\u2019s film critic. This article was originally published in the Guardian, and is reproduced here without permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

Anus Horribilis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 1994
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 18
\nRuntime: 74 mins
\nDirector: Krebva Trells
\nCast: Michael Praed, Chelsea Charms, Angela Lansbury<\/p>\n

This little seen British horror film has a controversial reputation that far exceeds its actual influence. The story, a loose recreation of A Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, involves Professor Hardwig (Michael Praed) and his team of scientific explorers adventuring their way through Prince Charles\u2019s monstrous anus, through which they expect to find a doorway to Hades. Along the way they battle innumerable monsters, including an horrifically deformed Queen Victoria (Chelsea Charms), the zombie Queen Mother (Angela Lansbury) and a hideous half horse\/half Henry VIII abomination (this, astonishingly, is just overdubbed reused footage of Ray Harryhausen\u2019s centaur from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad). One can only assume that all of this is intended to be satirical. It is, however, impossible to tell.<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw is at least not Xan Brooks<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

Brewster\u2019s Millennials<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 1999
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 18
\nRuntime: 89 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaak
\nWriter: Richard Curtis
\nCast: Alan Cumming, Lenny Henry, Donna Air<\/p>\n

8 years after the unexpected success of Bernard and the Genie, Alan Cumming, Lenny Henry and Richard Curtis teamed up once again for this BBC Christmas Special. A loose remake of Brewster\u2019s Millions, the setting this time was relocated to London and the time to the very last month of the millennium. Given \u00a330 million to spend before midnight on the 31st December 1999, if Monty Brewster (Cumming) fails he doesn\u2019t just forfeit an even larger fortune but all of civilisation, as the devil himself (Ben Elton) will rise from the depths and enslave humanity for 1000 years.<\/p>\n

Entirely formulaic in typical Richard Curtis style, Ted Vaaak\u2019s influence on proceedings is relatively muted until the final ten minutes, when it\u2019s revealed that the entrance to hell is through the belly button of Monty\u2019s best friend Spike (Henry), a monstrous \u201cinny\u201d that goes down forever and ever to the unspeakable lands of doom. As demonic perversions begin to escape, Monty\u2019s spending spree becomes ever more desperate and unpleasant, and the final scene would have been considered unbroadcastable in a gentler decade.<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw will never knowingly leave a film unspoiled<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

Let Them Eat\u2026 Us!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Year: 2013
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 18
\nRuntime: 95 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaaak
\nWriter: Ted Vaak
\nCast: David N. Guy, David N. Guy, David N. Guy, Tilda Swinton<\/p>\n

Idiotic satire imagining a future where the solution to reducing the EU\u2019s butter mountain is to force every citizen of Great Britain to drink 3 gallons of it every day. Of course the vile upper classes conspire to pay the poor to eat their shares of the congealed pie, leading to a stratified society where a person\u2019s social status is inversely proportional to their weight.<\/p>\n

The film takes a turn for the malevolent about half way through, starting with a series of attacks on the thin by the fat, escalating quickly through a series of Clockwork Orange-esque outrages, and appearing to culminate in an absolutely horrific nightmare where a group of overweight thugs (David N. Guy and David N. Guy) fight their way into Buckingham Palace and take our monarchs hostage. The gargantuan revolutionaries cut strips of their own flesh from their bodies and force feed the King (David N. Guy) and Queen (Tilda Swinton) the horrific meat of their subjects until their withered stomachs burst, and from the corpses their livers are harvested for a celebratory meal by their working class assailants.<\/p>\n

And yet even that is not the worst of it. A final scene in which this team of obese terrorists hijack a plane, commandeering the kitchen and eating all of the food until the plane is so overladen it crashes into the Empire State Building, is, both scientifically and politically, a provocation too far.<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw forgives no man nor no woman neither.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

Multi-Storey<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 2014
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 18
\nRuntime: 81 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaak
\nWriter: Paul Rose
\nCast: Tom Hardy, Helen Mirren, Tom Hollander, Helen McCrory, Tom Hiddleston<\/p>\n

A desperate attempt to cash-in on the current craze for single building actioners ( Dredd, The Raid, Attack The Block and countless others), Multi-Storey is, perhaps, Essex-based savant Ted Vaaaak\u2019s most deeply generic work yet, which is some achievement considering his dedication to the form.<\/p>\n

Shot in \u201creal-time\u201d, Multi-Storey follows unwitting everyman hero Alan Banger (Tom Hardy) in his attempt to retrieve his car from the roof of a car park run by local mob boss, Barry Shooter (Helen Mirren) and return home after a miserable night out as (an abandoned) designated driver.<\/p>\n

The car park is, we\u2019re told, the tallest in Essex, and Alan must fight his way across and up each of the four floors, facing off against a vast array of henchmen, henchwomen and even, inevitably, henchchildren.<\/p>\n

The pace is largely relentless for the first hour but breaks down once he reaches the ticket machines. The twelve minutes it takes for Banger to validate his ticket kills the momentum of the movie stone dead, and is a serious error of judgement which not even the astonishing single-take multi-level car chase escape and Helen Mirren\u2019s truly demented death scene can rectify.<\/p>\n

Imagine Peter Bradshaw stalking across the moors<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

The Barbs<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Year: 1981
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 18
\nRuntime: 63 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaaak
\nWriter: Uncredited
\nCast: Julian Sands, Patricia Pearcy<\/p>\n

Monstrous horror in which newlyweds Terrance (newcomer Julian Sands) and Barbara (Patricia Pearcy, returning here to the genre in which she so memorably made her name in the classic Squirm) inherit a farm in the abject wastelands of rural Essex. Horrified by the sinister local population, they install a huge barbed wire fence around their entire estate to keep them out. But when lightning strikes the fence in a freak storm, the barbed wire stops being the protector and begins to be the aggressor.<\/p>\n

In lesser hands, this premise could seem absurd, but here the story is handled deftly, and the creeping barb wire snakes are truly mesmerising.<\/p>\n

The film was shot on location across the Dengie, and as such there will be special showings at both The Ritz in Burnham and The Embassy in Maldon throughout the week, in a double-bill with Raiders Of The Lost Ark.<\/p>\n

This review was originally published in The Maldon And Burnham Standard on 23rd January, 1982. It has been recollected here without permission of either the publication or its original, and unremembered, author.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

The Brothers That Looked Exactly Alike<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 2014
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): U
\nRuntime: 283 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaak
\nWriter: Michel Houellebecq
\nCast: Nathan Fillion, J\u00e9r\u00e9mie Renier<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An unlikely and unnecessary remake of Twins, this time presented with a modern twist. Removing the single joke of its source material, this time the long-lost brothers are physically identical, but while Julius Benedict (Nathan Fillion) is a charming and successful All-American business genius, he is to discover with a shock that his brother, Vincent, is French.<\/p>\n

Originally commissioned by the French State Department as a propaganda piece to help repair damaged Franco-US relations in the aftermath of the Iraq war, this long-delayed project seems a strange venture for veteran director Ted Vaaaak, especially at this late stage in his career. Apart from continuing his recent interest in twins (The Twins Of Death And Disease, The Parent Trap 3), none of his usual recurrent themes of mordant body-horror, retrograde misogyny or conservative Essexism are in evidence here. Instead we have almost five hours of jokes about snails.<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw will never die.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

The English Disease<\/strong><\/p>\n

Year: 2012
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): NA
\nRuntime: 23 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaaak
\nWriter: Ted Vaaak
\nCast: Ted Vaaak, Danny Dyer, Paul McCartney, Richard Ayoade, Lucy Pinder<\/p>\n

This misguided video, funded by the Kick Racism Out Of Football campaign for sensitivity and awareness training sessions, was never used by the charity, and certainly wasn\u2019 ever intended to be made available to the public. However, its leak onto the internet this week has reignited the storm over racism in the English game, escalating bitter disputes between leading figures and bringing forth such a sustained flurry of lawsuits there is a chance that this could finally be the end of director Ted Vaaak\u2019s career.<\/p>\n

Set on the eve of Euro 2012, The English Disease is centred around the murder of a fictional and unnamed England player who, we are told in a wall of introductory text, is the first ever gypsy to play for the national team. From their, the story is told in a series of flashbacks instigated by the investigating detective\u2019s interviews with the players and staff.<\/p>\n

The player is shown being misunderstood, ignored, ridiculed, bullied and humiliated by both the manager Roy Stodgson (Paul McCartney) and the players John Scary (Danny Dyer), Ashley Cruel (Richard Ayoade) and Rio Murderhand (Noel Clarke), culminating in his eventual (never shown) murder in the changing rooms before the opening match of the tournament.<\/p>\n

With its startling depictions of the corrosive culture at the heart of English football, and the dangers of a dresssing-room \u201cdon\u2019t tell\u201d code of silence in prolonging abuse and protecting abusers at the expense of the abused, this could have been an excellent tool in the fight against prejudice. Unfortunately it is undone by a number of baffling artistic decisions, not least the use of rhyming couplets for the majority of the dailogue. \u201cOh god, you gypsy, don\u2019t you know that I hate you \/ If you think this is bad well I haven\u2019t even begun to slate you\u201d might well be the worst line sung this year, although the film is replete with others that run it close.<\/p>\n

All that pales into insignificance behind the casting of Ted Vaaak himself as The Player. Although Vaaak claims Traveller heritage through an unverified grandmother, the apparent whitewashing of the character in a piece such as this is problematic \u2013 not to mention disquieting \u2013 at best, and insultingly crass at worst. Additionaly, the sight of the septuagenarian Vaaak creaking around in an England kit is absurd, sickening, and largely inappropirate for a film intended to be shown to teenage boys.<\/p>\n

The inclusion of Tegan Gethard (Lucy Pinder) as the team\u2019s captain was presumably meant to highlighted the other, often unmentioned, unlanced boil on English football\u2019s bloated rump, but any genuine attempt at exposing sexism, even obliquely, is undone by the erotic moaning that overcomes her and the slow-mtion close-ups the director employs every time she is subjected to a \u201cplayful\u201d slap by a teammate, which is surprisingly often in a video with a running time of less than half an hour.<\/p>\n

Although the killer is never revealed, the final refrain that \u201cJust as surely as whoever laid the final blow \/ It was also YOU that killed him, that I know\u201d, accompanied with the detective pointing directly at the screen towards us, the viewers, proves to be simultaneously insulting trite and an impressive use of 3D.<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw cannot be found.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

The President’s Wife<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 1993
\nCountry: UK\/Canada\/Italy
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 15
\nRuntime: 93 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaak
\nCast: Leonard Nimoy, Shannon Tweed<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This amiable and largely forgotten comedy of confusion, now available on DVD for the first time, was to be Leonard Nimoy\u2019s last film role for 16 years. He stars here as an aging actor mistaken by an invading alien force for the President. The aliens send an envoy (Shannon Tweed) to seduce Leonard in the equally mistaken belief that his son will become ruler of the world. Towards the end the wittiness dissipates, and an unnecessarily graphic scene where the alien\u2019s human body is ripped apart as she lays a 4 foot egg ruins what had previously been a largely charming twist on an old genre. The epilogue, with Leonard Nimoy perched atop the egg in an apparent attempt to help it hatch, hints at a sequel that was to never be made.<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian\u2019s film critic. This article was rejected.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

The School In The Night<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 2001
\nCountry: UK\/Spain
\nLanguage: Spanish
\nCert (UK): N\/A
\nRuntime: 87 mins
\nDirector: Jaume Balaguer\u00f3
\nScript: Ted Vaaaak
\nCast: Jessica Del Pozo, Federico Luppi<\/p>\n

After the success of Los Sin Nombre, his successful adapation of English horror novelist Ramsey Campbell\u2019s story The Nameless, Jaume Balaguer\u00f3 planned on following this up with another film based upon a British author\u2019s horror works. However, La Escuela En La Noche, based upon the short story The School In The Night by Ted Vaaaaaak (who was also responsible for the film\u2019s script), would never see release. The showing this week of an almost complete cut as part of the Barbican\u2019s Horrific Stories season is something of a mixed blessing.<\/p>\n

Leda (Jessica Del Pozo) is a lonely ten year old girl. Trapped in a huge and empty school, she spends her days wandering the corridors of this impressive gothic prison. At night, she retreats to her safe haven in the changing rooms, sleeping on the wooden benches and talking to her only friend, a disembodied female voice that rises out of the pipework of the radiator.<\/p>\n

Desperate to escape, the voice from the radiator tells Leda of her one chance of escape. Every year on her birthday, all the doors in the school will open, and if she can get to the entrance she will be free. The only problem is the fearsome beast that roams the school after dark. Hunchbacked, fang-mouthed, fingers like hyperdermic needles at the end of swan-wing arms, the first we see of this horrible beast is its face pressed up against the windowpanes at the door to her room, a scene that is a perfectly judged homage to Nosferatu. But all is not lost, for the beast cannot touch her if she does not set foot on the floor. And so begins a terrifying and perilous journey to the other side of the building.<\/p>\n

This is where the problems begin to set in. The beast (played by Federico Luppi) is absurd, its awkward lumbering more reminiscent of the beachball creature in Dark Star than of the alien in Alien. The action scenes, mostly consisting of a girl balancing on a banister, are slow, and almost incomprehensibly repetitive. When the most effective scene is of a girl running into a chemistry lab and leaping up onto a table, scattering the stools that are resting there onto the floor, you must surely know that the script has problems.<\/p>\n

It is not all bad, though. There is, especially in the early scenes, a perfectly judged atmosphere of nostalgic horror, trading on that illicit thrill that always accompanies walking through public places at night, alone. And I must admit that I enjoyed the section where the beast messily eats an apple that the girl has dropped, hinting at a depravity that the rest of the film never shows.<\/p>\n

The final scene, with the beast unmasked and pleading for Leda to stay with him here instead of braving the outside world, is perhaps the best. As she defies him one final time and steps out into the morning air, he sits down on the stairs and cries openly, brokenly, pushing the tips of his needle-thin claws into his tear ducts in an attempt to stem the flow. It doesn\u2019t quite make up for the awkward tedium of the preceeding hour, but it hints at the film this could have been.<\/p>\n

This article was written by Peter Bradshaw and first appeared in the Guardian on October 29th, 2010. It is repeated here without permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

The Swollen<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 1964
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): Unrated
\nRuntime: 397 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaaak
\nWriter: Ted Vaak
\nCast: Ted Vaaak, The Women Of Essex<\/p>\n

The Swollen (originally titled Dreams Of The Undressed Witch) was ineminent British director and writer Ted Vaaaak\u2019s first widely released film, finding its way somehow into cinemas across Essex in 1964, including Southend (The Ritz), Laindon (The Radion) and beyond (The ABC in Basildon, although due to heavy traffic it did not open there until 1972). Based upon forced recollections of his childhood nightmares, The Swollen (showing at the BFI this week as part of its Rejection Of Narrative: British Avant-Garde And Confusion season) is often as unwatchable as it is incoherent, and as badly edited as it is written.<\/p>\n

And yet beyond the production failings, and the obvious budgetary constraints, glimpses of Ted\u2019s well-hidden genius occasionally emerge, especially in his intriguing sense of metaphor. Three sections stand out amid the tedium. In an early scene, footage of children screaming dissolves into hypnotic imagery of a blood-covered new-born lamb tottering unsteadily to its feet, before cutting abruptly back to the children just as it seems about to take its first step. Viewed contemporarily, this scene takes on a further level of sadness and melancholy as all the children involved are presumably, by now, dead.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, a scene of several women standing in a circle, the camera on the floor looking up at them as they laugh, endlessly, for sixteen unbroken minutes, is at first amusing, secondly distressing, finally terrifying.<\/p>\n

This contrasts expertly with the most famous sequence from the film, where the young Ted Vaaak (played by the even-by-then old Ted) watches a young girl (played by a stop-motion doll) undressing in the woods. Utterly silent, as the film itself is holding its breath in anticipation, the piece here has a claustrophobic momentum that builds and builds, from the initial flickering movements of Vaak\u2019s gaunt cheeks as he stares blankly into the trees to the moment when the animated doll removes first her shoes, her socks, her gloves, and then her hair, and afterwards large chunks of her skull. Just as the scene appears set to climax, with the girl? doll? witch? removing the skin from her own face with one hand and the tongue from her mouth with the other, the film abruptly ends.<\/p>\n

I alone applauded in the darkness.<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw Peter Bradshaw Peter Bradshaw Peter Bradshaw Peter Bradshaw<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

THIS IS A DOCUMENTARY<\/strong><\/p>\n

Year: 2014
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 18
\nRuntime: 222 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaak
\nWriter: Ted Vaaaaaaak<\/p>\n

Billed as Ted Vaaaak\u2019s final film, THIS IS A DOCUMENTARY is a stark and often mesmerising film, that nonetheless swerves so frighteningly at times towards antisemitism and racism that it is impossible to recommend.<\/p>\n

The documentary \u2013 which starts with a title card that says \u201cThis was all filmed on June 16th. A Sunday.\u201d \u2013 consists of three narrative strands (titled onscreen as THOSE ABOVE, US, and THOSE BELOW) interwoven together to show the ebb and flow of a single Essex day at all levels of the county\u2019s complex social strata.<\/p>\n

US centres on an unnamed and severely overweight man, following him through the various drudgeries of a typical day that is immediately recognisable to us all in the broadest sense \u2013 waking, washing, commuting, working, shopping, socialising, finally sleeping once more \u2013 even if the details themselves are sometimes disorientating (the sheer amount of whelks that can be consumed in a single day, the way the roads are populated almost exclusively by BMWs or white vans, the coarseness of the language of everyone, and the thickness of their tattoos and the coagulating slickness of their hair).<\/p>\n

It is in THOSE ABOVE that the controversies begin to mount. Now we watch a family of Essex aristocrats in a dust-filled mansion, all faded glamour and centuries of neglect. Each member of the family is a gaunt cadaver dressed in high Victorian fashion. Their withered arms, which hang limp at their sides, are useless and unused: instead a coterie of servantslaves cater for their every whim \u2013 dressing, feeding, cleaning, stroking. This family, and those that are their equals, are functionally incapable of attending to themselves, yet the film makes clear this is through choice \u2013 indolence is and has always been one of the major signifiers of status.<\/p>\n

And then in THOSE BELOW we pass the point of no return. We are shown the marshes, great featureless oceans of mud and grass and the abandoned vestiges of civilisation \u2013 rotting boats, rusting kitchen appliances, decomposing gulls, slowly unstitching footballs bobbing in the mire. The mud itself roils, pulses, and from the depths rise clay homunculi. These creatures fight each other, fight passersby, eventually venture into the towns and fight whoever it is they find there. And then as the sun goes down they return with the women of these villages and under the fading light make love.<\/p>\n

The three strands are cut together in the standard way, hoping to reflect the similarities and amplify the disparities in each story, but there are also hints at an even greater integration between the strands. The body that THOSE ABOVE are fed strips of at the feast resembles the obese protagonist of US, and similarly the young woman shown rutting with THOSE BELOW at sundown resembles his aged mother. Is this in fact not a single June 16th we are viewing, but three?<\/p>\n

Several scenes have aroused particular ire already. The staging and filming of the Acromioclavicularectomy procedure \u2013 the cutting and removal of the ligaments in the young aristocratic child\u2019s upper arms \u2013 is redolent of antisemitic portrayals of circumcision. Not only is the inclusion of a literal underclass of aggressive \u201cmudpeople\u201d problematic for reasons that I\u2019m sure do not need to be explained, the prolonged tittilation of the scenes of sexual congress between the townswomen and the mud creatures recall not just the many racist slurs of the 19th and 20th century but our long history of anti-gypsy propaganda.<\/p>\n

Yet it is the film\u2019s closing shot that to my mind proves the most controversial. Here the effluent from the castle drains directly into the marshes, the waste mixing with the pulsing mud. As the credits roll is the implication here that the circle of Essex life begins again, that THOSE BELOW are the literal excrement of THOSE ABOVE?<\/p>\n

There are other questions, and precious few answers. Where exactly was it filmed, and when? Is the title a bluff or a double-bluff? Is the questionable imagery accidental or intentional, ironic or sincere? Until Ted Vaaaaaak issue\u2019s anything even remotely resembling a statement of intent \u2013 so far the extent of the film\u2019s publicity is a typed sheet of paper declaring THIS IS A DOCUMENTARY over and over again on both sides \u2013 it will be hard to know for sure.<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw is elsewhere.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

Ted Vaaaaaak\u2019s FLEAS!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 1988
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 18
\nRuntime: 92 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaak
\nCast: Brian Glover, Julian Glover, Crispin Glover, Danny Glover<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Ted Vaaaak\u2019s FLEAS! is largely unremembered now, this was at the time considered evidence \u2013 alongside Clive Barker\u2019s Hellraiser and Shuan Hutson\u2019s Slugs \u2013 of a renaissance in British horror cinema. Set in a sleepy village in Yorkshire, and starring Brian Glover as a local doctor that has grown up since childhood with a crippling terror of fleas and who now has to confront his worst nightmare, FLEAS! follows almost every single cliche of the murderous flesh-eating innocuous animals genre that was a staple of the 80s horror landscape.<\/p>\n

FLEAS! was the first and so far the last film in his indescribable career to have used Ted Vaaaak\u2019s name as a promotional tool, and it has little of the usual confusion associated with the name. Formally one of Vaaaak\u2019s most conventional works, the only scene here that lingers in the memory is the final confrontation between Brian Glover and his mother, who has been nurturing the fleas\u2019 taste for human blood by allowing them to feed on her gargantuan breasts. On discovering that she has taken up residence in his wine cellar, he battles her to the death armed only with a nail gun.<\/p>\n

FLEAS! only real lasting legacy probably lies in its successful American remake, Arachnophobia. It is also sometimes considered to be the first work in what would become known as Vaaaak\u2019s \u201cboringness\u201d period, although others argue that this should not be considered a period and more of a phase.<\/p>\n

In 2007, Ted Vaaak tried to resurrect this tired genre with his film Fox Hunt, set after the fox-hunting ban and starring David Mitchell as a missionary back from Africa who discovers his idyllic home village overcome by flesh eating foxes hungry for blood, but it was not to prove a success.<\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

The Twins Of Death And Disease<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 2013
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 18
\nRuntime: 97 mins
\nDirector: Ted Vaaak
\nWriter: Ted Vaak
\nCast: Jonathan Frakes, John Barrowman, Sally Hawkins<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ted Vaak returns here with a largely pointless and fairly loose remake of David Cronenberg\u2019s 1988 film Dead Ringers. The Twins Of Death And Disease tells the story of twin gynaecologists and their decline and descent into madness, deformity and despair, allowing the director to engage in his usual mix of hysterical misogyny and shuddering kolpophobia.<\/p>\n

Due presumably to budget restrictions, the identical twins are here played by a freshly shaved Jonathan Frakes and the waxen smoothity of John Barrowman, which, rather than lessening the horror, instead adds a strange level of disquiet to the proceedings.<\/p>\n

Peter Bradshaw is afraid.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/center><\/p>\n

The Alan Turing Adventures<\/strong><\/p>\n

Production year: 2011
\nCountry: UK
\nLanguage: English
\nCert (UK): 12A
\nRuntime: 88 mins
\nDirector: Euros Lyn
\nCast: Mark Gatiss, Benedict Cumberbatch<\/p>\n

Mark Gatiss, fresh from the success of his adaptation of HG Wells\u2019 The First Men In The Moon, has been given a lavish (by BBC 4 standards) budget to create this pilot for a proposed series of lavish new detective stories, in which he stars as the titular hero. Based upon a never filmed script by recently deceased BBC veteran Ted Vaaak, The Alan Turing Adventures is set during an alternate history Second World War. Turing here has been re-imagined as a dashing and flamboyant secret agent careering around behind enemy lines in a desperate attempt to steal and decode Hitler\u2019s childhood diary, en route to which he gets locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse with Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun (Benedict Cumberbatch).<\/p>\n

The references to Mark Gatiss\u2019s beloved Doctor Who are legion, with Alan Turing attired almost identically to the Peter Davison-era Doctor, although here, in a subtle nod to history, he carries not a cricket ball but an apple. The final scene, where Turing turns away from von Braun\u2019s smoldering corpse and bites hungrily into this apple is surprisingly poignant.<\/p>\n__________<\/br>

Support An Accumulation Of Things<\/a><\/h3>If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon<\/a> or my ko-fi<\/a>. <\/br><\/br>Patreon subscribers<\/a> get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.<\/br><\/br>(Ko-fi contributors<\/a> probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). <\/br><\/br>Thank you!<\/i><\/br><\/br>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Notes: This is an incomplete collection of various film’s review on the Essex Terror! website (but not in the Essex Terror magazine). They are in no particular order, due to laziness on my part. And also a large number of images are missing. I am sorry.] *** The Trip To The End Of Southend\u2019s Pier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[583],"tags":[120,424,612,587],"class_list":["post-1794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archives-of-essex-terror","tag-essex","tag-essex-terror","tag-film-reviews","tag-ted-vaak"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1826,"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions\/1826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/accumulationofthings.com\/things\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}