Tales of the Uncanny

 COVID hit while Severin films were working on a documentary about the history of horror anthology films. This ended up being a godsend, as it gave them ready access through online video to a bunch of industry experts who had nothing to do. They rack up an impressive sixty-one talking heads - from appreciative bystanders and fans like Ramsey Campbell and Simon Barrett, to people who've actually been involved in crafting one or more anthology films - people like Joe Dante, Roger Corman and Kevin Connor.

 It's intended more as a broad survey than any sort of exhaustive history, and at times it just feels like a hangout movie where a bunch of people enthusiastically stump for movies they love; There's very little negativity to be found here.
 It's also almost 90% fluff. But given the amount and scope of talent assembled, there's bound to be a lot of little interesting bits of information on the films being discussed.

 The films discussed are loosely organized by date, starting with their origins in German silent films, which were then imported into the United States as filmmakers like Fritz Lang emigrated there before the war. A lot is made of Dead of Night, and there's a fun discussion about Amicus films, including a running commentary from people who were involved with various of their productions.

 There's a big section on TV anthologies - a couple movies Dan Curtis made from Richard Matheson stories, and TV shows like Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone, Night Gallery and Tales from the Darkside - before returning to more cinematic offerings. Creepshow 1 & 2 have an outsized presence, while other films are barely mentioned; it feels a little counterintuitive to spend so much time on films most people with even a passing interest in this format would have already seen, but there you go.

 It's still a fun, breezy overview over a genre that sometimes slips under the radar; If nothing else, it's given me a list of films that I need to track down now.

Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD

 First things first: 2000AD is a seminal punk-spirited British weekly comics magazine that started in the late '70s and is generally credited with a fuckload of innovations in comics- especially in introducing a darker tone and acid, satirical social commentary into their pulpy adventure yarns. It's very well-loved in the nerd community here in the UK, and it was where a lot of famous creators made their names before moving on to better known titles (mostly at DC): Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, Dan Abnett, Grant Morrison... the list goes on and on and on. And then on some more.

 Midway through Future Shock!, a documentary that tries to chronicle 2000AD's colourful history and legacy, legendary comic scribe John Wagner complains that because of the way their contracts were stipulated, the publishing arm of the comics he worked for sold the rights to his comics to American and other markets without him ever seeing a single penny of those sales.

 And... that's exactly how I first got to see his work; Sorry, Mr. Wagner. I'd been telling my folks I wanted superhero comics, which weren't that easy to find in the corner of the world I grew up on; Instead, they got me a series of Spanish magazines that reprinted a bunch of comics from 2000AD. And... that's pretty much why I never got into superheroes; When you grow up on Judge Dredd, a deadpan satire featuring a fascistic policeman upholding the law in a corrupt dystopia, it's really, really hard to take Batman seriously.

 The documentary is structured into fairly standalone chapters, each one dealing with a discrete subject: An introduction with the state of British comics and how the magazine came together, a chapter on (the lack of) female creators in the magazine, various run-ins with censorship, the unacceptable working conditions and various ways the staff were cheated out of fair compensation for their creations... It's all brought together by an amazing array of talking heads: with the conspicuous absence of Alan Moore, whose contempt for the comics industry is legendary, a ton of people involved in the magazine are given a chance to speak up - pride of place is given to artists and creators, as it should be, but we also get folks on the publishing side (in the unenviable position of having to defend themselves from accusations they know the others will inevitably have made), other creators that were influenced by the comic (most notably novelist Lauren Beukes and Scott Ian off Anthrax), plus Alex Garland and Karl Urban (who made their excellent Judge Dredd adaptation just before this came out). 

 Most of the people they rounded up make for good company, and the movie easily coasts on their not-always fond memories and anecdotes; Grant Morrison cheekily winding up Wagner with his foppish persona, Pat Mills on how a coloring mishap got a whole line of comics shut down by the censors, that sort of thing.

 Also present: a lot of minutiae on beloved characters like Dredd, Strontium Dog, Slaine, Rogue Trooper (my boy!) and Nemesis the Warlock. No love for Peter Milligan's Dan Dare run, though.

 There's also a very interesting (to me, at least) section on how instrumental Karen Berger (who is also interviewed) was in wrangling all the British talent once they left ship (to Pat Mills' amusingly lingering resentment) and migrated to the US; Basically, the DC Vertigo imprint was partly built on the back of 2000AD defections to house the more adult-oriented titles all these people wanted to create. It's obvious when you look at the list of names, but I'd never thought about it like that.

Yeah, 2000AD definitely helped define the productive citizen I grew up to be

 I do think it's a little too focused on pleasing fans of the magazine, though. Many of the segments feel undernourished, and there's a complete lack of context on many aspects. When discussing ownership over art, characters and storylines, for example, no effort is made to compare it with how that was treated elsewhere; How much better off where these people at DC? - I mean, it's not like Alan Moore was impressed. For someone without only a little knowledge about comics like myself, it leaves some pretty important stuff unsaid; The less you know, the less satisfying this is probably going to be.

 There's also a self-congratulatory tone which is allowed to go on for a little too long. Not just people reminiscing on how much fun they had, which is great, but them speaking about how capital-I-important the magazine's legacy is (especially Mills, who sometimes fails to thread the line between entertaining and overbearing) can get a bit grating by the end.

 There's also no mention of all the 2000AD 8-bit video games that came out from the then-thriving British bedroom-coder-based computer game industry; I know it'd be a deep cut, but a digression into the weird graphic/text adventure they made out of Slaine would have hit my withered nostalgia glands dead in the center.

 But on the whole it's an entertaining, informative romp; It's appealingly presented, with a ton of great artwork often animated seamlessly (by production houses Zebra Post and 3PS) to a guitar-driven score by Justin greaves. Director and editor Paul Goodwin does a great job of splicing the interviews so that any given subject often gets multiple commenters. And the level of access is astonishing; the assembled talking heads span a huge range of comic book luminaries, all of them seemingly happy to be there.

 Most importantly it gives a good overview on what 2000AD was and why it was important. Definitely makes a great case for why it does indeed deserve to be called The Galaxy's Greatest Comic.

Sideworld: Damnation Village

 The obscure, but influential sci-fi author Kilgore Trout postulated that ghosts are five-dimensional objects that tend to follow channels through space. The main channel that passes through earth skewers it right through the British islands, and that's the reason why no other country is as haunted as we are.
 The third Sideworld movie for some reason fails to mention that, but it does go into the just as valid theory of place memory. The series was already fairly UK-centric, and this entry doubles down on that.

 These films are extremely low-budget documentaries featuring a bunch of spooky folklore with a shared theme (for this one, haunted UK villages), on-site footage overlain with public-domain art, and a constant narration from director George Popov, who's a pleasant host even when his script (again by Jonathan Russell) gets a bit lurid.

 There's two problems with this one; the first is that it falls into the trap of just enumerating hauntings, and to be honest that's not nearly as interesting as the deep dive (ho ho ho) the previous movie took into spooky sea stories. It's a problem with the format, I guess, but that doesn't make it any less of a problem. The ghost stories assembled here just fail to engage.

 The other, bigger problem is that they take the fictional Derring Woods Massacre - an almost decade-old creepypasta - and present it as fact. That's... I mean, OK, now you're making folk horror, not a proper documentary, and that's fine. But now you've got me doubting everything you say from now on... and also retroactively. Or I guess you saw this online and you were fooled into believing it was true. Neither does your credibility any favours.

 As for the rest... it's fine. The movie divides its time between the standard "UK's most haunted places!", as seen in many ghost-hunter podcasts and TV shows. The first is Pluckley, which includes the bullshit I just mentioned above. Then it moves to Prestbury, which includes a couple of interesting asides into the pseudo-scientific theory of place memory and the Black Abbott haunting. The final segment is all about the town of Eyam, and it's the most interesting one as it's all about the village's historic response to the black plague back in 1665-66: they went into voluntary isolation, which was fairly unheard of at the time. Russell and Popov dig up some interesting material and are pretty respectful - there's nary a mention of any supernatural stuff. By far the highlight of the movie.

 It'd be easier to recommend if it wasn't for that Derring Woods faux-pas. But even without it, it's still a bit of a misfire.

Sideworld: Terrors of the Sea

 Calling it a documentary might be stretching the definition a little; The Sideworld movies collect spooky bits of folklore and historical miscellany (mostly from England) and bundle them into themed packages. In this case, the sea. Director Alexander Popov narrates from Jonathan Russell's script, along with good music (by Matthew Laming) and some beautiful nature footage and images from historical documents (DP: Richard Suckling); No re-enactments. The presentation is slick and unobtrusive.

 The stories are mostly regional tales from the British coasts and cover a nice range of nautical subjects, each one given a whole chapter: ghost ships, sea monsters, sailor ghost stories and underwater people. The incidents discussed are pretty interesting, and provide some sources were possible, but the focus is in keeping them fleet of foot and entertaining.

 They also get fairly obscure; the Ghost Ships segment, for example, touches briefly upon the Flying Dutchman and Mary Celeste by way of introduction, but spends most of its time on a particularly haunted sandbar just off England's southeastern coast.

 Popov makes for an great host, and while the script sometimes gets a mite too purple for my taste (the rhetorical questions at the end of each chapter made me chuckle) its contents don't push for supernatural explanations or call for credulity- not too hard, at least. Sometimes it sounds like Popov is workshopping horror story ideas based on whatever he's expounding on, and there's plenty sops to scepticism.

 It's an unpretentious and nerdy exercise which just happens to be a excellent way to spend seventy minutes.

Dick Johnson is Dead

 With the spectre of Alzheimer's looming over her dad, documentarian Kirsten Johnson -who'd already lost her mother to the same disease some years earlier- decided to celebrate the man by making a movie about him while he's still mostly present.

 But that would be too straightforward, so the documentary instead hangs on a gimmick. To confront his mortality, several scenes are staged where Dick Johnson dies in various ways: an air conditioner falls on him, he drops dead in the street, etc. There's also a fake funeral, and some weird, purposefully kitschy scenes in a music-hall like heaven where Mr. Johnson (who is still a believer) holds court while dancers wearing oversized photographic masks of himself and his wife as youths sway merrily in the background. I can only guess at what he was thinking.

 It's a weird and not entirely successful conceit, but Mr. Johnson goes along with his daughter's ideas with a seemingly unending reserve of patience and good will. At one point, covered in fake blood on a cold New York street, he compares the act of filming one of his demises unfavorably to the experience of surviving an actual heart attack. Not that you could tell that he's miserable; He's one of those people who remains pleasant even on the most trying circumstances.

 You can see why the director thought the fake deaths angle would be a good idea, but honestly, I'm not a fan. Best case scenario it was well intentioned and it didn't work out, worst case it feels mercenary: forced quirkiness, something that they came up to get the movie greenlit.
 The artifice of those staged scenes certainly doesn't seem to do much for Mr. Johnson; He seems to go along with it just to please his daughter, whom he dotes over. I hope it helped her, at least.

Chocolate fudge cake as a running theme; I approve.

 As the movie starts Mr. Johnson is closing down his psychological practice and selling off the beautiful house he lived in with his wife to move in with his daughter in her tiny NY apartment. He has to give up his car, and driving. It's devastating.

 Like any movie about Alzheimer's that attempts to portray it truthfully, I can only describe the experience of watching it as a constant kick to the emotional balls/ovaries. Despite eliding the most horrifying stages of the disease it still manages to be brutal, a sort of psychological act of terrorism; All this made even more hurtful by the fact that Dick Johnson is clearly a wonderful, delightful human being - a ridiculously sweet man whose love for his daughter is as clear as her love for him.

 The movie is full of powerful little moments: it tries to linger on the more positive ones, though most of them end up being bittersweet. Some of them even are a result of the gimmicks; a friend's eulogy/bugle salute in the fake funeral is hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
 The funeral is fake, and the mourners know Dick is not dead and probably will not die in the immediate future. But it's still a farewell. So maybe I'm wrong and the gimmick is worth it; I'm just angry at it because it made the guy miserable for one afternoon.

 Dick Johnson is Dead is a beautiful, heartfelt documentary, full of warmth and humanity. I am very glad I watched it, and would rather never watch it again.

The Creeping Garden

 How about... a ninety minute documentary about slime moulds?
 Why not? They're fascinating beings, situated somewhere adjacent to fungi, but different enough to make scientists a little uncomfortable around them. Until relatively recently they were classified as half fungus, half animal.

 The directors (Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp) chose to style it after retro sci-fi films, and tapped Jim o'Rourke from Sonic Youth to provide an unobtrusive electronic score; The whole thing is very well put together. And thanks to tons of time-lapse footage of growing, hypnotically pulsing slime moulds, it's got no lack of eye candy.

 It's all spliced together from interviews with people who study slime moulds in one capacity or another. An amateur who likes to wander around the woods looking for them waxes philosophical, various scientists geek out on their obscure subject of study, and a historian provides some excellent digressions on Victorian entertainment before a lively presentation on a British documentarian who was doing time-lapse photography on moulds back in the early twentieth century.

 Most of the interviewees are candid, engaging and interesting. The movie does lose its way a little when it focuses on artists using the movement of slime moulds; a live-action 'game' where people get tied together and asked to act following the rules the smaller organisms follow is kind of amusing, as are the experiments of people making them run simulate road networks and whatnot. But others - people building robots that take their input queues from slime mould colonies, or a pianist that likes to jam to background music generated by the mycetozoa have a distinct whiff of bullshit.
 The movie itself has no editorial voice and is content to follow up on anything to do with its subject, and does not judge at all; I'd really have liked more detail on, for example, how these people get any sort of dynamic response from something that moves a couple centimeters an hour.

 Another problem with the documentary is that it would have been nice to have a primer on these weird organisms - we get a lot of punctual information about them, but the broad strokes (such as that they have very distinct phases of development) are left for viewers to look up on Wikipedia afterwards.

 But the talking head approach really pays off when, for example, a specialised scientist admits that the subjects of his chosen field of study don't seem to have much of an ecological role ("They could pretty much disappear completely, and very little would change..." or when an archivist at a repository for fungus samples is kind of thrilled when someone comes looking for the slime mould section ("We never come back here").

 It's an interesting, entertaining look at a pretty obscure subject. Shame about the lack of depth.

This is Gwar

 Gwar, Gwar never changes.

 Oops, sorry, my bad- Gwar's always changing; Gwar is fucking chaos.

In the grim dark future there is only Gwar. And Joan Rivers.

Gwar, for those not in the know, is a metal band that is (in)famous for going out on stage wearing cool, oversized prosthetics and costumes and rocking out with their (prosthetic) cocks out. I've never really listened to them, but as anyone with an interest in metal music I was aware they're famous for putting on theatrics during their shows that make Alice Cooper seem utterly tame in comparison. Heads get chopped off, on-stage fights erupt, giant butts get impaled with crosses; Simulated body fluids of all (yes, all) sorts are sprayed on an enthusiastic audience.

 This is Gwar is a behind the music-style documentary that covers their whole history starting with their founding back in 1984 from the mixture of an art collective trying to put out a home-made science fiction movie and a punk band frontman who got them to make props for his shows. With full access to all the living members of the band, a bunch of people who slave away (no, literally - they work for peanuts and are referred lovingly as slaves) to make the props and effects that power Gwar's incredible live shows, and tons of archival footage, it's a fascinating oral history of the ups and downs of a band that's alternatively moving, riotously funny, and shocking.

 Seriously- these folks have been through a lot over the years. It would be interesting to see this just for the logistics behind their incredible stage props; The movie opens, very appropriately, with a roadie explaining the hydraulic setup that allows them to shoot jets of blood and jizz. But the story behind their creation, the conflicts between their very... highly idiosyncratic band members, the censorship issues you'd expect and a couple of deaths (and one near-fatal shooting!) - there's so much going on here.

 It'd just be worth it for all the concert footage, which is hilarious and shows a ridiculous amount of talent and effort expended just on the stagecraft, but despite the rigidity of the music doc format their history is so full of incident and wild twists that it makes for a ridiculous compelling viewing.
 I might still not be a fan of their music, but after watching this I can honestly say that Gwar fucking rules.