Showing posts with label George Popov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Popov. Show all posts

Monday, January 29, 2024

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.

Friday, January 12, 2024

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.