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Reviews
Torchwood (2006)
Doctor Who Weakly
Oh crumbs, it's really not working is it? I love the old Doctor Who, and happily sat through the first two seasons of the new series despite the odd flaw, misfire and under-par episode. We're halfway through this spin off series however, and despite all the attempts to fit it into Doctor Who's continuity I still have no idea what it's really supposed to be about, beyond the post-watershed teen-titillation and well'ard swearing and gore.
Beyond that, it's utter chaos - each week they shove half a dozen other recognisable shows into a blender and hope the resulting concoction will still be palatable. There is little to no consistency between each episode - the editing and direction is all over the place and views like none of the writers have the faintest idea what anyone else is doing - and the characters are unlikeable insert-random-personality-this-week ciphers with the exception of Gwen and Jack (who started off amiable but is steadily growing steadily more bonkers as the series trundles along). As an organisations, Torchwood itself is as Mickey Mouse as it gets; they seldom get the job done properly and half the trouble they manage to bring down on themselves through their own personal agendas, even managing to spawn their own serial killer(!) in the pilot episode.
Chris Chibnall's episodes are particularly atrocious and illogical to the point of insulting the intelligence; nobody has yet come up with any credible explanation as to why Ianto's brains aren't splattered against a wall - much less why he still has a job - by the end of Cyberwoman. And that's only four episodes in.
A spectacular mess.
The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1969)
So much fun!
The mark of a good show is always how much the technical staff and actors enjoy doing it. The DVD commentaries for this show prove it, as Janet Waldo (Penelope), Gary Owens (narrator) and Iwao Takamoto (designer) spend the whole time regaling us with wonderful anecdotes about Paul Lynde, Mel Blanc, Joe Barbera, and just how much fun was had during the production - fun they're still having just as much of from watching the episodes again over 35 years later.
The Wacky Races / Dastardly & Muttley / Penelope Pitstop triumvirate were also supremely blessed by the scripting elegance of Micheal Maltese, who years earlier had created the Road Runner and Coyote with Chuck Jones (and it shows in this series in particular with the Hooded Claw's ridiculously over-complicated Rude Goldberg traps).
This is the real joy of 'golden age' Hanna-Barbera (1968-1969 were the very best years, IMO); where the emphasis was in appealing character designs and the quality of the writing and voice-work, rather than what would look most sophisticated on the screen (although by 1960s TV animation standards, this is actually pretty good).
Still a classic so many years later, and a show that could really teach today's more turgid cartoons about giving your animators free reign to enjoy themselves so that everyone benefits in the end.
Eye on... Blatchford (2005)
"It's not easy being green"
Charlie Chaplin's philosophy was that comedy is born out of sympathy and pathos. Of course Chaplin never made films about one-eyed spaghetti-headed aliens, but it's a lesson which Rob Hammond has taken to heart well. Sardoth is beyond rubbish - where Scaroth from City Of Death oozes genuine menace and ruthlessness, Sardoth is blissfully naive and childlike - and never actually recognises his own failings nor why he can't fit into small-town human society. Anyone whose sympathies lay with Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf is going to feel right at home.
Admittedly it's a little hard to convey just how funny this sketch is to those who haven't before seen City Of Death (and if not, why not?), but comic highlights which all faux-Whovians will assuredly all giggle at will be the bookshelf belonging to Sardoth's GP ("Where Does This Bit Go"), his dismissal of the art 'treasures' collected by his other selves as 'splinter junk' (including a DVD of the lost Fury From The Deep, complete with authentic BBC cover), and his attempts to raise money via a pub quiz machine with the aid of his splintered selves, none of whom can agree on the answers to the questions. It also has the worst Who-related joke EVER when Sardoth goes to break a five-pound note in the pub, but you'll have to have seen Julian Glover's own performance in the original story for it to make sense.
Even if most of the Doctor Who jokes go over your head, you can't fail to be amused by the sketch's dead-on sense of total self-assurance, mixed with a blithe ignorance of its own utter inconsequence, that genuine regional television programmes from the 70s and 80s would exhibit, as typified by the likes of the drunken snail from Nationwide. In this regard at least, Rob Hammond certainly knows his telly.
Son of the Mask (2005)
Breathtakingly bad.
In a year that has already given us the eye-searingly appalling 'Alone In The Dark', and following a previous summer of such spectacular errors of judgement as 'Catwoman', 'Baby Geniuses 2' and Disney's 'Around The World In Eighty Days', it was hard to imagine how much more self-flagellation Hollywood could suffer without at least stopping to notice the blood. But at least Uwe Boll works for peanuts; some $84 million has been thrown away in this worst-of-the-worst retelling of a joke that stopping breathing some eight years ago after Jim Carrey and the Saturday morning cartoon show had flogged it to death. Skid row just got a bigger development grant too; now Alan Cummings and Bob Hoskins have both swan-dived into the cinematic dumpster for Christian 'Carnby' Slater to point his finger at and laugh.
So much has been written already by so many verbose movie buffs about what a conceptual, artistic, aesthetic (and no doubt financial) catastrophe this exercise in utter pointlessness is. But all you need to know, and a point none of the critics appear to have picked up on, the irony of Son Of The Mask's choice of 'One Froggy Evening' as a plot-expository clip; the movie stops being funny the moment anyone is watching.