Ghosts was a mid 90s BBC1 series of modern day ghostly tales - two of which, 'Three Miles Up' and 'The Chemistry Lesson', we've featured here before - that has mostly disappeared from people's memories which I think is a real shame as it had some interesting moments and this episode, the first in the series, is one of them.
Written by 'Ghostwatch' writer Stephen Volk it's the story of incarcerated gangster Jack Rudkin (Derrick O'Connor) who after a near death experience develops the ability to astral project which he uses to spy on and terrorise his wife Suzi (Anita Dobson) and brother Les (David Hayman) who he discovers are having an affair.
O'Connor who had a Wyrd Britain pedigree second to none with appearences in 'Blood on Satan's Claw', 'The Final Programme', 'Hawk the Slayer', 'Jabberwocky', 'Time Bandits' and 'Brazil' is phenomenal here and utterly terrifying. Dobson is on familiar 'Eastenders' ground as the rattled wife of the proverbial dodgy geezer and falls apart with aplomb as Jack's revenge escalates and Hayman is nicely understated as the backstabbing brother.
With a running time of less than an hour Volk has crafted an entirely satisfying plot from which spin off a number of well realised narrative threads with only the very closing scene feeling a tad contrived and obvious. Director John Strickland keeps everything well grounded but successfully imparts a queazily oneiric quality to Jack's astral excusions and in all what we have is an entertainingly bleak and occasionally brutal melding of prison drama, gangster movie and ghost story.
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I throughly enjoyed the last episode of mid 80's TV series World's Beyond that I featured here - 'Guardian of the Past' - so I thought I'd try another but this time the results are a lot less enthalling.
'World's Beyond' took it's stories from the archives of The Society of Psychical Research so the general conceit is that these are dramatisations of 'true' hauntings. Here a couple (Darren McGavin & Connie Booth (Polly from 'Fawlty Towers') are awoken by a man's voice and discover that someone has tried to hang their daughter. After trying again the spirit possessing her changes tack and decides to ask for the family's help.
Unfortunately neither (long time Eastenders) director Sue Butterworth nor writer Brian Clemens (Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter) really manage to get to grips with the story and inject any sort of dynamism and it just kind of stumbles along in a jumble of cliches. It's not terrible but it's a missed opportunty.
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'The Black Tower' is a short film by avant garde filmmaker John Smith that tells the story of the narrator's descent into madness triggered by recurring visions of the titular tower.
Smith - Professor Emeritus of Fine Art at University of East London - is perhaps most well known for his very funny 1976 film 'The Girl Chewing Gum' where he appears to direct the various comings and goings along a London street. Here he retains the playful humour of that film but wraps it in a pastiche of a Ballardian or Aickmanesque supernatural / strange story which unfolds through a series of fixed shots, primarily, of the tower from different angles and locations which gives the illusion that the tower is in some way stalking our narrator on his journeys. These images are enhanced with some well chosen, whimsical and sightly mischievous sound and editing that, more explictly than the narrration, allows us an insight into the narrator's increasingly fractured psyche as the tower closes in on him.
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