The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Audiobook

May 25th 
Happy Towel Day.

"More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

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The Book of Koli

M.R. Carey
Orbit

Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognizable world. A world where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly vines and seeds that will kill you where you stand. And if they don't get you, one of the dangerous shunned men will.
Koli has lived in Mythen Rood his entire life. He knows the first rule of survival is that you don't venture beyond the walls.
What he doesn't know is - what happens when you aren't given a choice?

Mike Carey has destroyed the world before in his fantastic mushroom zombies novel 'The Girl With All The Gifts' and its sequel prequel 'The Boy on the Bridge' and here he's up to apocalyptic shenanigans once again with his new 'Rampart Trilogy' beginning with 'The Book of Koli'.

Now I absolutely love a post-apocalypse novel but I generally prefer a more immediately post scenario than we have here.  Koli's world is several hundred years on from ours in a UK devastated by war and by genetic tampering that has left the world over-run by plants and animals with a real taste for all that squishy stuff that humans are made of.

This first book provides an easy and nicely straight-forward story that allows for some comprehensive world building as we follow young Koli on his travels from the relative safety of his village out into the wilds of Ingland.  

There are the inevitable shades of the two Johns (Wyndham & Christopher) along with hints of Walter M. Miller Jr's 'A Canticle for Leibowitz',  Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age' and Patrick Tilley's 'Amtrak Wars'.  With its undercurrent of botanical menace its debt to 'The Day of the Triffids' is the most notable but Carey has rejigged, reinvented and revived it for a new era and his story is fun and fleet of foot, never settling and thoroughly enjoyable and I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck into the next one.

Buy it here - UK /  US.

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The Haunted House of Horror

Director Michael Armstrong's 1969 debut feature 'The Haunted House of Horror' (also known as 'Horror House') has become well known as an example of studio hackery over directorial vision as his taut proto-slasher was re-edited and added to by studio (Tigon) dictat turning it into a bit of an overlong and meandering mess.

It's late 60s London and a group of pretty young things bored by their own party head off to a derelict and supposedly haunted house to hold a séance where one of them is brutally murdered.  Realising there's a murdering lunatic among them they decide to simply cover it all up and hope for the best which of course is exactly what doesn't happen.

At its core is a solid thriller with some strong performances from much of its cast especially Jill Haworth - who made a few horrors around this time including 'Tower of Evil' - but one has to wonder if some of Armstrong's original casting choices - including David Bowie as 'Richard' - would have made for a stronger movie with US popstar Frankie Avalon - cast at the insistence of US investor AIP - making for a very ineffective lead right up to his eye-watering end and both the subplot featuring a stalkery George Sewell and the final reveal drag somewhat but this is a movie that despite its many flaws I have a real soft spot for although it is tinged with a hankering for what could have been.

Buy it here - UK / US.

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Hellraiser: Soundtrack Hell - The Story of the Abandoned Coil Score

In 1984 Coil member Stephen Thrower struck up a friendship with author Clive Barker after a chance meeting in a London Forbidden Planet shop and played him some tracks off the not yet released first Coil album, 'Scatology'.  

From this friendship and mutual artistic appreciation the band were soon asked by Barker to provide the soundtrack to his movie 'Hellraiser', an adaptation of his own novella 'The Hellbound Heart'.  Alas, beyond some preliminary recordings, it was not to be and at the studio's insistence the movie eventually went the more typical orchestral route via composer Christopher Young.  

In the video below Stephen Thrower tells the story of the soundtrack; its development and it's demise.  Obviously for a Coil (and Cyclobe) fan like me it makes for a fascinating watch and it's a joy to see Thrower's enjoyment in the telling.  Personally Hellraiser was never a film I had any particular love for; I thought it had some striking visuals but body horror was never really my thing. I can't help but feel though that an undiluted version formed from those initial discussions between the author and the musicians would have been quite something to behold.

And then there's the music.  Within Coil fandom the story has long been debated and endless "What if's" discussed over how different the film could have been "If only..."

The small amount of music they made in that week in the studio has long been available and with it's very of the time sound palette and strong John Carpenter vibes it ably shows just how good it all could have sounded and makes the decison to drop them from the project all the more bizarre and obviously one made by corporate dictat.



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The Silent Scream

The seventh episode of Hammer Studio's and ITC's 1980 television series 'Hammer House of Horror' sees a newly released convict with the action movie name of Chuck Spillers (Brian Cox) taking a job with the man who had visited him in prison, Martin Blueck (Peter Cushing).  The job entails helping him look after the wild big cats in his basement zoo that he's using in his experiments to create a prison with no bars.  Unfortunately, temptation soon proves too much for Spillers and Blueck's true nature and plans are revealed.

Cushing, in his last role for Hammer, is, of course, as brilliant as ever and plays both aspects of Blueck's nature - the facade of banality that conceals the psychopathy underneath - to perfection whilst Cox is perfectly cast opposite him as the incorrigible and fairly hapless jailbird and as an actor of note in his own right able to hold his own aganst the Hammer legend in full flight.  Being more of a psychological thriller than the outright horror that either the venerable studio or the lead actor is famed for it's great fun to see, even at this late stage, their take on something different and as such it's always been one of my favourite episodes from the series.

Buy it here - UK /  US 

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The Creeping Flesh

Professor Emmanuel Hildern (Peter Cushing) returns from an expedition to New Guinea with the skeleton of a mythological evil giant that he soon discovers can be revived through contact with water.  Having being denied further funding by his asylum running half-brother Dr James Hildern (Christopher Lee) he begins to rush his experiments to use the skeleton to immunise the world from evil injecting his serum firstly into his lab monkey and, soon after, into his daughter Penelope (Lorna Heilbron).  Needless to say things soon start to deteriorate for all involved as several storylines begin to converge leading to a grim but pleasingly ambivalent ending.

Here, director Freddie Francis has perhaps made a movie with slightly too many loose ends for them all to be successfully and fully explored in the time given but in the tradition of a number of other Tigon movies ('The Blood on Satan's Claw' & 'Witchfinder General') it's ambitions are to be celebrated and with Francis' cinematographer's eye it looks lovely.

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

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