I was a bit disappointed with episode 2 of The Monster Hunters, Heir of the Dog, partially
because my expectations had been raised so high after the debut. Lorrimer and Roy are back to help a billionaire
from the mustard industry rid himself of a marauding werewolf at his English
country estate, but can they all really be as dense as they seem? Yes.
Yes they can.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Tin Can Podcast
A First Time for
Everything is a short black comedy scene from the Tin Can Podcast in which Mike
Shephard plays Adolf Hitler and Steven Florez plays Anton Drexler. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s a great,
zippy, brief piece written by Mike Shephard himself.
Dark Horse is also
by Tin Can Podcast and was recorded live.
You don’t get many of those these days!
It’s another short and rather funny look at life inside the Trojan Horse. It
was written by Mark Brown.
The Strange Case of Springheel'd Jack part 1
The Strange Case of
Spring Heel’d Jack, Part 1, The Ghost of Clapham Common, was very enjoyable
to listen to, and I very much intend to listen to the other parts of the
trilogy. This is a very popular genre on
audio at the moment (see my previous reviews), though to be fair, sci
fi/horror/weird fiction has always had a place on radio, for many reasons but
chiefly the way it can appeal to the imagination directly rather than relying
on effects that can sometimes let the story down.
Aside from a rather confusing prologue, the story gets off
to a rollicking start. Its hero, “Peeler”
Jonah Smith (Christopher Finney), reminded me rather of Johnny Depp in such
roles as Crane in Sleepy Hollow and Inspector
Abberline in From Hell. This should be taken as a
compliment. The mysterious and
atmospheric production has early 19th century Bow Street runner
Smith and his colleague investigating curious happenings in Clapham, which is
all bound up somehow with young heiress Charlotte Fitzrandolph and the Dickensian
dastardly duo of Chough (Jack Bowman) and his rather monosyllabic, Hyde-like
associate Durberville. Anyone even
vaguely familiar with pre-vampiric, pre-Ripper Spring Heel’d Jack will be
unsurprised when cloven hoofprints are found around the graves in Clapham.
This play is quite well-written by Gareth Parker and Robert
Valentine and very well-made by the Wireless Theatre Company. The moody music and lovingly attentive SFX
make it a cut above the rest.
More OTR
My third episode of Frontier
Gentleman continued in an enjoyable and amusing vein, though less
action-packed than the previous two. In
this one, Kendall wanders into a saloon and immediately makes the acquaintance
of good-natured Wall-Eye Smith, a “cowpuncher” who attaches “son of a gun” to
everything he says, like a sufferer from Tourettes. The saloon is called, in Kendall’s words, the
“sanguinary” Jug of Blood. Inside,
Kendall drinks some beer (no doubt of very inferior quality to that he might
have had in London, though alcohol as an index of class doesn’t function quite the
same here!) and unwittingly picks a fight with a young gunslinger. The gunslinger accidentally shoots himself
and gives himself up for dead. “There
ain’t no doctor ‘round here.” The
multi-talented Kendall next attempts a surgery in very primitive
conditions. He has the reluctant help of
Wall-Eye and two of the saloon girls, though all they actually do is staunch
bleeding and pray.
Saturday, June 9, 2012
The Monster Hunters
The Monster Hunters by
Newgate Productions was indeed a pleasant surprise. In description, it seemed to share a similar
format to The Scarifyers, whose first
series at least was extremely enjoyable supernatural/mystery/historical fluff
from great vocal artists like the late Nicholas Courtney, Gabriel Woolf and
Terry Molloy. The Monster Hunters, perhaps, takes itself a bit less seriously and
therefore restricts itself to smaller scope, with unpredictably hilarious
results. I was listening to this on the
train on the way home and could not help smiling at perplexed strangers as the
play wound its way to an outrageous climax.
The prologue, where the evil vampire Count Orloff is
defeated in London by Ignatius Chesterfield in 1771, reminded me very much of
Doctor Von Goosewing trying to stake Count Duckula in the eponymous Cosgrove Hall kids’ cartoon. Much as that cartoon succeeds from an
onslaught of gaffes, quips, and harmless buffoonery, so to The Monster Hunters: The Discotheque of Nights creates involuntary
giggles a-plenty, courtesy of its disinterested mastermind (Sir Maxwell House[1]), its
protagonists Roy Steel (Matthew Woodcock), world’s second best game hunter, and
Prof. Lorrimer Chesterfield (Peter Davis), fulfilling the Professor
Dunning/Terry Molloy role (albeit a bit stupider!).
I should mention, of course, that one of the reasons The Monster Hunters succeeds so well is
because it is set in 1971 and revels in the camp that Life on Mars eschewed. A
brilliant soundtrack and Steel’s completely un-PC attitude work extremely well
(it’s hardly surprising that the writers also play the leads). Like the escapist fantasy of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, it glories in a depiction of a silly,
semi-fictional past that just happens to include vampires. I may not know any
of the 1970s films it’s based on, but that doesn’t hinder my enjoyment.
The Monster Hunters—at
least in the league of The Scarifyers and
perhaps outdoing it.
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