Change Your Image
simon_fay
Reviews
Damon the Mower (1972)
A Poem of Moving Line and Sound
It's been at least twenty years since I last saw this little gem but hardly a week goes by when it doesn't pop up in my mind at some point.
The other review dwells on the peculiar visual devices of the film that make it seem something like an animator's line-test from a dream. To the hypnotic rhythm of the flickering zoetrope-like "split-screen" imagery is added a very apt soundtrack of distant tolling bells, the soft (but menacing) repeating swish of a scythe, interjections of breathy whistling in homage to the wind through wheat stalks, the weightless calls of distant animals, and you have a beautifully-opaque enigmatic pastorale, exactly as I (mis?)remember it.
UFO: Kill Straker! (1970)
Squandered Again
Once more the writers and producers make sure logic and tension don't get too much in the way of an excellent premise. Seems they didn't even bother to reconcile the events depicted in the first few minutes with the characters' explanatory account later on in the show, an account glaringly at odds with the events.
The re-entry/brainwashing sequence is something else though - one of the series' highlights for me, excellent British post-psychedelic TV (see also 'Reflections in the Water' and 'Mindbender').
If the film reboot ever takes off I hope it draws on the side of the series that foregrounded such strangeness, along with the conspiratorial back-story and nocturnal goings-on in forested areas.
Prometheus (2012)
Handsome Tosh
I've been beaten to the punch on more flaws in this film than I could even recall without the reviews' prompting. It's a fine-looking film, as you'd expect, but remarkably inane given its heritage and the hopes so many had invested in it. Just how stupid it is can be read elsewhere in these pages far better than I could summarise.
At least this epic fail should kill off all the guff about "Ridley Scott, SciFi visionary blah blah". With all his experience and clout, that he can helm something like this, and talk it up so brazenly, suggests he hasn't learnt anything other than a scaled-up version of his cigar-chomping ad- making captain-of-industry shtick.