Red-Barracuda

This BBC teleplay, written by genre specialist Nigel Kneale has garnered an impressive reputation over the years. Like a lot of the most well-remembered BBC horror, it was initially released as a Christmas ghost story, despite not having any actual festive element. It concerns a group of scientists who purchase a large old Victorian building to be used as a research facility. It turns out the building has a long history of hauntings and exorcisms and almost immediately a ghostly presence is seen and felt. This leads the scientists to wonder if a ghost is in fact a recording stored within stone and so they set about trying to capture this using scientific methods.

The connection between science and the supernatural is the basis for this one. And it does benefit from an eeriness which many of the BBC teleplays of this era seemed to be good at capturing. I have seen this a couple of times now and I can't help feeling a little disappointed though, given the film's reputation, as while it does have some effective atmospheric moments and some interesting horror moments, it also had a few pacing problems and was often a little too shouty and stagey for its own good at times. Worth a watch if you appreciate old BBC horror though.

Familiarity of the original Flash Gordon serials would probably help in fully understanding this one as a spoof. All that being said, the humour in this superhero sex comedy is so basic, I daresay it doesn't really matter very much. After all, this one features one-eyed creatures known as Penisaurauses, rapist robots, a planet called Porno, characters called Dr Flexi Jerkoff and Emperor Wang, an Amazonian lesbian cult, power pasties and a spaceship shaped like a penis. Sophisticated humour this clearly is not. The story has Earth is being bombarded with sex rays from the planet Porno - Flesh Gordon travels there to save the day.

Seemingly there were several hardcore sex scenes shot for this which were removed just before release, which I think we can be thankful for as that would have been sure to have made this daft film worse. In the event its a film which provides enough dumb humour to ensure its simultaneously moronic and quite charming, its chock full of bad acting and, despite copious nudity, is entirely unerotic. It does have to be said though, that there are a couple of stop-motion sequences which were actually rather well done, which indicate that there was a half-decent budget invested in this one. Its overall quite good fun.

This is a pretty solid overview of Jimi Hendrix, which details his life, music and impact. A selection of famous and semi-famous folks give their opinions on the great man along the way. It also states early on that this is going to be narrated by Slash but oddly I can't recall any narration!

Like a lot of people from the classic rock era, it is pretty amazing to think that their time in the spotlight was so brief, given their massive ongoing impact. In Hendrix's case it was a mere four years - I mean from the point-of-view of today, that just takes us back to the pandemic! Things moved so much faster back in the years when rock music was still in its infancy and new musical ideas were being born every other week. Hendrix was clearly a giant in the realm of guitar playing, specifically rock guitar playing and this doc tries its best to illustrate this. There's a bit more of a focus on technical matters than you might normally expect in a music-doc but obviously, given Hendrix's guitar god like status, I guess it makes sense in this case. This stuff can be a bit dry for the more casual viewer such as myself but its more than compensated for by the music clips and details about his life. Worth a watch for those interested in the 60's music scene.