Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004)

 

Director: Richard Ayoade

Screenplay: Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness

Cast: Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi/Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D; Richard Ayoade as Dean Learner/Thornton Reed; Matt Berry as Todd Rivers/Dr. Lucien Sanchez; Alice Lowe as Madeleine Wool/Dr. Liz Asher

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Series)/ An Abstract Candidate

 

I have never exploded. But I know what it would be like. Don't ask me how. I just know.

Garth Marenghi - author, visionary, dream weaver - is a prolific horror author, and in the eighties, he worked on a TV series which was never broadcast except for in Peru. That was until Channel 4 in 2004, desperate for content, asked him to resurrect the project, with new interviews with cast members who have not disappeared in the decades after. Breaking kayfabe, with the premise even sustained with the DVD released, is that Matthew Holness created Garth Marenghi originally in 2000, as part of a Richard Ayoade co-written horror parody stage show Garth Marenghi's Fright Knight performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Brought to this series, he is a parody of the likes of Stephen King, who had his real Marenghi moment when he directed Maximum Overdrive (1986), and also the likes of Dean Koontz or James Herbert¹, fellow prolific horror authors. Marenghi is an egotist, a sexist, and has an episode of these six where he exposes his racism against the Scottish, the definition of a man with his head up his arse, thinking of himself as the messiah of horror who can even have profound insights to help humanity but is a tawdry author of terrible ideas and dialogue.

Darkplace itself is a disaster in terms of wooden acting, cheesy props and using slow motion to pad out episodes. A meta-textual work, the actual show is Marenghi directing himself and starring in the main role, as the former warlock Dr. Rick Dagless M.D at Darkplace Hospital, who with side characters encounter increasingly weird and horrifying events. Marenghi in the series-within-the-series was allowed to shoot interviews, mainly with his publisher Dean Learner (Richard Ayoade) who starred as Darkplace Hospital's administrator Thornton Reed too, and later on Todd Rivers (Matt Berry), an actor on the show that visibly became the stereotype of the older star reduced to drinking a lot. When I first saw Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, I found it disappointing after all the build up. The episodes came off as slightly amusing but average altogether as I marathoned the entire series. A lot of the humour is the absurdity and ridiculousness of this set up, both Marenghi's ego, and the pastiche of a badly made horror series where he let his ego run wild, where he is shown as always cool and virtuous to the children in the wards, sexier than even Todd Rivers' heartthrob character, and always right. This time, I appreciated the show on its own terms, when the first scene introduces female lead Dr. Liz Asher (as played by Alice Lowe), who when starting at Darkplace Hospital is introduced to a cat, visibly placed on the hospital set by hands, telling her to "just leave!" in a dubbed over voice.

The show's structure could be a paradoxical one to work with; to create a technically awful programme could lead to making a dreadful show because it is too accurate to the dreariest of this type of programming. My initial issues with the show was that it was too deliberately broad, which leads to an ironic tone I found tedious at the time, growing when this became more common as a form of parody and becoming unbareable at the time onwards for a good few decades in cinema and television. With hindsight, I was too harsh on this, now that common trait has not become as prevalent. Though a version of this which fully depicted some of the strange programming coming from the likes of the BBC to ITV from the eighties would have been just as interesting for me, I just have remind myself I have seen some ridiculous special effects and incidents even in that type of programming which has won me over for their sincerely good parts. Then there are things, admittedly not a Dr. Who viewer but aware of this and seeing it with my own eyes, where you can have Bertie Bassett, the mascot of a British confectionary company, terrorised Dr. Who actor Sylvester McCoy in his sci-fi candy lab² and think that is the kind of insane moment you could have had in a hypothetical second series of Darkplace, if on a deliberately lower budget, and not bat an eye in standing out as too weird.

The central joke is established around how Garth Marenghi is clueless to how bad he is, and the six episodes we get are entirely focused on this, the first episode contrasting the madness of a man exploding into tiny pieces but Dagless still asking if he is all right afterwards. There are the scenes hastily put in to show Thornton Reed with a shotgun out-of-nowhere, in an entirely different field, when this man, the result of having tried practicing a demonic ritual with Dagless in the lunch hall, refuses to stay in his casket at the funeral, or how Reed himself is so wooden, to the point they have to shoot his scenes usually by himself even in two person conversations. A lot of my growing warmth to the series came from that initial negative reaction, developing a fondness for the production as time went on to its goofy tone as I thought about the series for a good few years, suddenly growing into a person who got the humour entirely. A lot of this is in mind that this is not trying in the premise to be a pitch-perfect parody of this type of television horror, which was the issue initially, but that this is exaggerated around Garth Marenghi's qualities as a creator being central to the joke. The one exception is where the final episode feels like Nigel Kneale's Quatermass mini-series if someone turned into alien broccoli rather than a blob. Instead, it is a very broad mash-up of medical soap opera and horror story where people being attacked by floating staplers, on noticeable strings, as in the second episode are so bad on purpose. The barebones nature of most of the episodes means you cannot really have a plot trajectory, so the humour has to come from the silliness. Also the interviews as integral to this punch line where the actors we have show their bad or misguided sides, such as how the cat somehow died on set or how two technicians died on the Scottish Mist episode, or how Dean Learner even hit a child for criticising how bad his dialogue is.

Cast wise, it is mainly the core four members who dominate the series barring a few surprise cameos, like Stephen Merchant or Julian Barratt as the hospital priest, emphasising that even before his role in Peter Strickland's bizarre horror film In Fabric (2018) Barratt could add gravitas even to the silliest of material, or add a much needed sense of absurdity to even serious material. Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi, both the writer and star, is interesting, and there are times he is lovably charming as he is actually indefensible, which makes the comedy work especially when it can lead to the abrupt reveal that they added comical amounts of slow motion to the second episode, where Liz goes on a rampage with her powers, or the Scottish Mist episode being about Dagless learning to overcome his intolerance to the Scottish only to expose, as he dodges the accusations of racism in his interview footage, that Marenghi shoot both feet off with his depictions of said Scottish. Richard Ayoade as his publicist hits the right tone and is a highlight - off the show he is a sleaze but in a subtle way that is funnier, whilst as the administrator of the Darkplace hospital, Ayoade inflects perfectly a man who cannot act. Matt Berry likewise hits to the right one too, as a hammy actor who adds w-e-i-g-h-t to his vocals in a way that's memorable, sounding like it is dubbed.

Sadly Alice Lowe as the sole female character is undercut by one of the major running gags, and is one of the moments where the show has flaws, in a show that does try for some social commentary in its humour, such as the final episode explicitly is a parody of terrible programming trying to metaphor AIDs is tasteless ways. The second episode especially, but throughout in her character's depiction, reflects how its author Marenghi has incredibly sexist dialogue and views of Dr. Liz Asher, playing her off as the simplistic female staff member, or in episode 2 going full-Carrie to the point people are menaced by furniture on string. It presents an issue especially as Lowe's character is later revealed to have disappeared, likely dead and buried in a random place in Eastern Europe. It is to the show's credit, whilst arguably the weakest episode, it was deflecting this sense of biting too hard at a difficult subject, sexism in older horror storytelling, with Marenghi coming off ridiculous from the get-go to get around this, as he is a dolt with very stupid ideas, and that we have Matt Berry in this episode having to fight off a homicidal egg whisk. My views on Darkplace have aged well due to seeing another parody of horror pulp, Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001), which is likely to one Steve Coogan project people may have forgotten even exists, where you had the issue of it parodying problematic issues of pulp fiction like Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, done with earnestness to still point out this was all racist as a joke but still having an actor in yellow face playing a Manchu pastiche to get the joke over. Episode two here is in the same issue of dealing with gender politics by having the sexism be so over-the-top, which may put people off or even just cause them to roll their eyes at the broadness of the pastiche, not actually dealing with the subject with enough to justify the satire and be comedy at the same time, so this does count as one of the weakest episodes if thankfully with a defter hand than Dr. Terrible.

Episode three clears the palette with probably the most eyebrow raising moment, a male patient being impregnated by an eye creature (with pixelated out genitals to the annoyance of Dean Learner) and immediately dying in childbirth conceiving an eyeball child. Here the humour of both the interviews and the story itself works, as Marenghi's obsession with never having male child but only four daughters, and a eulogy to a dead pet dog, are contrasted by Dagless' past trauma of losing his half-man half-grasshopper son which leaves him trying to protect a potentially dangerous eyeball child. Episode 4 imagines contaminated water turning the hospital into primordial ape people, effectively Planet of the Apes if with a bicycle chase final with an "apeazoid" that briefly turns into an episode of The Krypton Factor, a 1977-2010 game show which emphasises legitimate Mensa-like brain teasers, puzzles, and as the reference became evoked, an obstacle course with rope pulls as here.

By Episode 5, we get to the Scotch Mist, which is John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) if with kilter Scotsmen instead of pirate ghosts, who leave Scottish oats by their victims. Alongside the tangent about using high street bought batteries over cheap ones from markets, it is a story about overcoming prejudice but so prejudiced in the depiction, even subtitling the Scottish ghosts, it undercuts itself, Marenghi thinking Daglass can earn the name of true Scotsman by just apologising and appeasing the ghosts with shortbread. Episode 6 is the other time the series takes a risk in terms of more serious nods, being a tone deaf metaphor for the AIDs scare, which is explicitly talked of and is the one other time Darkplace is in danger of stumbling. Thankfully, it is also the story to contrast this which has the right balance of almost taking itself serious whilst being ridiculous to prevent this undercutting itself with the metatextual commentary taking too broad a scope on this subject. The humour found in Lucien Sanchez falling in love with a female patient slowly turning into alien broccoli due to a highly contagious mutation, that does feel like soap opera, Nigel Kneale and a healthy dose of sex humour in a blender prevents this issue of tackling a risky subject for satire because it is one of the stronger stories in its jokes. It allows Matt Berry more material to work with, which is for the better; it also has the one actual surprise where the episode abruptly turns into a synthpop music video for the character, and does one of the superior metatextual jokes in which a fight scene that breaks out, to save Lucien's life, was lost and had to be reconstructed from photos shot on the film set.

The first time I saw Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, I thought it was a case of acquired taste, because I had always taken an issue to ironic humour at that point. Nowadays, this is not the case, and instead I wished there had been another series to just stretch this premise from that initial set-up, forcing it to have to take risks with the construct. Garth Marenghi never came back barring a cameo in Man to Man with Dean Learner (2006), an in-world talk show hosted by the Learner character which had Marenghi on as the first episode guest, and it would have been interesting to witness how the second series of Darkplace, having established the set-up, could have forced this broad parody into his own discomfort or stranger humour as we could elaborate on the premise of the Darkplace show, or in the interviews. Any more series beyond this might have capsized the premise and become that ironic-for-the-sake of irony I thought this show had, and even with its flaws as is, you would have lost the magic I finally appreciated after time to soak myself in Marenghi's dream weavings.

Abstract Spectrum: Absurd/Ironic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

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1) Not in the slightest a knock against either man, but they are the apt comparison points for authors who commonly appearing second hand book stores in the United Kingdom, least in my neck of the woods, and how Herbert's blunt titles and covers does really evoke the absurd, crasser ones Marenghi's has as seen in the series.

2) Kandyman befittingly comes from the 1988 era of Dr. Who, emphasising how actual eighties television, though Darkplace is meant to be the early eighties, could really be as ridiculous as the parodies of that era.

Singapore Sling (1990)

Director: Nikos Nikolaidis

Screenplay: Nikos Nikolaidis

Cast: Panos Thanassoulis as Detective Singapore Sling, Meredyth Herold as the Daughter, Michele Valley as the Mother

An Abstract Candidate

 

It is special to see this film without burnt-in Greek subtitles, a title whose infamy means it finally got a high definition release in 2024 from the American physical media distributor Vinegar Syndrome. It is the one film by Greek filmmaker Nikos Nikolaidis to ever get any traction in the wider world, but that is not this film's fault, just a curse the others did not follow Singapore Sling. Thankfully, for whatever reason, Singapore Sling did, and even if it was out of how transgressive it was, it is good to see it happened even if other films from Nikolaidis' career, like See You In Hell My Darling (1999), a film set in a purgatory with genre tropes, showed he was as idiosyncratic after this production. Originally having to import the US Synapse Films release, this is a work of a director who was always provocative, and a production here which despite its innate transgressive between mother and daughter incest, puking, and a close-up of sexually rubbing a kiwi fruit on one's bared crotch, I do not consider this part of the line of very nihilistic and deliberately shocking films which feel grim for the sake of it, where even a director like Gaspar Noé has accidentally fallen into for all the times he has also impressed me. Whilst it may mortify people to even consider this if they have seen Singapore Sling, there is a sense of humour to all this film, even if very grim.

Singapore Sling is also indebted to cinema, a literal perversion of Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), a film noir about the titular Laura, who is seemingly dead and becomes a fixation for the men with only her portrait the visual image representing her. Here, the film noir detective archetype played by Panos Thanassoulis, washed up and drunk, is an unnamed sleuth who finds himself with a bullet in his shoulder and at the manor his own Laura was said to be working at where a mother and daughter live. In searching for her, however, the soon-to-be christened Slingapore Sling, after the cocktail recipe found on him, has also found himself with two women who are sociopaths. An incestuous family, the late father also involved, they are truly sadeian in the Marquis de Sade template in their complete disregard for morals, which we are first introduced by having killed their chauffer before the film started, trying to bury him in the garden on a rainy night when they are introduced. Though the daughter (Meredyth Herold) looks like Laura, she and her mother (Michele Valley) killed Laura when she visited, and decide to keep Sling hostage, as a torture/sex pet under the idea to know how he learnt of Laura being at their home.

The family can also break the fourth wall and talk to the viewer, which presents the immediate sense this film is more than shock value, and oh boy, this has not lost any of the transgression over the years I have been able to see this. It is a film which juxtaposes really shocking imagery against the absurd, which is arguably more uncomfortable but also adds a greater sense of nuisance. Between the re-enacting of Laura's meeting, with daughter taking the role and her mother with a strap-on involved first, and the daughter talking of having sex with her father, as portrayed by a mummy in the attic, this film is not recommended for everyone, but in even these scenes or details like an actual bandaged mummy representing said patriarch, you find already this film is also off-kilter, that it is juxtaposing the horrible with the strange. Juggling sexual perversity and violence, and explicit gruel in details like real animal organs representing Laura's being carefully placed into jars and on the kitchen top at one point, it also adds overt slapstick which might sound a bad decision but emphasises a tone which is more alarming but also means this never feels miserable for the sake of it.

Specifically there is even an influence, as Nikos Nikolaidis was a huge cineaste, from comedian/filmmaker Jerry Lewis, as described in the documentary on the director called Directing Hell (2011), which might be the hugest eyebrow raising to suggest, but has been confirmed in that work as one of his heroes. Burying the chauffer in the rain when we are introduced to them, even if Michele Valley is baring all as an actress in her nudity whilst wearing lace night clothes, as Meredyth Herold as her mother is too, she is especially more obvious as having been guided to make her sociopathic daughter character overtly wacky. She is playing the film between a farce and pratfalls just to bury that corpse like a manic sidekick, and her manners are over-the-top throughout as she bumbles about. Valley as a result becomes the best thing about Singapore Sling, even if the other two actors Herold and Thanassoulis commit to this as much, because the horror of scenes like the women torturing Sling with electroshock therapy, whilst one of them takes advantage to reach the perfect orgasm with him, is undercut by the ridiculous manners she has.

It sets up an upper class family who fell into madness, as the daughter starts to view Sling as a way out of her current place in life, whilst he becomes less a hostage to both but their sexual partner. It is helped too that Singapore Sling even on a DVD let alone restored was always visually gorgeous, becoming one of its weapons in terms of its transgression. Due to the work of cinematographer Aris Stavrou, it is a film shot in monochrome which is evocative and matched by an elaborate production design and costuming, including the work of Nikolaidis' own wife Marie-Louise Bartholomew, as a few of his films including this one, as Directing Hell talks of, were shot at Nikolaidis' own home. As she discussed in a featurette for the 2024 Vinegar Syndrome Blu Ray release, he worked on lower budgets, funding a film like this with his work in commercials, and despite the horrors onscreen paints a wholesomeness to the perversions, even the vomit which the daughter throws up on Sling mid sex revealed to have been concocted by Bartholomew from food substances that were actually delicious¹. Considering the film also has one of them urinate on him after sex, we are still talking of a very twisted film, if one where the magic of film makes these scenes legitimately dumbfounding for those unprepared for the film, if also emphasising a sense of deliberate bad taste more in the John Waters territory of cinema than dragging the viewer's face into the worse of humanity.

It means Singapore Sling has to be approached with caution, but alongside the make believe - as there is no explicit real sex, everything implied and fake, and no use of real atrocity imagery as other transgressive films have done over the decades - this feels more wickedly perverse with that sick humour always there. Juxtaposing visual splendour and decadence against the grotesque is also poignant to the film, where one of the more gruesome scenes for myself, despite all the things I have described, is a dinner table scene involving the consuming the contents of a real sheep's head in elegant dress, using fingers, eating brains and eyeballs, and throwing up or playing with the food. Having seen other films by Nikos Nikolaidis as mentioned, which I was lucky to have done, this is more explicitly transgressive than others but still feels on point for him, especially as this is in mind to the explicit pastiching of the film Laura, a film about a man obsessed with woman beyond existence which this plays to, as Michele Valley's daughter character, looking like this film's Laura, starts to use this as mind games between her and her mother, with Sling, symbolically unable to tie his shoe laces for most the film, slowly gaining his composer as he learns the real events. [Huge Spoiler] The ending may turn off some even next to the rest of the content, even potentially coming off as misogynistic, as with the deaths of the women in their betrayal of each other using Sling, this predates David Fincher's Seven (1995) for a knife strap-on, but it is telling for a noir protagonist, a genre known for bleak endings, he neither leaves unscathed, a wounded archetype who finishes the film starting the bury himself in one of the leftover open graves among the others, unable to leave. [Spoilers End]. This film will be divisive, undeniably, but as it focuses on the psychodrama, the shock value alongside Nikolaidis' cinema in general predates the New Greek Wave that Yorgos Lanthimos became the figurehead for, predating the transgression but also the sense of perverse humour that films like this had. It is a film which is striking even next to a Dogtooth (2009), where even its use of fourth wall breaking, not the breaking of taboos, will be too much for some viewers, but it is a far more rewarding film for how brave it is. It does indeed in mind to Dogtooth, and the other Greek films following its lead, feel like the older aunt to them to, making its place much more important by its existence.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque/Moody

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) The Vinegar Syndrome release includes a 12 minute interview with Marie-Louise Bartholomew, where these details are revealed.

Alien Beach Party Massacre (1996)

 

Director: Andy Gizzarelli

Screenplay: Andy Gizzarelli

Cast: John Eineigl as Dr. Bateman; Mark Fite as Jeff; Stacey Havener as Babs; Kourtney Kaye as Robin; Perry Martin as Bud; George Willis as Nagillig; Eric Zumbrunnen as Glue

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Linda, don’t worry, we know where your arm is.

Surf rock opens up on the opening credits, hurdling into outer space, and it is best for context to explain how a film like this would have come to be. Contextually, the nineties are what I have always viewed as the decade where its pop culture ate its own tail, apt as it was just before the Millennium, a new century, with both the angst of the new era coming and clearly a lot of reflection taking place in popular culture and retro trends. A lot of decades where repeated in just one, where swing revival music met against pulp comic and radio characters being adapted into films, where bands like Combustible Edison brought back lounge music, and there were some obscure remakes of old b-movies, such as Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman (1959) getting a 1995 television remake. Here, where old b-movies and sci-fi were finding themselves in the likes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and surf rock became prominent in the Pulp Fiction soundtrack or new bands like Man or Astro-Man?, this particular film, an entry in the slasher genre with some odd genre mixing and a lot of ironic comedy, makes sense in mind to this. Honestly, the biggest issue with Alien Beach Party Massacre comes from the fact that it does not fully embrace its premise, staying in an abandoned spooky house for the slasher section, even if this has a bit to it to admire, and is a parody with its tongue firmly in its cheek.

Humanoid aliens are in our solar system, having stolen from another evil species (space pig humanoids) a weapon called the “Deathsphere”, a super weapon of horrifying destructive power which they find themselves unable to flee with. Attacked and the ship forced to burn up in Earth’s ozone layer, luck and a hole in said ozone layer leaves one surviving member of the crew, the bumbling cleaner, to protect the Deathsphere. Unfortunately it is confused for a beach ball and brought to a human beach party he is also invited too, everyone believing he is a cousin of a party guest from New Jersey, with one of the pig aliens planning to slaughter anyone in their way to get the death ball back.

There are broad stereotypes at the party: the Bill and Ted surfer dudes (who are also stoners); the obnoxious college jock who presumes beer can be used as a mouthwash and gargled to clean your breath with; his suffering girlfriend; a nerdier girl, an alien obsessed scientist, and other stereotypes. It is jokey, not taking itself seriously, and some of the jokes have not aged well, usually with the women being called “bimbos” etc., but considering this has someone impaled on a surf board, for every joke which does not land and the film feeling stretched at times, a lot has aged well as openly goofy. The biggest disappointment is most of this set-up ending up in a house, when the main cast split off from the party as an excuse to get high, a shame as it means most of this does not actually transpire on a beach. You expect from this title a piss take on the early sixties beach part genre, a niche to parody in itself, only to sadly never get that.

That in truth is the real slight to the film, where a better and weirder film was left on the table un-done, with what we have. Some of the film lurches into more edgier content – there a gag, which I have seen in another horror film called Neon Maniacs (1986), which bluntly involves an act of oral sex being interrupted decapitation and a morbid joke about what happens afterwards, which is the kind of moment which may come off as poor taste than really twisted humour. Most of this is more comfortable, and more rewarding, where it is goofier even with the gore. Losing a limb, as for one character that loses multiple, is something to suffer through with the issue more the inability to drive gear stick in a car than fatal blood loss, the tone better in these types of moments.  It is a one-off from its director-writer Andy Gizzarelli, whose career in cinema is to be found in other production departments, leaving this curiosity from the irony tinged edge of horror and cult cinema which vanished into obscurity. Feeling like the chance for someone to bring what they wished to see in a film to the screen, it shows the indulgences that would result from this, both the things which did not succeed and the sections which did prove rewarding even if the entire film is a flawed mess.

Detention (2011)

 

Director: Joseph Kahn

Screenplay: Joseph Kahn and Mark Palermo

Cast: Josh Hutcherson as Clapton Davis; Shanley Caswell as Riley Jones; Spencer Locke as Ione Foster; Aaron David Johnson as Sander Sanderson; Walter Perez as Elliot Fink; Dane Cook as Principal Karl Verge; Erica Shaffer as Sloan Foster

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You have the arms of an anaemic spider monkey.

The follow up to Joseph Kahn's debut Torque (2004) as a feature filmmaker, a post Fast and the Furious motorbike action film from a director originally prolific in music videos, drops a gauntlet down immediately in terms of whether you can appreciate its tone or hate it. From the first scene of a high school girl talking to the viewer in a very reference heavy, but bluntly vapid, dialogue with masses of text and on-screen graphics morphing on the foreground, the film immediately stands out as something very different from the post-nineties slasher films which were already being meta-textual. Detention now is a film from an entire different era of culture too, but by 2011 when it was first released, it existed in context to how Scream (1996) and its self awareness for the slasher genre had already become nineties chic alongside the boy bands and the fashion of the era. Knowing this later film, despite being about a slasher killer, is going to involve a time travelling taxidermied bear and going to 1992, Detention manages to be both irrelevant and bouncing off the rubber walls.

Greg Araki with his nineties films could frustrate people, from The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997), with their irrelevant mashing of sci-fi, teen sex and abrupt gore, and if anything, Araki's naive nihilism of his characters was at least sincere. Aptly, he released Kaboom (2010) which contrasts Detention. Kaboom was an older director reflecting on his obsessions in the then-modern day in a wacky apocalyptic cult scenario, whilst Detention is a film made by Kahn, who started his career in music videos in 1995, reflecting on two decades worth of pop culture, the nineties and the 2000s, he was a part of building himself, all in a mass of post-ironic prodding in the template of slasher films and teen films in general. From a man who worked with the likes of Korn, Destiny's Child, Wu-Tang Clan, Mariah Carey, literally figures who were popular in these two decades among others, his sadly sparse filmography is contrasted by all the music videos he worked on in-between them. Kahn (born in South Korea and moving to the United States as a child¹) is someone who is clearly proud of his work in glossy movies but also deliberately prods and mocks the pop culture too². With this, he is taking an entire generation of young adult culture, and the one before it, and transforming it into an abrupt, multi-text mirror back towards this past.

At Grizzly Lake High, a killer dressing up as a fictional prom queen slasher villain, a mix of Prom Night parodying the Saw films known as Cinderhella, is picking off high school students. What this is from this springboard is less a full slasher film in the usual plot tropes, but drawing from the pop culture of the 2000s and 1990s through this context, the film centred around the lone, alienated female student Riley Jones (Shanly Caswell) who has nothing to live for to the point her fellow high school students gladly walk over her prone body on the hallway floor without realising her presence. Around her is every stereotype of high school culture, including herself, from the jock to the nerd, melded with vast areas of filmic culture, from high school dramas to, of all things, Cronenberg body horror, pulled together by Riley’s relationship with failing outsider Clapton Jones (Josh Hutcherson) and a serial killer who has literally jumped out from a slasher film series in the story’s world. From there, stereotypes are bent plastically into shapes unexpected, and referencing multiple pop items at the same time, going through the countless sub-chapters on even minor characters which disrupt the film with stories-within-stories which do not even have direct connections to the Cinderhella killer. It becomes apparent that, while there is a clear plot line with an ending, Detention is as much a purposely abstract movie, and gleefully so, whose tangents are meaningful in how out-of-place and silly they can get.

The film will put people off. Immediately it is clear this is a film with heavy levels of referencing that have become of the time it was made, the dialogue intentionally arch to the point it could cause the film to feel pretentious and obnoxious to others in conjunction with its tone and visual barrages. However unlike another work, say the animated television series Family Guy which made its bread and butter a lot of references to old pop culture with thin bare stories wrapped around them, Detention still has a core that is both cute with its referential jokes but have a clear, razor tongue in them, the erratic bombardment of music references, film homage and quips reflective of the age we live in. Even the stereotypes themselves, both meant to reflect the ordinary lives of real teenagers and abstract archetypes, is part of this, whether it is parodying (in a film-within-a-film) when they are cast with thirty year olds, or that there is even a reference to a seminal eighties film about teenagers, The Breakfast Club (1985), in having the titular detention also happen on a Saturday in the school library. The film has many visual gags, but especially with the many passages of text onscreen, this was an early film figuring out how to depict an age of Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, and many decades worth of the internet from the nineties onwards to take into considering in culture and cinema. With the countless forms of media on many tiny or large screens, the rapid fire nature of Detention visually is a picture of what all this would look like if it was fully part of our lives as breathing is.

The overriding nature of pop and geek culture both good and bad – hipsters, retro fads, cult films etc. – has reached almost everywhere in Western society, and this ironically was already riding on jokes about the nineties making a comeback in fads, something that prominently would start to be mined into the next decades in mainstream culture themselves. The film avoids making itself merely a parade of references by showing how pop culture can fade and become old quickly, even for the next people a few years later, and is also regurgitated, coming in with the subplot of Ione Foster (Spencer Locke), who fixation on the early nineties in trends is explicitly part of a curious Freaky Friday scenario in one of the many strange tangents in a world where anything can happen. Even the tangent about half fly-boys, the Cronenberg parody, would have gotten David Cronenberg's approval as it leads to them growing up with a literal television on their hand, which is not really a reference to pop culture saturation, more of a strange joke, but really feels apt for a film about culture itself. This stays to the late 2000s and the early to mid nineties in terms of the jokes, but looking at my own upbringing even in Britain, I think of all those nu-metal and pop punk bands I heard on Kerrang TV over here. I think of how they have flooded the second hand stores now with their albums between the likes of Dido and Coldplay, representatives in terms of popular radio hits, let alone NME magazine and the crest of indie rock they promoted which has moved along into the mid 2000s. An inspired highlight is a reverse timeline from the film’s main setting to 1992, depicting the music and fads from 50 Cent to Hole along the way, a 360 degree repeating camera spin, helped by simple optical effects, that depicts the changing trends of culture.

It helps that the film is so amused in its oddness, that despite being conventionally made when stripped of its flourishes, in terms of structure and still having to resolve itself in some form, it is still immensely weird. The time travel, the cultural references from both decades the film is set in, and the collage created plot threads, lead to some bizarre and absurd ideas made more prominent by how they can be casually done. This feels less intentionally strange in a hollow way, something you could have accused other films from this era of parodies and pastiches, but something when this has plot details which could have made whole movie narratives. A sequence involving a film-within-a-film-within-a-film-within-the-film-I-watched, work prints-within-work prints downloaded off the internet, even a porn parody, was the scene back when I first watched the film which won me over to Detention, even if the use of Ron Jeremy, a porn star who became famous for cameos in the mainstream between the nineties to this point, has not aged well due to real life (and horrifying) criminal convictions.  This sequence, the bravado it has, is inspired for how absurd it is, adding to the complete disregard for solid dimensional reality to the film. It made me realise the film should be embraced as a non-narrative blitz on its material references as well, following what Airplane! (1980) was after with its amount and frequency of jokes on-screen, pushed to the stage of anti-narrative cinema with its silly walks and bloody pie shots to the viewer’s face.

It still is a genre film which needs to end with a resolution, and any flaws the film has is that it has to lead to a conventional conclusion rather than what Greg Araki could pull off, let alone the fact that, despite actual nudity here and some surprising gory sequences, Araki's films were far more transgressive. Proudly anarchic, proudly bisexual (and horny in general), and proudly subversive, Araki's films for all their pretensions really struck the tone right for how weird the strangeness of the nineties were. Kahn's film here is more openly a parody of these characters, with a distance kept, and it still has to be ironic even if mocking "post-irony", something Araki's films did not do at all even to the point of alienating an audience more than Detention could do in how sincere its characters' angst was meant to be. Credit to Kahn though, despite this, he still makes something good here, and that Kahn’s director credit, looking like alphabet spaghetti, is puked out into a urinal bowl by a character shows a self mocking from the get-go that emphasises people made this production with a sense of fun and with a reason to its parodies. That opening credit sequence along, before you get to anything else, also presents so much more creativity on screen than many parodies I remember from this time.

By this point, in mind one dialogue sequence is a digression into the legacy of Scream in Detention, the famous slasher franchise had came back this year with Scream 4 (2011), after a long period of that series not being continued and as an old franchise being rebooted. Even the slasher films in its wake of divisive receptions were nostalgic by this point. The meta text here could not be a mere parody of straight faced slashers unless it had managed to reinvent the wheel again, as the original Scream had both done this.  Here we have Detention fully breaking down the films of the past, even making jokes about the idea of post-irony with a mocking glance, and then having Patrick Swayze and Steven Seagal have a metaphorical fist fight. This eventually becomes a film that has broken so many rules of logic it clearly does not care as long as it entertains and still pokes itself savagely in recognition of the silliness of it all. It is telling, when it comes to its film-within-a-film, Cinderhella, Kahn is parodying the Saw franchise, and the "torture porn" genre films, Saw from 2004 to 2010, before a huge gap in time, releasing films each October each year for a time as horror trends themselves had changed.

Detention sadly has become an obscure film, one of many that came to DVD and are ready to find a cult audience - call it the cult era of just before Netflix became the streaming service and still rented out discs - and sadly in Detention's case for Britain, it came out in a generic looking DVD and, unless you were aware of what it was or stumbled across it by accident, it became the kind of film you may thankfully get for a couple of British quid still but gets lost among all the many copies of big blockbusters also found on the charity shop shelves. Jokes about how long it took Avatar (2009), which gets name checked here, to actually get a sequel aside, even that film by now on DVD fills the same shelves too, and both feel like time capsules of their eras, both becoming the type of films Detention if it had been made in the 2020s would have parodied in terms of a characters obsessed with the early 2010s in music and fashion.  As someone who grew up in the early 2000s as a teenager, the days of rap metal on Kerrang, the seeds of hipsterism and the shiny little monoliths known as the iPods about to invade music culture, all jostling in my mind as I write this and in said mind as countless other memories from the period, this is a film that speaks to my generation as well as the young audience of 2011 it was intended for. Nowadays, with some of the references likely to go over a new audience's head, even some of the jokes in this back then feel deliberately obscure or obfuscating references people would have gotten on purpose, such as the guy in a Sigur Rós t-shirt trying to steal peoples' iPods whilst listening to Aerosmith. As a film along tackling the 1990s, which I grew up in as a child, with its pre-Millennial panic and post-modernism Ouroboros eating its own tail, Detention could have only been this much of a mess on purpose to tackle it. Far from perfect, as a horror film which is secretly a parody of pop culture, it does so much to admire.

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1) The Bio on Joseph Kahn's own site.

2) Joseph Kahn, the infamous director of Taylor Swift’s music videos, tells the ugly truth, written by Wesley Yin for the Washington Post, published on August 5th 2016.

Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015)

 

Directors: Jon Salmon, Michael Rousselet, Tomm Jacobsen and Joey Scoma

Screenplay: Alec Owen

Cast: Alec Owen as Brent / Brock; Jon Salmon as Nedry; Paul Prado as Turbeaux; Greg Sestero as Derek; Jimmy Wong as Sizzler; Ben Gigli as Samzy; Joey Scoma as Todd; Kelsey Gunn as Samantha; Olivia Taylor Dudley as Motherface

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Candidate

 

I'm an immortal fuck machine!

Contextualised as an almost lost film, Dude Bro Party Massacre III was by all accounts demanded by President Ronald Reagan to be destroyed, likely for the plot twist in a dream sequence where he is secretly killing bros as a female serial killer. His censorship of the film, destroying it, was however thwarted by the fact one teen in Minnesota and his VHS player managed to record a late night public television screening of the film, the only copy we are able to see. Just in recounting the first two films, never existing outside this scenario, the amount of gore combined with female nudity, ridiculous deaths and a man getting his face pulped as an orange does in an electronic juicer is enough to catch one off guard. The story is recounted by Brock, twin brother of Brent (Alec Owen), who is murdered immediately after this exposition. This continues the curse of the "Motherface", originally a dorm mother burnt in a panty raid gone wrong, eventually leading to a daughter/copycat "borrowing" her face, with someone else now at it again in a film which is less a slasher parody, but does get in the joke about sequels managing to stretch out the premise over and over.

The real context of the film is that it is the creation of 5-Second Films, a group founded by Brian Firenzi in the spring of 2005, originally starting with films that are simple:  2 seconds of beginning titles, 5 seconds of film, 1 second of end titles¹. Naturally, 5-Second Films evolved to the point of making this theatrical film and creating this ironic parody, structured as being shot on VHS, a type of film going through this neo-grindhouse and meta-genre era of cinema in the late 2000s and early 2010s which I found at the time very uninteresting. Alongside the possibility I have softened to these films through this particular example Dude Bro is also aiming for something stranger in tone, something to use a Spinal Tap reference deciding to go up to eleven than merely just for the lowest hanging fruit. Considering someone gets a harpoon in the crotch, not even that is safe, and yet this is going to cram as many bizarre turns as it can in an era when YouTube was becoming a concept, and looking at the parody films of yore, in taking this absurdist tone to an extreme.

That is not including all the meta jokes and the adverts in-between, like the Pizza Goblins, which are seconds long and more there to knock you for a loop than for parodying advertising, as the film when it is staying on point with a plot is going to turn it on its neck in bizarre ways. The premise is a slasher, where after two previous Motherface spree attacks, the bro dorm for the third year welcome into their midst Brent, the twin brother of their fallen bro, welcome in among a vegetarian named Sizzler (Jimmy Wong) who will not get into the dorm unless he gets some "beef" and because of his dietary choice, a wheelchair bro who lost his legs to wolves, one whose trauma of his French handyman father leads to the subtitles being from someone sneaking in distress messages, and also among them one traumatised from the previous times. There is also a girlfriend of one of the bros who wants to join the fraternity despite being an all men's one, and whose boyfriend is stalked by the fear of her wanting to take his virginity and have kids.

The film befits the era it was made; now the 2010s became an old decade than lived in, where this type of humour is not within context of many "surreal" films from this period like this. Time has also softened this type of humour, and made the references more noticable, where suddenly you are taken aback by a cameo by adult film star and pro sex advocate Nina Hartley as a school principal, only to be bombarded by the fact this also has Larry King and Andrew W.K. among the cameos, a mad pot pourri of figures to have had. This is a film proud to write the most ridiculous dialogue, to have the silliest plot twists and play loose to its own plot, even point out its absurdities, which were once things I hated in these types of genre films. I have changed, but also Dude Bro is willing to push the joke to its extreme, taking the slasher and taking it the most surreal route of all. The plot is your traditional slasher in a body count, but you also have to factor in, where you also have to factor in the police being led by comedian Patton Oswalt, a Satanist who is rooting for the Motherface killer as the Bros have the power to summon the ultimate bro, one who needs to be stopped even if it involves sacrificing his virginal male police officer, a noble spirit even if his noble desire to "bang" kids with the power of literature is badly phrased. This would all be jokes I once hated, but now, something delights me in the lunacy of how the plot lines are interconnected in jokes that seem random but lead to extended pay offs, such as how this cop (guided by the female officer meant to lead him to his sacrifice) is told he needs to bop the bros on the nose, because they are actually sentient oranges behind a huge vitamin c decrease in the state, a bizarre joke that has a tragic and perverse pay off with the film ending with oranges raining from the sky.

The production - helmed by Jon Salmon, Michael Rousselet, Tomm Jacobsen and Joey Scoma, with collaborations by numerous people for the script by lead actor Alec Owen - does have a frenzied lunacy to it of clear improvisation. It exhibits the type of layered nudging humour of YouTube but in a case where, as an ultimate spoof, any joke which fails is matched by ten more afterwards, which is a huge advantage to the film tenfold. There are moments you will wonder if you have actually seen certain moments in this movie, such as the spirit guidance from a deceased foetus, and yet this has for the obvious gag of side characters, there to just pad the cast out for a body count, them making reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two Hamlet characters who only have one significant moment in that monumental play and, as referenced in this moment too, got a Tom Stoppard play around them which is just as well regarded and absurdist, a smart joke to pull among all the lewder jokes which also land perfectly.  

Back in the day, this type of irony undercut the absurdist and surrealist touches to these parodies, but with a film like this, even jokes which would have caused me to roll my eyes once, like an abrupt robot duplicate, now land especially as this takes the jokes to their extreme, especially as this is still also a super gory splatstick comedy where a man will slap himself with his own ripped out tongue against his will. There is also the willingness, for a joke about the bros having of killing many people for yearly pranks, to extend it to a long (frankly sombre and beautiful) extended gag with model shots and underwater imagery just to add to the punch line. Especially as the fourth wall gags are a factor too - in the adverts being mild aneurisms in their randomness, or the search for a lost bro to become a joke one expects from a Leslie Nielsen parody film - and I became to admire Dude Bro Party Massacre III as a gleefully bizarre spectacle.

Abstract Spectrum: Lurid/Wacky/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) 5-Second Films' About Us page, preserved on Web Archive in its October 3rd 2012 version.

Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001)

 

Created by: Graham Duff

Directors: Matt Lipsey

Screenplays: Steve Coogan, Graham Duff and Henry Normal

Cast: Steve Coogan as Dr. Terrible / Captain Tobias Slater / Lester Crown / Denham Denham / Dr. Donald Baxter / Nathan Blaze / Captain Hans Brocken; Graham Duff as Josh / Norden / a Policeman / a Porter; Sarah Alexander as Beatrice Crown; Sally Bretton as Carmina; Julia Davis as Stephanie Wise; John Thomson as Sir Donald Tyburn; Louise Paige as Nurse MacReedy; Warwick Davis as Tygon

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

That day, I learnt an important lesson. Never eat your own chin. Had I feasted on my own chin, I'd be ill-equipped to introduce tonight's tale.

In terms of digging up a real obscurity, finding the time when Steve Coogan was co-writer and centre stage on a parody of horror anthology shows, and British pulp and horror stories, is pretty significant as a find. Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible is the creation of Graham Duff, an English writer/actor/producer. Steve Coogan, for those with no idea who he is, is an actor/comedian/screenwriter whose legacy includes Alan Partridge, a character of his and co-creator Armando Iannucci, over multiple productions and multi-media, who became a phenomenon alongside Coogan's extensive career in other productions such as his roles in 24 Hour Party People (2002). This, six episodes broadcast on BBC 2, was released on DVD, but has become an obscurity. He, alongside playing all the protagonists, plays the host Dr. Terrible, a horror show guide who, with his Count Orlok ears and fake teeth, contemplates in the first episode I saw his dreams of an erotic kind. He is a perversion of a senile old man who steals his deceased wife's coffin and has witnessed other macabre things like a man eating his own chin as his monologues suggest, alongside befitting that a show like this needs a macabre host.

Even the BBC DVD played a trick that, unlike the original broadcast order, episodes one and four were switched, leaving me with And Now the Fearing as the first tale, a story set in 1972 where Steve Coogan plays a sleazy businessman named Denham Denham, part of him clearly having it as part of the roles to have as many fake hair pieces, or hair stylists involved, per episode as he can. Denham, a feminist female reporter (Julia Davis) and an architect (Alexander Armstrong) are stuck in a lift which is heading towards a thirteenth floor which should not be there. A possible spoiler, but this is clearly Tales from the Crypt (1972), the Amicus anthology horror film, crunched into less than thirty minutes, including the punch line, whilst also being a parody of such Amicus and anthology films from the era.

It also presents that a) Coogan and the co-writers clearly like these types of films despite the piss taking that comes through all six episodes, and that b) unfortunately one of the clear problems, and likely why the series did not work, comes ahead in that this is a wildly inconsistent work. When this hits, it is funny, but when it misses the mark, this show has aged badly and is also broad as a brick. And Now the Fearing also sets this up with an alternative world scenario, if this had gained a cult audience and worked, of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) before Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness created it, and if interpreted by Steve Coogan, of pastiching cheesy horror tales of the past, which is bizarre to consider. For my reservations with Darkplace that it played to "ironic bad" for its humour, thankfully, we got the timeline with that series, and this makes a lot more mistakes. Here you see that, for half the episodes of House of Horrible, the broad tone in comparison does not land as well. Feeling strange as an early 2000s television production trying to replicate the nineteen seventies, stranger for an inexplicable reason than any of the older periods being tackled, the production feels like it is going for the obvious jokes which do not work. The stories themselves could have worked - one's drunken hit-and-run of a homeless man damning you in a cycle, why you never try to cheat gypsies from their land, and the most openly silly like a Darkplace joke, why never to purchase a haunted table. But the tone is off, and it is only by the end of the series the show hits the point of itself premise.

Curse of Tongs, set in Limehouse in London in 1910, is not an episode to help as it is a Fu Manchu parody, which even if played for irony to damn it, is damned in itself by playing to it. Whilst a broad parody of "Yellow Peril" xenophobia of the infamous Sax Rohmer character, I had to think about what the Chinese cast to this episode thought of all this, as this is still as a parody a Fu Manchu pastiche, with actor Mark Gatiss in yellow face as Hangman Chang. Kidnapping the love of Steve Coogan's Nathan Blaze, Coogan is also still playing the heroic white savour over the Chinese villains in something which, for the 2000s, really shows that ironically playing with these themes was not a lesson that succeeded at this time period, more so as, alongside the sixties films when Christopher Lee played the figure, Peter Sellers played Fu Manchu in a comedy in 1980 called The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Not even having a Chinese detective on the heroes' side works to undercut this as, not even a sidekick, the character barely appears onscreen.

The legacy of Fu Manchu is more uncomfortable in mind that, whilst Sax Rohmer was a good pulp writer for tales like Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), he was also a figure ingested with the xenophobia of his time, and as a British writer, I cannot help but feel more uncomfortable, even as someone who has found enjoyment in Fu Manchu tales, knowing it stems from not only British xenophobia, but also our really problematic relationship to China into the 20th century beforehand. A character like Fu Manchu, whose first tale was published in 1912, stems from British colonial influence as much as the fear of the East coming to the West, after the likes of the Boxer Rebellion - an anti-foreign, anti-colonial, and anti-Christian uprising in China between 1899 and 1901 - and that, in mind to the scene here where Coogan is forced to become an opium addict by Hangman Chang, Britain is the villain for me as an Englishman in the two Opium Wars. The two Opium Wars, the First Opium War fought in 1839–1842 between Qing China and the United Kingdom, the Second Opium War fought between the Qing and the United Kingdom and France, 1856–1860, were the result of Western groups like the British trying to force opium trade on the Chinese. A parody in 2001 about this, ironically done, cannot work because I learnt this history in my university days in lectures, and even if I had not, as mentioned, it still involves Mark Gatiss in yellow face playing an Asiatic evil. Even the amusing special effects for the giant crab Tong has in the sewer, nor his secret crab claw hand, can help get over this.

Episode three, Curse of the Blood of the Lizard of Doom, can be argued to be as bad as an episode, in its many cheap jokes about red heads and the Scottish, the later likely as offensive just for the fake Scottish accent. It is also compellingly ridiculous. In Edinburgh 1880, Coogan plays a specialist burns doctor, Dr. Donald Baxter, who is experimenting with reptile plasma (at one point even gecko rectal fluid) to treat burns, even if it accidentally leads to patients developing webbed fingers and a need to crawl on the ceiling. There are more ironic sexism jokes as in the first episode, but for what is, frankly, an eye rolling parody, at least in this tale the humour is more about Coogan experimenting with lizards to treat burns, with a female doctor he begrudgingly works with, throwing caution to the wind in how silly it is. Chameleon plasma is experimented on, and alongside a man hanging himself with his own extending tongue, or trying to bluff around a conference with colleagues by incinerating a body of a man meant to have been a live patient, Coogan experimenting on himself leads to him turning into a giant chameleon, This is compellingly bad at least.

Episode four, in Upper Carpathians 1877 and the original first episode, is Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust, entirely based on Hammer's Karnstein trilogy. The trilogy - The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971) - are the children of the famous 1872 novella Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. It is a text which has gained greater weight as becoming an LGBTQ novel of gay desire between women, if in mind this period into the seventies, when Hammer were trying to sell their films on more sex, one should consider these movies from heterosexual film producers from the perspective they may have only included the content in a titillating way, not any possible interpretation from female scholars which could find more of note within the films, or the legacy of Carmilla as a story which gained weight over centuries in meaning.

This is again another premise which could pose problematic, as with a female vampire countess eyeing Coogan's newly wedded bride, the vampires are gay, even their human servant Rebenor, played by Ben Miller, a dapperly dressed and flamboyant figure who even makes a dress he stole from someone else look stylish. However it is fascinating it never touches the subject at all barring its source material as a parody, more interested in a lot of sexual innuendo as has also been common in the series. With the sense the series improved considerable by the halfway point, this is an openly silly pastiche, just from the get-go in having Coogan with his blue eyes and Hugh Grant hairstyle playing a heroic lead that is mostly useless. Sadly, the older female Van Helsing stand-in does not last long, but the tone, including the bombastic choral score, or the ending based around Steve Coogan playing tongue hockey by himself by a mirror, means this comes off as one of the strongest episodes.

In mind that was originally the first episode, the last two episodes of the series show the tone was improving. Episode 5, Voodoo Feet of Death, is also one of the stronger episodes too barring, however, it is parodying voodoo tropes in cinema, which is a huge issue as, with horror's longstanding history of demonising an actual religion, I do feel uncomfortable with even this parody. Even if I enjoy my old horror films - and will always think fondly of George Zucco playing bongos in Voodoo Man (1944) with Bela Lugosi - this is not woke for the sake of it, just admitting embarrassment at how narrow minded this area of storytelling can be, even accidentally as a parody of this narrow-mindedness. It also has no point in being included, barring the voodoo priest who demands Coogan returns his late brother's feet so they can be purified of the evil slowly corrupting their new host. The premise is strong enough as it is without the "voodoo" aesthetic, that this is The Feet of Orlac, or The Hands of Orlac (1924), which was remade as a 1960 British film, where Conrad Veidt, as a concert pianist, loses his hands in a horrible accident only to have experimental hand transplants that. To his horror, they may have once belonged to a murderer. This works with just parodying this, set in the 1920s, where there is a romantic triangle between Coogan, playing a dancer named Lester Crown, his wife and a trendy new tap dancer. An ill-advised scouting of possible adultery, involving a giant novelty barbershop pair of scissors, leads to a moment of comically levels of fake blood spurting and experiment feet transplants, taken from a dock worker who was crushed under a heavy crate baring those appendages.

The joke of sentient feet that kill is inherently funny by itself, and no one suspects that feet can strangle a person, or that extra long toe nails can slice a jugular in one swipe, which adds to this humour. It proves one of the funnier episodes, as does Episode 6, Scream Satan Scream, Coogan playing a Witchfinder General in 1645 Blackburn, who is burning witches and those who inappropriately use vegetables. Captain Tobias Slater is also a sex hound who is abusing his power, masquerading under finding witches to bed as many women he can within one location at a time. Throughout the show, there had been sexual innuendo, but Scream Satan Scream fully embraced this, to the point there is literally an inn called Fist Inn as a setting. With a curse over his head from a previous witch he burnt in the first scenes, this is a very funny episode, arguably the best as it embraces blatant sex comedy, Coogan playing a villain, and Warwick Davis makes a suddenly and welcomed appearance as his assistant Tygon, clearly a reference to Tigon British Film Productions, who released Witchfinder General (1968), the Vincent Price witch hunter film which this is parodying. Sadly, Davis does not have lines, but when the camera cuts to him in close up reacting to Coogan, it is perfect in itself.

Embracing its silliness, where Satan ends up looking like a Jan Švankmajer project, superimposed onto the screen when the Dark Lord is briefly summoned, this is what Dr. Terrible's House of Horror should have been. Not ironic attempts to mock racism or sexism of the past in horror and pulp cinema, the jokes tightened, just embrace the crude sexual innuendo, and just run with the silliest ideas possible, like The Feet of Orlock or Coogan reimagining Vincent Price's Witchfinder General just scrapping past being dunked in a river as a witch himself. There is a clear sense the people made this admire the horror cinema they parody, from the elaborate animated opening credits, and in how there is even a cameo in And the Fearing Starts of Sheila Keith, from Frightmare (1974) and House of Whipcord (1974). The show sadly faltered many times because, as I have found in other work, a lot of its humour was cheap ironic pastiches, and jokes, including enough Scottish stereotypes in one episode to fill a tin of shortbread. There was also content as well that show we did not really progress well in the 2000s in our humour as we thought we did, and other times where it did not work at all just as a joke. It is fascinating, and when it rewards, it is very funny. It is, as mentioned, that one Steve Coogan work, from a man who is an institution for many nowadays, which I have never heard brought up, as mysterious as that sounds.