Thats right kids, episode 2 is finally here and boy is it worth the wait. We’ve got some excellent analysis from Kev on what horror is and a man with a bean factory up his nose. Find out why Dracula lures Van Helsing to his lair and other stuff.
Be ek fortum na!
In this first show of the all new Wenton Project we look at the eponymous hero Sherlock Holmes. With our finger on the pulse we started this show about six months ago. Luckily for us the bbc have decided to start a new Sherlock Holmes series that has made the episode relevant again.
The amount of research and dedication put into this production is literally mind boggling. Shepperton is back with a bang and we confront Jeremy Pixman wth his long lost dead father. Kev defends Guy Ritchie, Sam’s not impressed.
Strap yourself in for the all new Wenton Project.
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Wenton Project now has its own Mevio Channel – http://wenton-project.mevio.com/ We will put all of our podcasts up here as well as any outtakes and specials we do.
Coming soon on our Mevio Channel:
Wenton investigates paranormal activity.
Wenton investigates the redditch water tower for alien tec.
Wenton video’s.
So bookmark it now: The Wenton Project
Kicking off the list at 50 we have:
50: Stargate – An Emmerich early bird and the only Emmerich film in the list. It was kind of cheesey but it bought together two great genre’s, archaeology and sci-fi. Would be higher in the list if the series hadn’t ruined it.
49: Serenity – A surprisingly good romp that demonstrates fan power. Even if you are not familiar with the Firefly tv series this is worth a watch.
48: Ghost in the Shell – Our first Anime entry, one of the all time great Anime films some would argue this should be higher but I fell asleep whilst watching it which gets an immediate penalty.
47: Cloverfield – Almost didn’t make the list, the beginning was boring but did make up for it once it got going. Happy ending.
46: Chronicles of Riddick - Monumental failure at the box office and for no good reason really. Very reminiscent of classic sci-fi literature and vin diesel really does the part justice, feels like a film from a different era.
45: Enemy Mine – Brokeback mountain in Space.
44: V for Vendetta – There was widespread discussion over whether this was actually sci-fi. In my book anything dystopic is sci-fi and I get the overruling vote.
43: The Thing From Another World – Howard Hawks classic about an alien plant creature that formed the basis of John Carpenters re-imagining. Really enjoyable 50′s paranoia sci-fi.
Strange I thought it would be Bigger
42: Dark Star - John Carpenter gets another mention, he will not get another one for Ghosts of Mars! College project with bouncing alien ball works well for me.
41: Akira – The ultimate Anime film, things are on a young mans mind and he threatens to destroy the universe for it. You got to love those anime films.
40: Pitch Black – Slightly subtler introduction to Riddick and a low budget make this very much worth watching.
39: The Thing - See John Carpenter again. Its not massively high brow but seemed to take on more significance with the discovery of Aids/HIV. Awwww poor husky.
38: Equilibrium - Probably the surprise factor more than anything else. Good sci-fi with good action.
37: 1984 – Epic and dystopic, we love it.
36: Zardoz – Widespread nudity makes this a winner, also flying statue heads.
35: Event Horizon – Gory spaceship with gore and guts all over the windows sends people mad, big spinny spikey thing has something to do with it.
34: Dune – How this film ever made it into the list with all the production problems and quickshot story telling is a testament to how far a sci-fi fan will overlook things to see some giant worms.
33: Logans Run – Peter Ustinov and Jenny Agutter give this a win. Michael York I could do without.
32: Invasion of the Body Snatchers(1956) – Don’t fall asleep. No I said don’t, okay you’ve been secretly replaced by a pod.
31: Planet of the Apes – You maniacs!
30: Demon Seed – Whoah, weird robot computer rapes woman to make new species of life. Whoah.
29: The Day the Earth Stood Still(1951) – Stop building nuclear weapons! That worked then.
28: Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi – Ewoks kind of ruin what is one of the ultimate show downs in movie history.
27: The Abyss – Who would of thunk there was things in the abyss.
26: Farnheit 451 – Well looks like we got ourselves a reader! Again dystopia rules. Maybe I’m a pessimist but I can’t think of a utopic sci film.
25: Total Recall – Two weeks etc. Get your ass to mars and watch this movie.
24: Invaders from Mars(1953) – Beware the sandpit at the bottom of the garden there is a guy in a jar who will take over your mind. We love these 50′s sci-fi movies.
23: War of the Worlds(1953) - Looks like 1953 was a bumper year for sci-fi. This really is an iconic film and the special effects were inspired.
22: When Worlds Collide – A curious documentary which investigates how wrong humans can get it when it comes to choosing who should continue the human race on an alien world. Featuring the biggest skateboard ramp ever.
21: This Island Earth: There was a moral in this film somewhere something about white hair.
Triangular TV's never caught on Bizarrely
20: Silent Running – Shhhhhhhhhhhh don’t disturb the trees or I will kill you.
19: Predator – Action, bullets and a weird ass invisible creature that has a nuclear weapon stapled to its arm make this probably the best sci-fi ever bar everything else on this list.
18: Terminator 2 Judgement Day – pre-post apocalyptic robot from cyberdine systems forms a lasting relationship with a wayward child. This unlikely relationship takes them on an emotional journey which leads them both to realise that skynet will attempt to destroy the human race. Luckily they manage to destroy all future tec which could lead to the creation of skynet thus ending the franchise.
17: Close Encounters of the Third Kind – so its a bit disney but it turns out that music is the universal language and not maths at all. Bravo on the mashed spud mountain.
16: Metropolis(1927) – Not sure what this is about but a robot gets animated into some sort of dancing floozy. Or did I dream that.
15: The Matrix – There is no spoon.
14: A Scanner Darkly – Playing an undercover narc whose brain gets addled by death somehow suits Keanu Reeves. Also more excellence from Robert Downey Jnr.
13: Star Trek: The Motion Picture – V’ger wants to communicate with the creator and is really pissed off!
12: The Quatermass Xperiments -Nigel Neale + Hammer Productions + BBC = groundbreaking sci-fi.
11: Twelve Monkeys – This film should be a lot more complicated than it is. As it turns out it wasn’t complicated at all even with the time travel and all that jazz.
10: Forbidden Planet = Uber sci-fi, in fact almost archetypal and Leslie Nielsen shirley can’t be in it. Monsters from the id rock.
It's a Toaster
9: Quatermass and the Pit - Great story, what can you say.
I think the SFX guy worked on Dr. Who
8: Aliens - Guns, marines, a mother alien and a robot fork truck thingy but an annoying kid that doesn’t die a horrible death means this film drops a couple of places. Still a resprectable 8 though.
That Annoying Kid must surely Die
7: Star Wars IV A New Hope - May the force kill the death star with womp rats not much bigger than two meters.
What were you thinking in wearing that?
6: Terminator – Sarah Connor, Yes, *boom*. Oscar winning dialog.
Obviously a Robot Governor from the Future
5: Village of the Damned(1950) – Creepy kids with Akira style powers. Kids are scary!
Why do they all have such odd Hair? Arggghhh
4: 2001: A Space Odyssey – Open the pod bay doors please HAL you mental case.
Is that Jesus?
3: Starwars V The Empire Strikes Back – Star Wars Radiohead style. One wonders what would have happened had Luke joined up with Darth to take over the universe. Where does the emperor fit in with this plan?
He's just a rip off of Dark Helmet
2: Alien – In space no-one can here Ripley being all sanctimonious and so full of her own sense of worth that jones her cat would rather take its chances with the alien and an exploding space freighter. The cat loses.
Couldn't find an NHS Dentist huh?
1: Bladerunner – was there ever any real doubt?
Keep Running
And thats it. Agree, disagree or whatever, I’m sure we’re right 
*EDITOR’S NOTE: This review was submitted by my mum and as such cannot guarantee the validity of the facts in this review.*
The Reader
It starts off like the graduate where an older woman has an affair and teaches a young boy. Their relationship grows and for his reward she likes him to read to her, hence the name ‘The Reader’. He’s studying languages. He falls madly in love with her and her with him a bit I think. It was based in America? Or Germany. She’s a ticket conductor on the trams. She was given promotion to an office job for diligent work. After university or college or whatever he goes to see her but she’s gone. He’s studying law now and as part of his law training he’s going to watch a particular scenario at the court. It so happens that its about Germans that worked at the prison camps in the second world war. Suddenly she turns up with about twelve others who are being put to trial for war crimes. He’s gobsmacked.
My review would be: an excellent refreshing film that I would want to see for the first time again. Kate Winslet was unrecognisable in quite a few of the parts. Brilliant performance.
A film that you don’t know where its leading to. You dont know what direction its going in. You can’t guess what happening next or the outcome of the film.
by
My Mum
*EDITOR’S NOTE*
This article has been graciously submitted to Wenton by the meglomanic bore. Well done!
So, as I sit and watch one of my PC’s trawl through 50,000 orphaned files… on a disk which was working fine not 25 minutes ago, I thought I’d appear here on Wenton and put my threepenny cods wallop option of two sci-fi films… Two films so diametrically opposite in the amount of hype and the amount of successful storyline delivery as you can get…
The first of these films is “Avatar”, a film by his Royal Highness Lord Xenomorph, Baron Terminator von Abyss himself… and what a film, visually a gorgeous stunning mesmerising feast for the eyes. A film touted to the world as THE next best thing since sliced bread, and lets face it, the box office take shows us quite what an excited crowd a modern effect packed ‘blockbuster’ with a name like Cameron’s can pull in…
It also goes to show just what a pile of shite the film industry is… Avatar has about as much story-line as my last trip to the bathroom. Seriously, as a film maker with the likes of Terminator 2 and Aliens behind him you’d expect a project which he himself touted as “taking time from my life over the last 15 years to develop” and “only started work on it because technology allowed me to realise my dream of what would be Avatar”, you’d think such a highly self-motivated project would have a plot with no holes in it.
Alas, this is not the case, from the very moment I started to watch the film, I was a bit perturbed by what we were expected to swallow… Jake Sully [played by Sam Worthington] the main protagonist, we’re given a tear jerking introduction to him, he’s an ex-Marine he’s a paraplegic however, he wheels himself around and they’ve done the first excellent effect (one of the few seamless ones in the film) of actually wasting the muscle mass of his legs to make him actually look like he’s been in this wheel chair for years… do you remember how blown away you were the first time you saw Gary Sinise in Forest Gump without his legs… well I was as blown away by the simple effect of how well they’d put Sam Worthington off of his pins.
But from then on, the effects roller coaster that is avatar took a downward turn. There’s a bit of zero gravity work, and well, it’s not very convincing. Not wanting to harp on about bits from another film with Tom Hanks in it, but remember 1995′s Apollo 13? Well, in the 15 years between then and now, zero gravity effects have taken a computer graphic imagery down turn.
Not to spoil the film for you, but the miss matched footwork of the “floating” technician coming to check on the pods of people emerging from deep sleep, was just terrible, the background for the scene was not too well done either. It was blue screen work of the utmost “Phantom Menace” standards. i.e. utterly rubbish.
Then we’re force fed some poor plot moves, defining the good guys, and the bad guys, and liberally tossing the main character [Worthington] between the two. We’re treated to some interesting shots of the human landing base, with robots and all sorts of cool stuff. And hey, this is a James Cameron Film, we all remember how cool Aliens was right?… Right? Yeah, I thought you did punk.
Too bad all this is thrown away the moment you meet the Navi, these strange bodies that people become, I’m not going into the science they make up, but if you’ve ever played an MMORPG, just think about the log on screen. But the effects of these things you’ve paid your money to be convinced by… erg.
There’s a fantastic moment where the paralysed Worthington getting into this new body, which can walk, goes hog crazy and goes for a run about, he then eats an “apple”, well… it’s clear to my untrained eye how shit the matching up of the solid he’s “holding” and the effect model being used to make the shot… the apple is all over the place, it is rubbish.
The let downs continue for hour upon hour, floating rocks people have to jump between… long vines to climb, large leaves to drop down on… Am I still in a film review here? Or am I describing perfect Video Game fodder? That’s right, this film takes a good old handful of secondary merchandising ideas and sprinkles them through the screen, for no obvious story advancement gain.
The story line itself is a bit of a laugh, if it took James Cameron 15 years to sketch this story together, he must have been drunk for a lot of that time, the audience; in my opinion; is not made to care for the natives, there’s no significant plot development around the supporting cast around Worthington, indeed, even the mighty Signourney Weaver finds it hard to get any screen time unless she’s in her blue body… which I might add just made her look like some strange blue smurf style tabby cat.
The next visual joke comes in the form of the scenery, great pains must have been put into making sure the landscapes of this far off planet are jaw dropping, and indeed they are stunning… that is until a real human actor has to stand in them, then suddenly, and very obviously, they look just like Redwood Forests of North America… Throw a couple of guys in black and white on speeders in and you could have been in a whole other film.
In the end you’re left with a feast of visual effects, with very little plot commitment, tenuous acting and a storyline which frankly I find offensive as it is classed as Science Fiction; Fiction it maybe, but Science, nEvEr!
This pairs up so smartly to my other Science Fiction Film of the week, a film which had nearly no hype surrounding it, which had not even a smidgen of an advertising campaign around it, and which slipped out of the establishment without so much as a wet slap as it’s new born body hit the cold floor tiles and this film is Moon.
A film directed by Duncan Jones, a name I didn’t know, but one I will now avidly follow, and starring Sam Rockwell; an actor I feel has been underutilised since I first met him on screen in the Green Mile. Holey-moly, is a Tom Hanks reference going to appear in every movie link I write?
Jones takes us on a quiet, sedate, thought provoking and very nostalgic Science Fiction thriller, with effects drawing inspiration from the masters of science fiction and suspense. The film takes you on the path of a guessing game, a who-done-it, where you can easily be drawn into caring for the main character and you find yourself often trying to look at the whole screen to see the little details.
This is in no small part due to the excellent portrayal of Sam Bell, the main protagonist of the story, ably played by Rockwell, supported by an ensemble cast but primarily Kevin Spacey. The film finds Sam alone at the end of his three year contract mining minerals on the lunar surface, all communications have been lost, all Sam has for company are the harvesters he monitors, a wooden model he spends his spare time on and a computer, come Robot who looks after him [Kevin Spacey].
Clearly when putting the film together Duncan Jones has drawn on inspirations such as Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Stanley Donen’s Saturn 3, a helping of Peter Hyam’s interpretation of “2010” and a pinch of Gary Nelson’s “The Black Hole”.
Moon is a great film, which raises more contemporary questions, about a more poignant theme than Avatar’s sly dig at society.
So, look out for Moon on Sky SciFi at the moment, and if you must watch Avatar, don’t blame me for the wafer thin plot and unnerving feeling that you can go pick up the console game of the exact story and not miss a thing from the film.
Howard the Duck
Lea Thompson Seduces A Duck!
A duck called Howard is pulled across space by a scientfic experiment that went wrong. He’s all alone on an alien planent and wants to go home. This is the original duck out of water movie. Yada, yada, yada. Let’s face it, it’s tripe. For whatever reason, on Howard’s planet evolution has given ducks the upper hand/bigger brain etc. It’s almost as if life in the universe is like Bingo. Every inhabitable planet has the same numbers it just depends what ball is pulled out of the bag. This suggests that somewhere in the universe Koala bears are the predominant species on the planet. This seems more appealing than a planet inhabited by annoying ducks the size of ten year olds.
Anyway the duck has some sassiness to him. All he wants to do is get home. So he hooks up with whatsherface out of back to the future – Lea Thompson and they go on a mission to get Howard home. Does Howard make it back home? Will he ever have sex with a human woman? How would that work? These are the active questions going through your head whilst watching the movie. About a talking duck. From another planet.
The relationship between Lea Thompson’s character and the Duck is not entirely facile but its not exactly Casablanca stuff either. It’s not even Harrison Ford, Kate Allen. The primary joke of the film is “it’s a duck that talks.” This can wear thin. Especially if you didn’t find the joke funny in the first place which is unlikely because stating the obvious is rarely funny unless done in a sarcastic way. Without giving too much away (you might not have seen it!), the baddies at the end are pretty good, they obviously look well dated now but at the time it was genuinely scary.
It’s true that the emphasis of the film is on the special effects. What do you expect, George Lucas was involved. It’s shallow, it has all the sensibilties of a McDonalds birthday party which means it is all about fun. And it is fantastic fun. It’s incredibly difficult to dislike a film the sheds the tethers of reality so completely as Howard the Duck. I mean come on, its a film about a Duck that speaks. It’s ludicrous. It’s fantastic.
Weird Science
You Have a Bra on your Head!
There is a side to John Hughes that I could never get along with. It was called The Breakfast Club. Don’t get me wrong. It was hilarious, the sight of a bunch of teenagers crying fo no apparent reason is great. Although, how come the geek doesn’t get a girl at the end? Sure he’s got a smile on his face but the other two guys scored big time. What I didn’t like about this film was the smulchy sentimentality that is a shortcut to an emotional arc. Its the same technique fraudsters who claim to be psychic play on. “There were times at school when you felt pressured to conform”. That sort of thing and this is where John Hughes put himself.
Uncle Buck – troubled teenager
The Breakfast Club – troubled teenager
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – troubled teenager
Nearly all of his films involve a teenager of some description getting upset about something. What I like about Weird Science is that it has Kelly LeBrock as a do anything slave girl in it. This appealed to me immenseley (unfortunately the PG rating let me down). I can tell you right now that no matter how big a bra you put onto your head you cannot create a real live woman on your computer.
Robert Downey Jnr is in it which is worth a mention as he plays a really good annoying cool kid. There are teenagers who have emotional problems but that comes at the end when all the fun has been had. Bill Paxton as Chet the older brother with a gun fettish is possibly his best role. But when all is said and done it boils down to this, “so what do you little maniacs wanna do first?” It is the stuff of teenage fantasy.
Night of the Living Dead
I Think she Needs to get some Sleep
Sometimes there’s a film that starts something. So fundamental that its release is considered an epochal moment in cinema history. The first. The inspiration. Without which there would be no others.
BLAH
BLAH
BLAH
BLAH
YOU want to know WHAT this film can do for YOU.
So, erm, yeah. It’s the ‘first’ proper zombie movie. As with most firsts, there’s other stuff that came before, but this is the first PROPER zombie movie. Shut up. It defines the genre in so many ways – a small group of incompatible people trapped in a small space hiding from zombies and the twist being that it’s not the zombies that get them in the end – it’s each other.
Well, that and the zombies are infected people reduced to basic animal instinct of the need to feed. The need to feed on other human beings, for some reason. It’s all about the horror of crowds of people, overpopulation and how mass culture turns people into mindless drones out to suck you in too. This was made a bit more blatant in the 1978 sequel (not the god-awful remake) when the zombies have infested a shopping centre. Essentially, YOU are all zombies, you idiots! It’s also about racism and that, too.
It also starts the tradition of a not very happy ending. Most zombie movies usually end with at least one character just about surviving, but the trauma of the experience they’ve had leaves them pretty much wasted. Without giving anything away, the final scene in Night of the Living Dead is far more brutal than anything that came after.
Random fact: Oddly, the copyright for the movie has expired due to useless film execs.
Being in black and white gives it an energy that the later movies don’t have- avoid the dodgy coloured-in version – it’s much less scary, but find it in its original form wherever possible. Do it now!
