News

Feature Alex Westthorp 16 Apr 2014 - 07:00

Alex's trek through the film roles of actors who've played the Doctor reaches Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy...

Read the previous part in this series, Doctor Who: the film careers of Patrick Troughton and Tom Baker, here.

In March 1981, as he made his Doctor Who debut, Peter Davison was already one the best known faces on British television. Not only was he the star of both a BBC and an ITV sitcom - Sink Or Swim and Holding The Fort - but as the young and slightly reckless Tristan Farnon in All Creatures Great And Small, about the often humorous cases of Yorkshire vet James Herriot and his colleagues, he had cemented his stardom. The part led, indirectly, to his casting as the venerable Time Lord.

The recently installed Doctor Who producer, John Nathan-Turner, had been the Production Unit Manager on...

Man is there a lot of new content on streaming services this week. There are literally hundreds of new titles available for your viewing pleasure, I couldn’t possibly have written about all of it because I would be writing into next week! Just know that there is something there for everyone whether your bag is comedy, drama, action or horror.

Most impressively this week, Netflix have stepped up to the plate and unleashed a full load of good stuff. They have also announced that they are going to add an audio commentary to their original show House of Cards, which can only be good news for those holding on to their physical media love and may mean that this most valuable of DVD extras is not going away but will instead be reborn in a different guise.

This week’s new titles are as follows:

Star Trek Into Darkness...

In San Jose, California, there is a creepy mansion called The Winchester Mystery House, where the widow of the Winchester Rifle fortune lived in a nightmare of her husband's making.

Convinced that the souls of those who had been killed at the hands of a Winchester gun were out for revenge against her, Sarah Winchester moved to California in 1884 and built a $5 million home (that's 5 Million in "1884" money, so like, 200 Million today) in Northern California designed to confuse the spirits with doorways to nothing, stairs to nowhere, perspective tricks, hidden passageways, secret rooms, and anything and everything she could think of to keep them from "getting" her.

This isn't the movie yet; this is a true story. The Winchester House is now a museum open for amusement and paranormal investigations, but it definitly has a sinister past that is a very likely setting for a horror film.

The new Hammer...

Tremors? Nightbreed? Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat? 976-evil? Are all on the list this year. And though there were not huge horror wins in sound editing through screenplays, the Technical Awards never cease to bring out the horror veterans. Notably Tim Drnec who contributed to such VHS classics as Alien Seed, Destroyer, and Prison won for his work on “Spydercam 3D volumetric suspended cable camera technologies.” An award also shared with Ben Britten Smith and Matt Davis who both also worked on Constantine.

But among all the winners, the Academy also honored some great loses in 2010. And though they mentioned some of our heroes, Dennis Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Dino de Laurentiis (King Kong), they did not mention Zelda Rubinstein or Corey Haim. But we will in this last section and the others lost to us last year.

So farewell fight fans and remember,...

As one YouTube user so eloquently puts it: “Ingrid Pitt, you can bite my neck with pleasure.” The Polish actress and star of films like The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, died on 23 November, just two days after celebrating her 73rd birthday. Sadly, it turns out that all the fake blood she imbibed over the years didn’t make her immortal. Fortunately, her screen image was so indelible that she’ll live on in the hearts and minds of horror fans.

Fittingly, Pitt who was born Ingoushka Petrov, made her screen debut in the obscure 1964 Spanish film El sonido de la muerte, which was known in the Us as Sound of Horror. From the brief clip I’ve seen, it would appear that the budget only stretched as far as providing some very unconvincing dinosaur sound effects. Still, even horror queens have to start somewhere.

After uncredited appearances in Doctor Zhivago...

Come in from the cold, stranger, and prepare yourself for the best and bloodiest work from Hammer horror's archetypal vampire countess. Let me take your scarf ...

Following Ingrid Pitt's death at 73, apparently from heart failure, her daughter Steffanie told the BBC the actor should be remembered as the vampire countess with the "wonderful teeth and the wonderful bosom". There seems little doubt Pitt will remain associated with the particular blend of gore and sex appeal that typified the Hammer movies of the early 1970s, and which remain her trademark.

Ingoushka Petrov was born in Poland in 1937 to a German father and Jewish mother. Confined to a concentration camp for much of the war, she later moved to Berlin where, in the 1950s, she married an American soldier. They moved to California but the marriage failed and she returned to Europe. In the 1960s, Pitt worked with the Berliner Ensemble theatre company under Helene Weigel,...