A horror unlike many others, Gantry has, since its release in 1990 through to here and now with this fantastic new edition from Ubbstress Books (£7.99), lingered at the edges of my mind far more often than it should, often causing me a series of minor confusions before I could finally banish it to the unseen voids that lay beyond the visible boundaries of my mind.

Like all good books, the premise of the novel is immediately apparent from the cover, so I need not go into detail about it here.

Ted Vaaak is currently starring at Madame Tussauds as a waxwork of Bobby Davro

Although Ted Vaaaak’s FLEAS! is largely unremembered now, this was at the time considered evidence – alongside Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Shuan Hutson’s Slugs – of a renaissance in British horror cinema. Set in a sleepy village in Yorkshire, and starring Brian Glover as a local doctor who has grown up since childhood with a crippling terror of fleas and now has to confront his worst nightmare, FLEAS! follows almost every single cliche of the murderous flesh-eating innocuous animals genre that was a staple of the 80s horror landscape.

FLEAS! was the first and so far the last film in his indescribable career to have used Ted Vaaaak’s name as a promotional tool, and it has little of the usual confusion associated with the name. Formally one of Vaaaak’s most conventional works, the only scene here that lingers in the memory is the final confrontation between Brian Glover and his mother, who has been nurturing the fleas taste for human blood by allowing them to feed on her gargantuan breasts. On discovering that she has taken up residence in his wine cellar, he battles her to the death armed only with a nail gun.

FLEAS! only real lasting legacy probably lies in its successful American remake, Arachnophobia. It is also sometimes considered to be the first work in what would become known as Vaaaak’s “boringness” period, although others argue that this should not be considered a period and more of a phase.

In 2007, Ted Vaaak tried to resurrect this tired genre with his film Fox Hunt, set after the fox-hunting ban and starring David Mitchell as a missionary back from Africa who discovers his idyllic home village overcome by flesh eating foxes hungry, but it was not to prove a success.

Peter Bradshaw is appearing as The Ghoul in Top Trumps: The Movie.

This years marks the 25th anniversary of a little remembered landmark in British SF, the commercial release of Ted Vaaak’s directorial opus The Perilous Planet based on a script derived from his own story (reprinted here on Essex Terror itself). Despite it’s lurid screenplay and challenging themes the story behind the film is probably more terrifying than the film itself.

Ted Vaaak was a prolific author in the 1960s, his work typically being the standard SF fare of uniformed oafs who flew silver spacecraft, dated beautiful women, punch green aliens in the throat and hung around with young men. Coincidently, Vaaak was to list all these activities amongst his hobbies. Suddenly, around Christmas 1965 he stopped producing new work and rumours began spreading that he was working on something special, something new. The world (or at least Maldon) waited with bated breath.

Three weeks later, Ted submitted a new story, Perilous Planet, under the non-de-plume Tedney Vaaaak. It was published in the February issue of Cosmic Trousers. The reception was mixed. Michael Moorcock described the story as ‘pointless’. Unkind rumours surfaced that Flann O’Brien was found dead clutching a copy of the story with the look of a haunted macaque frozen on his face. The tale was quietly forgotten about for 20 years.

It seems odd now that Perilous Planet would be chosen by a major Hollywood studio but that is to forget the incessant search to find the new Star Wars that was prevalent at the time. However, the decision to allow Vaaak to direct the film seemed foolhardy even at the time. He was later to comment, ‘I was cheaper than Spielberg, plus I also threatened to kill the producer’s dog.’

A less risky decision was to give Elvin the popular children’s TV performer a starring role. However, budget problems meant that the rest of the cast had to be filled out with shop mannequins. Barry Norman comments wryly that they were ‘better than Schwarzenegger’.

Filming was further wrought with problems. The studio objected to the abundance of phallic plants on the set of what was meant to be a family film. Vaaak compromised by filming half a mile away to obscure the detail. However, on the first day of filming a freak storm blew the offending set back into shot. The studio backed down and filming continued.

Vaaak had a tempestuous relationship with his star, Elvin ‘Elvin’ Elvin. On one occasion witnesses claimed he threatened to throttle Elvin twice then throttle himself. Tragically, a few days later, Elvin was found dead, throttled in an accident that remains a mystery to this day. Filming was held for several days whilst an adequate mannequin was found to fill in.

After a tortuous editing process, the film was finally deemed ready for release. At times, frightening, wondrous and bizarre, one laughable 30 minute section appears to be an episode of the soap Crossroads (‘Benny makes a Mistake’), the BBFC surprisingly gave it a PG rating, more out of desperation than merit.

The critical reception was poor. Roger Ebert bursts into tears at any mention of the film. Peter Bradshaw claims he never saw it. Neil Gaiman dismisses the film out of hand, ‘In the original short story, Captain Ubbliona Brush-Set turns the villainous Admiral Hlug-Holm into a penis-shaped plant. In the film, Hlug-Holm is some kind of surprised hat-stand.’

The film also fared poorly in the box office, except in Latvia where it was mistakenly released under the title Ghostbusters 3. However, it did gather a few fans, particularly amongst self-harming thirty-year olds. Indeed, in 2003, Vaaak himself claimed that an (unnamed) former prime-minister said she found the film ‘profoundly moving and diverting’.

So then is it time for a long mooted DVD release? In the immortal words of Captain Ubbliona Brush-Set, ‘Fire up the engine.’

Pual Farrell is the senior film correspondent for The Portsmouth and Southsea Times. This article is reproduced according to the contract.

Mark Gatiss, fresh from the success of his adaptation of HG Wells’ The First Men In The Moon, has been given a lavish (by BBC 4 standards) budget to create this pilot for a proposed series of lavish new detective stories, in which he stars as the titular hero. Based upon a never filmed script by recently deceased BBC veteran Ted Vaaak, The Alan Turing Adventures is set during an alternate history Second World War. Turing here has been re-imagined as a dashing and flamboyant secret agent careering around behind enemy lines in a desperate attempt to steal and decode Hitler’s childhood diary, en route to which he gets locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse with Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun (Benedict Cumberbatch).

The references to Mark Gatiss’s beloved Doctor Who are legion, with Alan Turing attired almost identically to the Peter Davison-era Doctor, although here, in a subtle nod to history, he carries not a cricket ball but an apple. The final scene, where Turing turns away from von Braun’s smoldering corpse and bites hungrily into this apple is surprisingly poignant.

This little seen British horror film has a controversial reputation that far exceeds its actual influence. The story, a loose recreation of A Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, involves Professor Hardwig (Michael Praed) and his team of scientific explorers adventuring their way through Prince Charles’s monstrous anus, through which they expect to find a doorway to Hades. Along the way they battle innumerable monsters, including an horrifically deformed Queen Victoria (Chelsea Charms), the zombie Queen Mother (Angela Lansbury) and a hideous half horse/half Henry VIII abomination (this, astonishingly, is just overdubbed reused footage of Ray Harryhausen’s centaur from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad). One can only assume that all of this is intended to be satirical. It is, however, impossible to tell.

Peter Bradshaw is at least not Xan Brooks

Production year: 2001
Country: UK/Spain
Language: Spanish
Cert (UK): N/A
Runtime: 87 mins
Director: Jaume Balagueró
Script: Ted Vaaaak
Cast: Jessica Del Pozo, Federico Luppi

After the success of Los Sin Nombre, his successful adapation of English horror novelist Ramsey Campbell’s story The Nameless, Jaume Balagueró planned on following this up with another film based upon a British author’s horror works. However, La Escuela En La Noche, based upon the short story The School In The Night by Ted Vaaaaaak (who was also responsible for the film’s script), would never see release. The showing this week of an almost complete cut as part of the Barbican’s Horrific Stories season is something of a mixed blessing.

Leda (Jessica Del Pozo) is a lonely ten year old girl. Trapped in a huge and empty school, she spends her days wandering the corridors of this impressive gothic prison. At night, she retreats to her safe haven in the changing rooms, sleeping on the wooden benches and talking to her only friend, a disembodied female voice that rises out of the pipework of the radiator.

Desperate to escape, the voice from the radiator tells Leda of her one chance of escape. Every year on her birthday, all the doors in the school will open, and if she can get to the entrance she will be free. The only problem is the fearsome beast that roams the school after dark. Hunchbacked, fang-mouthed, fingers like hyperdermic needles at the end of swan-wing arms, the first we see of this horrible beast is its face pressed up against the windowpanes at the door to her room, a scene that is a perfectly judged homage to Nosferatu. But all is not lost, for the beast cannot touch her if she does not set foot on the floor. And so begins a terrifying and perilous journey to the other side of the building.

This is where the problems begin to set in. The beast (played by Federico Luppi) is absurd, its awkward lumbering more reminiscent of the beachball creature in Dark Star than of the alien in Alien. The action scenes, mostly consisting of a girl balancing on a banister, are slow, and almost incomprehensibly repetitive. When the most effective scene is of a girl running into a chemistry lab and leaping up onto a table, scattering the stools that are resting there onto the floor, you must surely know that the script has problems.

It is not all bad, though. There is, especially in the early scenes, a perfectly judged atmosphere of nostalgic horror, trading on that illicit thrill that always accompanies walking through public places at night, alone. And I must admit that I enjoyed the section where the beast messily eats an apple that the girl has dropped, hinting at a depravity that the rest of the film never shows.

The final scene, with the beast unmasked and pleading for Leda to stay with him here instead of braving the outside world, is perhaps the best. As she defies him one final time and steps out into the morning air, he sits down on the stairs and cries openly, brokenly, pushing the tips of his needle-thin claws into his tear ducts in an attempt to stem the flow. It doesn’t quite make up for the awkward tedium of the preceeding hour, but it hints at the film this could have been.

This article was written by Peter Bradshaw and first appeared in the Guardian on October 29th, 2010. It is repeated here without permission.

Production year: 1993
Country: UK/Canada/Italy
Language: English
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 93 mins
Director: Ted Vaaak
Cast: Leonard Nimoy, Shannon Tweed

This amiable and largely forgotten comedy of confusion, now available on DVD for the first time, was to be Leonard Nimoy’s last film role for 16 years. He stars here as an aging actor mistaken by an invading alien force for the President. The aliens send an envoy (Shannon Tweed) to seduce Leonard in the equally mistaken belief that his son will become ruler of the world. Towards the end the wittiness dissipates, and an unnecessarily graphic scene where the alien’s human body is ripped apart as she lays a 4 foot egg ruins what had previously been a largely charming twist on an old genre. The epilogue, with Leonard Nimoy perched atop the egg in an apparent attempt to help it hatch, hints at a sequel that was to never be made.

Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian’s film critic. This article was rejected.

Essexorcists -- Kount Kremlin

Label: Alan Records
Format: CD, Album
Country: UK
Released: 1991
Genre: Horror Rock
Style: Rock, Punk

The first and only album by Essex-based horror rockers Kount Kremlin gets a  much anticipated rerelease this November after being nearly two decades out of production. If you’ve never heard of them (for shame) this is like a minimalist 45 Grave for the South of England. A three-piece lineup (lead and bass guitar, plus Keith Jism’s choked vocals and enthused zither solos, with a drum machine backing it all up like iffy plumbing in a septic tank), it all has the finesse of a cement clarinet and really shouldn’t work. But it does. I still curse the Farnborough Airshow for taking these brave meistros from this world too soon. 4/5

Track Listing

1. Thaxted
2. Ballad of Dangly Ubb
3. Plan 7
4. I Was A Clacton Frankenstein
5. Essexorcist
6. Harlola
7. Smash Up a Shop and Kill the Police
8. Fear of Flaps

(review by Magnesia Stripp)

Synopsis: When the Californian Wieczorek family move north to the sleepy town of Essex, Vermont, the chilly weather proves to be the least of their problems as they struggle for acceptance amidst the impoverished townsfolk.  Mom Janey deals with distrust and suspicion in her new posting at the local high school, whilst her husband Mike finds himself sacked on his first day of work at the logging outfit.  But nobody could prepare for what happens when their starving son Cody takes a bite of an infected pumpkin.  As one by one the people of Essex are absorbed into the PumpkinChylde’s disgusting, vegetated mass, it’s a race against time for a local scientist (Ian McShane; Lovejoy, Deadwood) to formulate the antidote…

Label: 4AD
Format: CD, Album
Country: US
Released: 2008
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Industrial, Goth Rock

The first blood-offering since the band signed to 4AD last year, Shadows is finally out in the UK this month after a staggering 12 month delay from the US release.  Frankly? It wasn’t worth the wait. Nosferatu shot to obscurity back in the mid-90s with Vampyre’s Cry, and with no less than three different versions of the club hit bulking out this album, Shadows seems a thinly-veiled attempt to ride the last lingering pulse of that forgotten climax. As for the genuinely new stuff, well, it’s all danceable — Sorrow & Sadness being typical but surprisingly upbeat synthrape not-not-goth that’s become so popular of late (don’t ask me why), whereas Poe-Faced is the perfect backing track for you to jam your obese S.O. into that dimestore ‘corset’ you bought her. The Nos are so much more capable than this, and the fact they didn’t even bother to give their last track a name makes me wonder if this isn’t just an ironic, middle finger of apathy to an increasingly uninspired scene. One can only hope. 1/5

(review by Magnesia Stripp)