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)

Production year: 1987
Country: UK
Language: German
Cert (UK): Unrated
Runtime: 124 mins
Directors: Sir Terald Vaakenheim
Cast: Ted Vaaak

Ted Vaak’s The Trip To The End Of Southend’s Pier, from 1987, is now getting a re-release and it’s pretty scary and entertaining stuff, though I always get the feeling that nothing in it lives up to the tremendous opening section. It begins with Ted Vaaaak (credited inexplicably as Sir Terald Vaakenheim for his role as director, but as plain Ted Vaaak for his acting and his writing) wandering muttering and confused down Southend Pier, early morning mist lending everything an unreal and apocalyptic air. Filmed in one unbroken 25-minute sequence, Ted’s stuttering, near heartbreaking, waltz along the deserted Essex landmark is a thing of genuine beauty, reminiscent of the climactic scene in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, and it is so affecting it often threatens to remove the very air from your lungs and constrict the muscles in your chest. From then on, things tend to slip away and get a little broad for my tastes, and the scenes featuring his tortured internal dialogues with a benevolent celestial Margaret Thatcher seem astonishingly dated, though it always remains watchable. 3/5

Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian’s film critic. This article was originally published in the Guardian, and is reproduced here without permission.