In my day, school playgrounds were a beautiful place, filled with concrete climbing frames and boarded up bombshelters and the hugest tractor tyres a farmer could discard. These days there is nothing but the smoothest asphalt, black and untarnished even by the painted lines of netball courts. And spread out equally across the playground, each exactly as far away as they can be from any other being, are the children.

Sullen, grey, motionless, these children are like ghouls abandoned into the sunlight. Each one stares at the phone in their hand, prodding bony fingers into the screen like crows tapping endlessly at a dazzling window. Occasionally a laugh will ripple across the playground as a new joke is accessed online, a new insult aimed at the heart of whoever today’s enemy happens to be, emailed and facebeeked across their abstracted community.

I enter the playground unnoticed. I plot a course through the children, keeping as large a gap as possible between me and each of them, hoping I can reach the building without stepping accidentally too close to one of them and alerting the mass of creatures to my presence. I am almost to the front door when I step on a discarded quavers packet and lose my footing, stumbling slight further forward than I had intended before being able to regain my balance. Instantly they are upon me.

Each one turns to face me, phones held up and out, the blinking eyes of their cameras fixed on my face. The calm is broken by the screech of a hundred EU-mandated simulated phone shutter noises scrying away in unison, attempting to capture whatever is in my soul. I freeze, my mind blank, all my years of journalistic professionalism lost in a blaze of pretend whirrs and clicks. By the time the bell goes and the children are sucked into the gloom of the school I have collapsed to the floor like Mina ravished by Count Dracula himself, bloodless and utterly alone.

GAMES

Grim Fandango 2: Grimmer Fandango (Available on iPad 2, PS3, XBox 360, Zandy Megamilk and Dragon 32)

This sequel follows on from where the popular adventure game finished. After his best friend is killed and girlfriend kidnapped, what’s a Manny to do? Grab his scythe and kick pelvis bone, that’s what!  Jettisoning the point and click mechanics of the original this new game is third-person action all the way.

The new game forgoes the cartoony look of it’s predecessor for a bleaker look, indeed at some points the blackness literally leaks out of the screen and up the curtains. The scene where Glottis dies, accompanied by an instrumental version of Johnny Cash’s Hurt is particularly moving. In addition to the single player game a number of multi-player modes are available including Capture The Soul, Stomp The Skull, Highway Reaper and the hilariously named, Team DEATHmatch.

TELEVISION

Threads

Stephen Moffat has rebooted the classic 1980s series for the 21st century, replacing the nuclear holocaust with a terrorist attack brought about by an environmental catastrophe that causes an economic meltdown in this action-packed re-imagining. After the partner of hard-boiled cop Jimmy Kemp (Phil Glenister) is killed in the attack he is assigned a robot as his new partner. can they set aside their differences to solve the case before the bombs drop? Gillian Anderson plays Ruth, the woman they both fall in love with.

Some other reviewers may have panned this as being confusing and pointless but they are just idiots. This is cracking stuff. The battle between the robot and the mutants in episodes 3, 4, 6 and 7 is jaw dropping.

MUSIC

Godspeed You Black Emperor – F#A#∞ (Dubstep remix)

If, like me, you found the 1997 original too dark and terrifying then you’ll love these floor-filling remixes by acclaimed producer Vrokex. Coming to a Friday night near you soon.

Next time Pual reviews Star Wars The Phantom Menace 3D.

Unfortunately, I have never been able to get beyond the first room before the blood drowns me, so I am unable to tell if it is a notable addition to Ted’s canon.

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

I took it inside and unpacked the contents hurriedly onto my living room floor. All wires attached, and all plugs inserted, I switched it on, caressing the swollen monitor’s screen as it powered up to remove the static from its glassen face to stop it exploding and through my fingers transfer its wayward energies to my broken heart.

Within minutes the desktop screen appeared, bright red, yet otherwise blank, except for a lone folder, name: geocitiesterroredition001. And inside that, treasures I had never before dreamed of. A whole new chapter, unmentioned in the annals, from somewhere between the old and the now, a grasp at technologies at the time unknown, Ted Vaaak’s restless mind wrestling with the future and trying hard to tame it.

For here is Essex Terror online, for the first time, before I had even seen the internet, or even dreamt of it, and yet Ted, old Ted, often considered dead Ted, had already mastered its capricious whims.

To see the full beauty of my find, please click this link and be transported.

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.

Minds here are corrupted not by incomprehensible visions of infinity and malevolence but by a bizarre religious devotion to Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine of self sufficiency. The gibbering madnesses that result are, however, largely the same.

Hospitals, a frightening reminder of the coddled horrors of living in a socialist state, are largely shunned, and their functions are slowly being replaced by a variety of macabre houses of medical horror that cater to the twisted whims of these strange and deranged people. Shopping centres no longer contain just shops. Here you can have your teeth vibrated clean, strapped down into a chair just outside Wilkinsons, your lips pulled back, a crowd of onlookers marvelling at the lack of enamel left in your maw. There, next to that stall where they print pictures onto canvas for no readily apparent reason, you can have your eyeballs sliced open, businessmen allowed a quick glimpse of the ultraviolet dimensions before the cornea is replaced and their lunchhour is over. And everywhere you can sit with your feet in a trough and let piranhas feast on your everdying flesh.

Those that cannot pay are left to rot in their shoes.

Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s senior.

"We can dance if so we wish & leave thy freinds behind, For thy freinds dance not & if they dance not they be no freinds of mine."

If you were to dig beneath the stone, however—an act which is forbidden by a special order from the office of the Witchfinder General—you would find something out of the ordinary. You would have to dig through three feet of earth, then three feet of slightly different earth, then scrape through a thin layer of gravel, scoop out a hundredweight of treacle, extract several cubic metres of compacted white dog shit, go through a scale model of the Great Pyramid with a pickaxe, then break open a metal enclosure that reaches ten feet into the ground, and then dynamite your way through a solid marble sarcophagus before you got to the metal casket, which is lined with lead sheeting. If you finally managed to get the casket open, you would find what appeared to be a mummy or possibly a frankenstein, wrapped in successive layers of lead, corduroy, tweed, silk, sackcloth and ashes. After unwinding these wrappings, you would finally see the mortal remains of Barry Johnson himself. You would notice that his belly and chest have been roughly sliced open and his internal organs removed, along with his feet and most of his teeth. While pondering this macabre scene, you would be absorbing enough evil to put your immortal soul in peril. For Barry Johnson is better known to the world as Jack Pudding, the notorious Dancing Man of Walthamstow.

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.