I was going to review the series Harsh Realm, but it looks as if Lt. Thomas Hobbes has an important message, so I’ll give him access to my keyboard for a couple of seconds. Lt. Hobbes?

A world exists exactly like ours. You live in this world, your family and friends. And though you may not know it, I was sent to save you.

[Here the lieutenant pauses for a moment.]

It’s just a game.

Thank you, Lt. Hobbes.

Harsh Realm is a television series, though this might have slipped your mind. In fact, the only reason you may have known about it was that the creator was Chris Carter (you know, from The X-Files). The most acceptable reason you never heard of it: it only aired for three weeks and then was shelved for five years before someone decided to release what was out there on DVD. Which meant all three episodes as shown on tv, plus the six episodes that were already canned when Fox took the series off the air.

What follows now is a DVD review in two parts: the first will focus on the series outline and the three episodes that made it to the air (albeit that I only saw them 9 years later on DVD), the second will focus on the DVD exclusives (which include episodes 4 to 9).

If history will remember Chris Carter (and it will), this will mainly be for one thing: The X-Files, the hugely successful sci-fi series Carter and c° launched in the early 90s. The series was so popular (after a while – as even the first season ended with the closing of the FBI’s least liked department because Fox wanted to take the show off air) Fox asked Carter to come up with other shows.
Millennium never got the attention it should’ve deserved: although some episodes were in fact quite weak and it took a couple of episodes to get into the series’ arc (a cult inside the FBI that got bleaker every episode), it was generally quite watchable. Sadly, Carter and friends never seemed to decide whether the show was sci-fi or not, which did make the show bounce everywhere and occasionally look like the semi-retarded nephew of Mulder and Scully.

In 1999 (after three seasons) Millennium ended and Carter wanted to dive into new territory. Virtual territory, that is. Like Millennium reminded you of Profiler (NBC’s stab in the dark to copy the success of The X-Files), Harsh Realm reminded me of VR, another short-lived series you may have picked up late at night on BBC2. I guess, what I’m saying is: don’t write a series about virtual reality, there’s a fair chance it’ll be pulled.

Harsh Realm introduces you to Lt. Thomas Hobbes as portayed by Scott Bairstow. Bairstow worked for Carter before, in an X-Files episode (Miracle Man). If I draw this parallel, there’s a reason: Carter’s shows tended to refer to each other. The first episode includes Millennium’s Lance Henriksen as a guest star, Gillian Anderson is the voice of the introduction video Hobbes gets to see and Terry O’Quinn is even more evil in Harsh Realm than he was in Millennium.

Lt. Hobbes, happily sharing some time with his pregnant fiancee, is given a new task and has to leave for base immediately. It is there he learns there’s a virtual game (Harsh Realm) that was hacked by one of the first people to be sent there, a man called Santiago (O’Quinn). He is now a dictator in Harsh Realm and uses it as a test for the real world. Thus he must be stopped and Hobbes is the man to do it. Hobbes is hooked to a machine and off to virtual reality he is.

Soon Hobbes finds out that Harsh Realm is a copy of the real world (well, a copy that’s gone off a bit – quite a bit). Which means that there is a Sophie in Harsh Realm, but she only looks like the Sophie Hobbes is engaged to in the real world. Virtual characters (this means the people who aren’t sent to Harsh Realm by the enemy) can die like a tv set being switched off, but it’s best not to die if you’re an army officer playing the game. And as the first episode (bearing the wonderful title “Pilot”) ends, we discover Hobbes was lied to: we see his body in the real world, attached to wires to live in Harsh Realm, but the camera zooms out and we see Hobbes is part of hundreds of people taking part in this virtual game.

I guess you’ve discovered one of the biigest problems with Harsh Realm: it’s an immense stretch to believe all this information (even now, nine years later). Something which heavily annoys me (but Carter liked, according to his commentary) is the voice-over by either Hobbes or Sophie, writing letters to each other (most of those undelivered as he’s stuck in the virtual world and she’s stuck in the real world, having been told her partner died on duty). To me they sound quite contrived and I feel the constant urge to fast forward them, as they only tell their lover they’d like to be reunited again. Anyway yes, Sophie is told Hobbes died on his secret mission, but a mysterious woman tells her this is a lie and gives her a couple of clues Sophie may want to investigate. It turns out that this mysterious woman (named Inga Fossa – oh Carter, you and your silly names) has the ability to switch between the real world and the virtual world.

Hobbes wants to locate Santiago and gets help from two people, Pinnochio and Florence. Florence is a mute woman with a gift: she can heal people. Oh, and she’s a real fighting machine. Pinnochio is like Hobbes, but he doesn’t seem keen to leave Harsh Realm. His secret is explained in episode three: in real life he has a disfigured face.
This was good for the series: a complaint often heard is that it was hard to relate to the main characters. This gave at least Pinnochio a bit of background to make him look less like a one-dimensional virtual character.

As for Hobbes, it is a bit irritating that he’s so ‘good’ he seems to get into trouble almost every episode. The Jesus references aside, it’s a bit unlikely this sort of character could last long in Harsh Realm. Which is why Pinnochio and Florence stay with him, to get him out of the trouble he manage to get himself into time and again.

If you watch Harsh Realm, it becomes clear that the series is clever enough to have an intrigue you’ll only discover after a couple of episodes. Sadly the viewers didn’t show this patience and the series was pulled after three weeks. A shame really, as one of the better episodes was up next. But more on that later, in part two of this review.
What’s there to conclude after three episodes? That Hobbes is annoyingly good, that part of the build-up was excellent (the idea of the Harsh Realm world, Sophie being told Hobbes is dead, the mystery of certain characters…) and some of it annoying (the letters, the voice-over). But mainly the notion that there was so much more discover, stuff you couldn’t find out in three episodes. So let’s look forward then to part two of this review: the stuff viewers never got to see…

Wasn’t it Peter Greenaway who recently lamented that cinema has existed for more than a century and that basically we’re still watching moving paintures? If there was one director who tried to change cinema by making it more interactive (long before movies like My Little Eye were made) it’s William Castle.

William Castle had been making movies since 1943, not necessarily the kind of movie you’d still remember the next year, but nicely made movies.

In 1958, however, he decided to make movies more interesting by adding gimmicks. People who went to see Castle’s Macabre were asked to fill in a form that would give $1,000 to their loved ones in case they would go and see Macabre and would die of fright. Add to this, the movie’s tagline (“Keep saying to yourself: it’s only a movie… only a movie… only a movie” – a tagline that Wes Craven would borrow a couple of decades later) and you’ll know why Macabre gave Castle’s career a boost.

Tonight we focus on two of Castle’s movies, both well equipped with an intriguing gimmick:The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill.
Because it’s a shame that Castle is contantly overlooked by movie buffs who want to write their history of the silver screen. If one really tried to innovate cinema by making it more interactive, we shouldn’t look down upon this director as a creator of gimmicks. Tonight we give Castle the spotlight he craved for and frankly really deserved…

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL

Here’s a reason never to have kids: Castle’s kids recently gave Hollywood the chance to remake some of his movies. But without the creative mind of Castle these remakes were even much worse than the remade fodder we’re normally subjected to. While Thirt13n Ghosts still had the merits of adding glass walls it didn’t come close to Castle’s original (13 Ghosts) and the way they wrote the title didn’t help much either. House on Haunted Hill (1999) didn’t even change the title, it just took out everything that was fun about the original Castle movie. And yes, House on Haunted Hill (1959) was lots of fun. Vincent Price stars as a millionaire who invites a group of people to spend a night in his house. If they survive the night they’ll get $10,000. And that’s when we get a display of blood dripping from the ceiling, moving skeletons… all the things you’d expect from a spook show.

Is it a scary horror film? No. As Sean Axmaker put it, “William Castle’s gimmick-laden comic thriller is not so much a horror movie as a fairground funhouse come to life.” Even Emergo, the gimmick invented for this movie, is an example of the funhouse fun Castle tried to put into this movie: at the time when the skeleton moved towards the screen, Castle made sure an actual skeleton (that was hidden behind a curtain next to the screen) would come flying towards the audience. House on Haunted Hill was an improvement onMacabre, both as a movie (the script and performances are better) and as far as the gimmick was concerned.
However, this wasn’t the last time Castle would try and invent gimmicks to give his movies just that little bit extra.

THE TINGLER
This is probably the best-known of Castle’s movies. Could that be because of Vincent Price playing the lead (again)? Could it be because this is a black and white movie with one colour scene (the bloody delirium)? Or because William Castle outdid himself with the gimmick? Probably it’s all of these factors combined.

A tingler is a little creature that grows inside you when you’re afraid and you don’t scream. If you scream the tingler stops growing. But if you don’t shout the tingler keeps growing until you… die! That’s why you better scream for your life when you’re afraid. The thing is, how do you know that there’s a tingler inside you? Well, when you’re afraid you’ll feel it grow, as if there’s an electrical impulse going through your body. And yes, people, you’ve just guessed Castle’s gimmick: he had made sure there were some wired seats in the audience. Somewhere during the movie there’s a scene where the movie pretends to stop: the screen goes black and you only hear the voice of Vincent Price, informing you that the tingler has escaped and it’s loose. If you feel the tingler, shout… shout! Shout for your life! At which point you’d feel a buzz and probably started shouting.

The Tingler has a decent script and good performances, which is why this is so much more than a gimmick movie.
As briefly mentioned earlier, there is a scene where blood is running from a tap and because it was too expensive to shoot the movie in colour and because this scene wouldn’t be so effective in B&W this scene is shot in colour. It actually works and gives the scene a touch of delirium, much like in these days flashbacks are occasionally shot in black and white to appear like ‘older’ footage.

If you look at the full package (script + performances + gimmick) it’s hard to find a better Castle movie than The Tingler. Then again, if you see that a full package needed to make a good movieThe Tingler may just be the best movie in the world.

OTHER GIMMICKS
Castle also invented gimmicks for some of his other movies. For the movie 13 Ghosts you needed 3D glasses to see the ghosts, while Mr. Sardonicus was an early experiment of interactive viewing: the audience got to decide the fate of the bad guy at the end. They could hold up a green or a red card to vote whether the evil character would live or die. Apparently the audience always voted for the bad ending, sparking a discussion as to whether Castle had actually made a second ending. Allegedly it was made, but it seems nearly impossible to track down.

We save the best for last: Homicidal‘s gimmick was the Coward’s Corner. If you were too scared to watch the end of the movie you would get your money back at the Coward’s Corner. The drawback: the Coward’s Corner was just outside of the screening room and you’d have to wait until the end of the movie before you’d get your money returned. Leave it to Castle to add the touch of a spotlight shining in your face, just so everybody that watched the movie until the end would leave the studio and see you clearly as the coward you really are. Castle didn’t really like the idea of people leaving during the movie, so just before we get to the climax of the movie we would hear a heartbeat warning us the climactic ending was near. A clock would appear on the screen (as pictured here) and a voiceover would inform us that if you were too scared to watch the end of the movie this would be the moment to leave the studio. Castle called this the “Fright Break”.

Castle’s creativity in movies is only matched in the autobiography he wrote, Step Right Up. You’d be daft to believe every single word, but it’s an incredibly entertaining read. It’s a shame the book isn’t published anymore, but you might be lucky and find it somewhere. It’s definitely something to look out for.

P.S. Images content of own collection, Amazon and House of Horrors.

Les Nuits Botanique offers a unique concept in Belgium: it’s a festival (in Brussels) that lasts a fortnight and allows lots of bands to appear in one of the venue’s rooms. There’s the Orangerie (the regular room), the Rotonde (a smaller and round room) and the Chapiteau, a big tent outside of the premises, just next to the majestical gardens. Tickets are valid for one room, which keeps the festival quite cheap: on average you’ll get to see three bands for 10 to 20 euro. And occasionally, Les Nuits Botanique raises the ticket price and opens all the rooms. In 2008 they did this for the line-up of May 9. For just under 25 euros you could watch I’m From Barcelona, Chrome Hoof, Minus, Get Well Soon, We Are Scientists, Two Gallants, V.O., Of Montreal, Blood Red Shoes, Timesbold, Nestor, The Germans and Forward Russia. We didn’t need that much incentive to get our asses to Belgium’s capital. Here’s an impression.

Two years ago ¡Forward, Russia! blew me away on Pukkelpop. Their concert may have been uneven, but the only way to describe the song Thirteen was “sheer brilliance”. Thirteen was the opening track of the album Give Me A Wall, which also contained the tracks Twelve, Fifteen (part 1), Nine, Nineteen… yes, the band didn’t bother to give their songs a name, they were named chronologically. So “Thirteen”, despite being the first track of the album, was the 13th song the band ever wrote. A gimmick for sure, but not as annoying as most of them.
Two years later the band has a new album, Life Processes, and decided there’s nothing wrong with giving a name to a song. (Suppose the band wouldn’t give up that trick and would even go as far as to name their children One, Two etc.) Last.fm allowed you to listen to the album before it arrived in the stores and my first conclusion was that the album had to do without mind-blowing tracks like Thirteen. Life Processes also contains a couple of songs that didn’t need to be on the album, but the hit and miss style of Give Me A Wall at least enabled the band to come up with excellent hits.
Add to this Tom Headwood’s peculiar vocals and you can understand why ¡Forward, Russia! annoys a lot of people. For my money, as long as they can come up with the occasional brilliant track I’ll love them. Hey, despite the uneven concert I even bought a T-shirt, mainly because it’s a beautiful shirt, but also because I want to believe there’s a future for a band like this. Even if a band’s member is called Whiskas (no really). Let’s hope there will be more tracks like Thirteen that are still on your MP3-player two years after the release (don’t worry band, I legally purchase my MP3s on eMusic and 7Digital). Let’s hope they don’t always feel the need to show off (occasionally that got in the way of the concert and the quality of the vocals). But let us believe for now…

Up next: the toughest choice. Of Montreal, Blood Red Shoes or Timesbold. Since Timesbold took longer to get started, my maths told me that if I went to Blood Red Shoes first, I could still get a large slice of Timesbold afterwards (well, if Blood Red Shoes were on time). They were. On stage just two people, Laura-Mary Carter and Steven Ansell. Steven’s conversations with the public were often kept at “Merci!” and the occasional word in French even some of the francophones near me couldn’t understand. Laura-Mary had apparently made a promise to herself not to look at the audience too much. Still, they promised themselves to rock’n'roll and that’s what they did. The concert was poignant even though it never became excellent and half of the songs sounded exactly like they did on the record. So at times you could’ve just stayed at home and played the album in random order, but you wouldn’t get to see these two young people who made an album on their own terms after touring the country from tiny venue to tinier venue and who were suddenly catapulted into stardom. Well, stardom… a lot of people were still unaware of the duo’s existence. Here’s to hoping their concert at Pukkelpop later this year will change them. For now, the record convinced me more than their live performance, but what a wonderful record Box of Secrets is.

Over to Timesbold. Definitely not the best concert of this band I’d seen, but then again, their concert at the AB a couple of years ago was extraordinarily good. I’m not sure whether the band had an off-day or if it was the room that bothered them. Timesbold admit they’re not the most professional band in the world and it’s always nice to see them have another technical problem (during which Jason Merritt will tell another story, funny and/or cringe-worthy). The Rotonde is, as mentioned before, a smaller room and very much round. This makes a lot of the concerts quite intimate. I’m not sure Timesbold like being so naked, surrounded by audience. A dark room with the audience in front of them becomes them better. Nevertheless, people who didn’t know the band might have picked up on the band’s greatness even if Timesbold had to do without it. Said someone in the audience: I can believe they’re very good, just not today.

Is it a concert? Is it a talkshow? It’s We Are Scientists. Whereas Blood Red Shoes managed to utter only twelve words during the entire concert, We Are Scientists said enough between two songs to fill a complete novel. I had no idea how popular this band was until I went inside the tent. Are they good? Well, they’re certainly not bad, but I tend to prefer bands that let the music speak (rather than egos).

Which is why I let myself glide off to Two Gallants, appearing at the same time in the Orangerie. That room is a lot bigger than the Rotonde and it seemed as if Adam Stephens and Tyson Vogel felt a bit intimidated. Their Wikipedia entry labels them an indie rock band, but don’t be fooled by that: much of this concert proved the band also liked their concerts lo-fi and intimate. Add to this large technical issues on which plug needs to go where or tracks that may be classified as background music and you may understand why I felt a bit disappointed.

I confess I didn’t know Chrome Hoof, but I’ve never understood why I’m From Barcelona is so popular (especially not after last year’s concert at Pukkelpop, which a lot of people seemed to like but I hated). And some genius had decided to cancel the last train to Antwerp, so it was either hoping Chrome Hoof would be excellent enough to spend the entire night in Brussels waiting for the morning train home or going home earlier and enjoy cocktails with a couple of friends. I don’t think I need to tell you what my decision was, let’s hope the clue my review ends here is sufficient enough.

TOP 3 CONCERTS:
1. Blood Red Shoes
2. Timesbold
3. ¡Forward, Russia!

It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it may be wooden, it’s the Spanish Superman ripoff Supersonic Man and it’s directed by Juan Piquer Simon (Slugs, Los Nuevos Extraterrestres).

Juan Piquer Simon used to be a postman (thus linking him to Fabrizio de Angelis, ex-postman and director of “Killer Crocodile“), but quit his job to step into the movie business. If his mail delivery was as excellent as his knowledge of movie making, I wouldn’t send a letter to Spain.

“Supersonic Man” is so obviously a Superman rip-off that I’m almost ashamed to mention it. Still, shame is something Piquer Simon didn’t seem to have. Granted, the man has lots of imagination, but so has a toddler who draws three lines on a piece of paper and says it’s a car. Supersonic (for that is his name) is sleeping in a spaceship when an intergalactic voice tells him an evil mastermind wants to kidnap a professor so he, the evil mastermind, can rule over the world. The evil mastermind is none other than Cameron Mitchell, actor in a handful of classics and the lead in over 150 B- to D-movies. In this production he’s the biggest (read: only) star.

Supersonic doesn’t take the train, like any superhero he can fly. Well, flying… it does look like the actor is busy pretending to swim in the air. Go lie on a bench and move your body first 10° to the left and then 20° to the right. Keep doing that, add a blue screen and you too can fly.
To make us believe the movie was shot in the US, Supersonic often flies in the air with parts of New York in the background. Unfortunately, that’s the only reason these scenes were made, so basically you’re just watching a man in a silly suit pretending he can fly while you’re watching a tourist promo video of New York.

Supersonic’s suit may give you a few chuckles, but what really got me rolling on the floor is the scene where the professor’s daughter (Patricia) is chased by gangsters.
Just when it looks like her car is going to hit a bulldozer, Supersonic lifts it up with one hand.
Though, why a bulldozer is standing in the middle of a forest road beats me, just as it’s quite fascinating to see the bulldozer is actually made of wood. The crooks try to avoid hitting the bulldozer, drive down a hill and for some reason that should explain why their car explodes.

The bulldozer scene is featured quite early in the movie, so it’s best to stay on the floor.
Don’t crawl back into your couch as an avalanche of bad scenes is still coming your way: bad special effects (toy helicopters anyone?), cheesy humour and even more bad special effects (toy houses?).
Oh, have I already mentioned that the plot is hard to follow and some plot lines commence but neverlead to anything? Frankly, “Mulholland Drive” is easier to follow.

To make things even worse, this Spanish action movie (let’s use that phrase lightly) is dubbed in university English.
When the giant robot bursts into the professor’s lab to kidnap him, the professor states: “What kind of tomfoolery is this?” One has to admire those academics, if not for their vocabulary, then for the fact that he doesn’t start laughing when the giant and fierce (and frankly slow) robot appears.

Juan Piquer Simon is sometimes compared to Ed Wood, but at least Wood had a vision (a vision hindered by a budget, but still a vision).
“Supersonic Man” however is a work that makes “Killer Crocodile” look like a masterpiece. Which in its own right is quite special.