Reviews

  1. “The Holy Machine” by Chris Beckett – A Review

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] (Corvus, 294pp, £12.99) "The Holy Machine" by Chris Beckett I bought this book for a few reasons, which should probably be made clear before I begin dissecting it. First amongst them, was the review of this UK release in Interzone #229, which gave a pretty glowing summary of it. Second, and related, was the quotation on the front, from the Interzone review of the US...
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  2. Inception Review...

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] So, I saw inception on Saturday. And I wrote a review on the way home. I was going to post it on here, when I’d edited it up on Sunday morning, and left a Facebook status to that extent. But, as they say, the best made plans of mice and men, often go awry. When I woke on Sunday, I found a Facebook message from Tony Lee (head honcho of Pigasus Press and DVD reviewer for...
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  3. Doctor Who Series 5 (A Review) [CONTAINS SPOILERS]

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] I mean it. This contains serious spoilers. In respect to the non-UK members, I've put this in spoiler tags, but you click at your own risk. Having said that, enjoy :D
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  4. "Thirteen Years Later" by Jasper Kent - A Review

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] (Bantham Press, paperback, 543pp, £12.99) As a review, I suppose this is a bit on the late side, given that the book actually came out back in March. But with coincidence and life conspiring against me, I've only just finished it. So here you are. First off, Thirteen Years Later is a sequel to Twelve. And both of these books are that most bemoaned of things, vampire...
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  5. Fire up the Quatro! (Ashes to Ashes - A Retrospective Review) [contains spoilers]

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] So, it’s over. And in all honesty, what an ending. But first, a little background. In 2006 a fantastic series called Life On Mars began. It starred John Simm as a present-day policeman, who ends up in a coma and goes back to 1973, where he has to figure out what is happening, whilst dealing with classic 70s policeman DCI Gene Hunt. It was funny, witty, intelligent, and...
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  6. “Silversands” by Gareth L. Powell – A Review

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] (Pendragon Press, hardback, 160pp, £12) I seem to be having a run of short novels/novellas lately. Maybe it’s a subconscious choice, as I’ve also caught myself praising shorter forms of fiction in particular. Especially with speculative fiction, where the suspension of disbelief is often inherent to entertainment, the shorter novel is often the ideal format....
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  7. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) – A Review

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] This was a remake, of the classic 80s horror film. I’m not generally a fan of remakes. The overwhelming question that I find myself asking whenever watching one, is “Why?” I, honest to God, do not understand why people make them. It’s all be done before, and it invites inevitable comparisons with the original. And I can’t think of any remake that has outmatched the...
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  8. The Geek shall Inherit the Earth

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] I did it! Six Star Wars films, 12.8hrs of film (according to iTunes), watched in one day. Okay, so I finished about half an hour after midnight, but that’s just because I overslept yesterday morning. The point is that I watched them all in one go, the only breaks being the necessary ones for food, toilet, and showering. So what was my overwhelming impression of the...
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  9. It's a little bit ironic... (Iron Man 2 - A review) [contains spoilers]

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] It’s actually not ironic at all, I just wanted to make a bad pun on ironic. And now that I have, we can all pretend that I didn’t, and get on with the review… I went into this film with a some trepidation, having read a number of reviews that said this film wasn’t any good. Whilst my first response to that was annoyance, in retrospect, it probably improved my...
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  10. “The Harm” by Gary McMahon – A Review

    [Copied and pasted from my external blog. Please do take a look. I'm trying to update regularly, every few days or so] (TTA Press, paperback, 64pp, £5) The first thought that struck me when Gary McMahon’s new novella slid through the letterbox was how pretty it looks. I know the old adage says don’t judge a book by it’s cover, but with Ben Baldwin’s cover art it’s extremely hard not to. And the size of it seems perfect for a bit of light reading (even though it’s immediately apparent...
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  11. District 9 - A Review [Caution, contains spoilers]

    I realise this is a string of good reviews, but I'm not kidding when I say this is my tip for film of the year. It was nothing short of brilliant, from start to finish. To begin , the concept was fantastic. Aliens not as superior beings, but as almost refugees. To the best of my knowledge, there hasn't been a present-day use of such an idea before. And the choice of location (Johannesburg) was perfect. As a sociological metaphor it may be a little blunt, but the similarities between alien...
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  12. Gamer - A Review [Caution, contains spoilers]

    Very impressed. It pissed me off a little with some of the early camera shots. I get they were trying to show Kable's confusion, and the chaos of the Slayers game, but it just left me disorientated, headachey, and less inclined to respond favourably to the rest of it. Conversely, I didn't mind it as much when it was demonstrating Kable's inebriation (which, really, was the point for me which tipped it from ordinary action sci-fi, to actually pretty damn good action sci-fi). The...
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  13. Orphan - A Review [Caution: contains spoilers]

    I'm gonna start this off by saying that I've now seen this film twice. This could mean two things. Either it's incredibly good, or everything else at the cinema at the moment is incredibly bad. And the two aren't mutually exclusivee But actually, given the horror films that have been released recently, this was a great film. It was actually scary, rather than simply gory or just bemusing (see my Antichrist review). From the opening, it sets atmosphere brilliantly. The dream sequence (yes,...
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  14. Antichrist - A Review [Caution, contains spoilers]

    Okay, let me first make one thing clear. This is not the kind of film I would have chosen to go and see. I went because I had free tickets. It proudly advertises itself as "the most controversial film of the year", and has a warning for "real sex, violence and self-mutilation", and in that sense it doesn't disappoint. However, my experience with controversial films is that they usually try too hard to be shocking, and lose out as a result. (See Bruno for evidence of this; true the film...
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