EOFFTV

A few people have asked about this and Terror of the Tongs. I wish we had done them now but they were a bit borderline. Maybe we can come to them in a special episode at the end. Mind you we added a few more borderline titles this week and we're not now due to finish until next January so who knows!

Play for Today: Jumping Bean Bag (1976) The BBC’s strand of single plays, Play for Today (1970-1984), was always throwing up surprises. Of its almost 200 episodes, it’s often the heavyweight social dramas that are best rememb…

More weirdness from the Play for Today strand with Jumping Bean Bag (1976), a hallucinatory and cautionary tale of teenage rock wannabes, social commentary, and glam/prog songs. Make of that what you will...

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Mr Benn (1971-1972) In 2001, Channel Four ran a poll of its viewers to determine the 100 Greatest Kids’ TV Shows as revealed in a one-off special of that name. Coming in at number six, beaten only by big hitters…

Mr Benn (1971-1972) is another cherished childhood memory, the charming tales of an ordinary City gent and his travels to strange lands through a door in a fancy dress shop.

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A View to a Kill (1985) The end of the road for the Roger Moore incarnation came with John Glen’s A View to a Kill (1985), a fairly mindless and dull fiasco that highlighted all of the negative aspects of the Moore …

James Bond was back scraping the bottom of the barrel again in the dismal A View to a Kill (1985), one of the most boring films in the series. It was Roger Moore's last and things would get, temporarily better, with the next entry.

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I can certainly understand why. It's extraordinary.

The Boogey Man (1980) German born director Ulli Lommel, previously a collaborator with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who produced Lommel’s early attempts at directing, notably the very dark serial killer drama Die Zär…

The Boogey Man (1980) is probably Ulli Lommel's best American film (though that's not saying much), a derivative but fun supernatural chiller full of gimmicky killings and a decent conceit about a haunted mirror.

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The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) Director Colm McCarthy made an impressive, low-key debut with Outcast (2010), an ingenious bit of folk horror transplanted to an urban setting. He spent the next few years overseeing episodes of so…

Colm McCarthy's The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) is an absolute gem, an intelligent and thought-provoking zombie film that takes the stale and tired genre into new and more interesting territory.

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The Diamond (1954) The Diamond, shot under the lengthier title The Million Dollar Diamond at Nettlefold Studios from 14 September 1953, was Britain’s first 3D feature film but the plot harked back to the earlie…

Dennis O'Keefe and Montgomery Tully's The Diamond (1954) is two-fisted tale of an American detective in London teaming up with his British counterpart to track down the makers of artificial diamonds.

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Play for Today: London is Drowning (1981) At the end of January 1953, a heavy surge tide in the North Sea wreaked havoc along the east coast of Britain, as far north as Scotland and extending as far south as the Netherlands and Belgium. A …

London is Drowning (1981) is a terribly earnest but not uninteresting Play for Today about various London characters facing the threat of an imminent flood from a huge storm surge. Cheap, sometimes preachy, but still quite fascinating.

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It's as good a barometer as any! And with so much out there now we all need guidance from time to time.

Oh, always best to give things a try and decide for yourself. You never know...!

Not quite as exciting as your last batch I'm afraid, but they're all worth watching (sort of!)

😂

Great stuff! Glad to be bringing these gems to your attention!

This week on HAMMER TIME we have a serious case of imposter syndrome, as Kevin (@eofftv.bsky.social) and I dive deep into the twisty, turny - and very creepy - psychological thriller PARANOIAC from 1963. Out now!

I can well believe that!

Café Flesh (1982) One of the most famous (infamous even) adult films of the early 1980s, this bizarre post-apocalypse drama is so defiantly unerotic, deliberately so, that it functions more as anti-porn than “…

A bit of a rude one today - Rinse Dream/Stephen Sayadian's mad porn/science fiction surrealist performance art madness Café Flesh (1982), which is sadly nowhere near as interesting as it might seem. In fact, it's a bit dull...

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Ah, can you imagine that? Sid and Ken as Droogs, Charles as an astronaut, Babs as the voice of a saucy computer and Bernie riding a nuclear bomb to obliteration. What a missed opportunity!

I've got notes for a Wrong Turn review. I'll get round to that soon!

Oh yes, do! Any time is good for some Walter Hill!

Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 (1987) Original title: メタルスキンパニック MADOX-01/Metaru Sukin Panikku Madokkusu Zero Wan The directorial debut of Shinji Aramaki, the former designer of popular anime like 機甲創世記モスピーダ/Kikō Sōseiki Mosupīda/Genes…

Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 (1987) is an underwhelming short Japanese animation about that most ubiquitous of anime themes, giant machines hitting each other. If that's your thing, you might enjoy this nicely designed vignette.

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Octopussy (1983) Sadly, the improvements seen in For Your Eyes Only (1981) proved to be a mere blip in the continuing downwards spiral of the James Bond series. Although the producers again protested that they were…

After a return to the relatively serious, the Bond franchise gets silly again with Octopussy (1983), a film you can easily forget even while you're watching it. It's going to get worse, but an improvement is on the horizon.

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Southern Comfort (1981) Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort (1981) has, like that other borderline horror film John Boorman’s Deliverance (), cast a long shadow over the genre. It makes the swampier depths of off-t…

Walter Hill's brilliant Southern Comfort (1981) is a horror film and we'll brook no argument about that here - a group of National Guardsmen are remorselessly hunted by angry Cajuns through the Louisiana swamp. How could that not be horror?

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Children of the Damned (1963) The success of MGM’s Village of the Damned (1960), an adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, prompted the company’s British wing to mount a more ambitious se…

And while we're here, let's look at the very different "sequel" Children of the Damned (1963), a very different beast but in some ways a more interesting film, in which the kids move into the city and their origins are given a fascinating twist.

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Village of the Damned (1960) Nicely spoken, wholly unrealistic middle-class English children were endemic in 1950s British cinema. Even the least well behaved of them were merely cheeky scamps who were set back on the straight…

Wolf Rilla's eerie Village of the Damned (1960) is a faithful adaptation of the John Wyndham novel The Midwich Cuckoos, a disturbing tale of alien children implanted in the women of a small English village. One of the greatest of all "creepy kids" films.

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Hope you enjoy it!

The Playbirds (1978) British sex comedies of the 1970s were almost entirely awful, generally devoid of any genuine eroticism and packed full of jokes that were already long in the tooth when the days of music hall fina…

The Playbirds (1978) is one of the grimmest and most depressing British sex/horror films of the 1970s, a tawdry tale of a serial killer stalking glamour models in London's Soho with an ending that will leave you baffled.

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Yes, gets us off to flying start!

Ah, be still my beating heart!

It's Hammer Time! This week Kevin (@eofftv.bsky.social) and I join a bloodsucking cult as we discuss 1963's KISS OF THE VAMPIRE 🧛🏻‍♀️💋 Listen wherever you get your podcasts