Black Gate

I’d hoped to put up the fourth of my series of posts on the fiction of C.S. Lewis last week; I didn’t, and this isn’t that post either. I ended up spending more time running around over the holidays than I’d expected, so while I’m hoping to get the Lewis post up next Sunday, for the moment I want to do something different. Having seen a number of discussions about Hugo voting emerge over the previous days, I’d like to put forward some suggestions for the Dramatic Presentation categories.

Regular Black Gate readers may remember that this past summer I covered the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival in my home city of Montréal. I got to see a number of wonderful science-fiction and fantasy films from around the world. And I thought it might be worth looking back at those movies, partly to help people looking for works to nominate on their Hugo ballots, and partly to draw a bit more attention to some excellent work. So here are some films of possible relevance to Hugo voters, with quick summaries and links to my reviews. (I reviewed several movies in each post, so some of the different links go to the same places.)

In this post I’m going to stick to movies that are pretty clearly science-fiction, fantasy, and horror. I’ll divide my lists according to the Hugo rules: films ninety minutes long or more are eligible for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, and those less than ninety are eligible for Short Form. I’m going to list movies in alphabetical order, with brief descriptions and the occasional critical observation. I’ll err on the side of completeness, listing even marginally genre movies. Although Worldcon membership skews American (or so the Hugo Awards web site states, under “Country & Language of Publication”) I’ll include films that have no American release listed, as presumably some readers aren’t American, and I have no idea what’ll be coming on Netflix or other venues in the next month or two. Note that I’m not necessarily recommending all the following films, and certainly not suggesting that Hugo ballots should be put together just from these lists. I’m only trying to highlight movies people might not otherwise have heard of, but might want to investigate now or later. If you want to look through all my reviews of the 2015 festival, you can find links at the bottom of the post linked here.

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I want to espouse the virtues of a story written by Robert Holmes for Tom Baker’s Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang. This story has got to be counted as one of the high points of (original series) Doctor Who concept and scripting.

John Bennett’s portrayal of the stage magician Li H’sen Chang, sometimes criticized because Bennett was an English actor playing a Chinese character, takes on a new light when one supposes (this is my theory) that Robert Holmes was alluding to the real-life Chung Ling Soo, the stage name of American magician William Ellsworth Robinson.

Like many stories in that period of Doctor Who under the production hand of Philip Hinchcliffe, many of the stories were pastiches or developments from old horror story tropes. Hinchcliffe and Holmes shared an enthusiasm for those old story ideas, like Frankenstein (The Brain of Morbius), Egyptian occult stories (The Pyramids of Mars), King Kong (Robot), The Day of the Triffids (The Seeds of Doom), and locked room mysteries (The Robots of Death).

But it reaches a zenith in The Talons of Weng-Chiang: we not only have an allusion to real-life ‘fake’ stage-magicians, we have subtexts or suggestions of:

The Phantom of the Opera
Sherlock Holmes
Pygmalion
Fu-Manchu (or any ‘Yellow Peril’ tales)

…along with much music hall colour, giant rats in the sewers, and maybe even a hint of the Elephant Man?

Pardon my enthusiasm, but I really do feel there are excellent old series stories, and Talons is one of them.

In nerd-world, my credibility is pretty good. Star Wars was the first movie I’d ever seen in theaters, I can name all the Super-Friends, read comics, I’ve sold a bunch of science fiction and fantasy stories, and I blog here.

However, my nerdish education and vocabulary has, until now, had a few embarrassing gaps.

Hi. My name is Derek and I have a problem. I never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, nor Firefly.

I have other nerd-world-related problems, like thinking Dr. Who is a bit dumb, never having cottoned to Lost, and not being that particularly drawn to zombies in any of their incarnations.

But, at least with Buffy, there’s no reason I can’t fix this. So, I’ve set out to correct this deficiency.

In the last 3 weeks, I’ve watched two and a half seasons. I have two sets of reactions: the frivolous ones and my reactions as a writer.

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