On the second of February, barring accidents, a Russian film will hit the screens (in Russia, if nowhere else) that features Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, Rutger Hauer and Charles Dance.
And it’s a sequel.
So, while we wait for the second serving, let me introduce you to an adventure movie you might have missed, and that, while not exactly a masterpiece, still is well worth a viewing if you feel like a serving of weird action fantasy, with a side of Hammer-like horror.
So, as we wait for Viy 2: Journey to China, let’s talk about Viy: Forbidden Empire.
Category Archives: Media
Gotham by Gaslight
One of the many perks of having a high-speed web connection is that (finally) I can access streaming media and acquire digital downloads without the risk that my registration or purchase money will be wasted due to connection collapse.
And so I decided to celebrate a good start of the year and got me a copy of Batman: Gotham by Gaslight.
I bought the comic back in 1992 (it had been published in 1989), attracted by both the steampunkish setting and the art by Mike Mignola, and I was both excited and worried about the movie adaptation.
But all in all, it turned out to be a good way to spend 75 minutes. Continue reading
Robert Arthur and the Mysterious Traveler
I was a fan of Robert Arthur Jr before I was a fan of anybody else. Robert Arthur Jr came before Jack Williamson and Robert Howard and Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock and all the rest.
This because the first books I cut my teeth on were part of the series The Three Investigators, that were credited to Alfred Hitchcock but were actually written by various authors – and Robert Arthur Jr wrote the first dozen or so.
Robert Arthur also edited a number of anthologies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery, that was – as I mentioned a few days back – the book that started my long-time fascination with ghost stories.
The volume included three stories by Arthur, The Haunted Trailer, The Wonderful Day and Obstinate Uncle Otis. Very good stories, that remained in my memory these 39 years. Continue reading
The Phantom Rickshaw
Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses “repeats” on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something—not fever—wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.
Oriental ghost stories, we said, and let’s start with Kipling’s The Phantom Rickshaw and other ghost stories, that you can find in a variety of formats on Project Gutenberg.
The book was first published in 1888, but I think the Gutenberg edition is somehow later, because it includes an extra story, The Finest Story in the World, that’s not listed in the Wikipedia page devoted to the book.
The original stories in the book were written by Kipling in his twenties, and published by The Pioneer or the Civil and Military Gazette.
Tits & Sand: dance and censorship
I was surprised, this morning, when I found out the cobra dance clip from Cobra Woman, that I had posted in 2015 as I reviewed that movie, has been pulled off Youtube because the sensual moves of Maria Montez as she dances with a cobra muppet could cause dirty thoughts in the innocent viewers.
I am seriously worried by this weird form of preventive censorship, based on the idea that something might offend those that don’t like it – but if they don’t like it, why are they watching it?
So, just for the sake of being contrarian, here’s another exotic dance that the censors have yet to purge: Debra Paget’s dance from Fritz Lang’s 1959 tits & sand movie, The Indian Tomb.
This one, too, had the censors’ knickers in a twist.
IN 1959.
Enjoy.
… and yes, the Indian priests speaking German are somewhat unusual.
As a side note, the whole “woman dancing with cobras” might be familiar to my friends that are into Robert E Howard.
Shadows in Zamboula1, anyone?

Go and talk about censorship and undue perturbations of the viewer’s spirit.
- the comic adaptation of Shadows in Zamboula was actually the first ever Conan comic I read. ↩