Hello, there. I’m Darren, and this is a collection of stuff I’ve written over the years, mainly about music but there’s some other stuff too, such as film, TV and merch. You’ll also find the odd bit of promo for videos and music I’ve made. Thanks for dropping by.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether I’m part of the last generation to experience stop-motion as a contemporary weapon in fantasy cinema’s special-effects arsenal.
As a kid in the 1970s, I was wowed by television showings of the likes of Jason And The Argonauts, One Million Years BC and The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad - films that, at the time, were relatively recent releases, though I must admit, I didn’t...
To some, it’s Zombi 2; to others, it’s Zombie. To me, it’s always been, and always will be, Zombie Flesh Eaters. That’s the title that stirred my imagination back in the pre-VRA days of the early 1980s, the one that conjured up all kinds of hellish images (especially in combination with the wonderfully alluring artwork that graced the video sleeve, pictured left) - basically, the one that promised the most.
“Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”
You didn’t think I’d write about Lon Chaney Jr’s Wolf Man and not kick off with this famous line, did you? As a scene-setter, this rhyme, the creation of screenwriter Curt Siodmak, is hard to beat. It does raise the question, though: if this ‘man changing into a wolf’ business is so...
Bernard Cribbins - actor, storyteller and “pop star for three months” is pretending to be aghast at the idea that, as Wilfred Mott in Doctor Who, he killed the 10th Doctor. How does it feel to be responsible for the on-screen demise of David Tennant, the best-loved Time Lord since Tom Baker? Bernard pleads a defiant ‘not guilty’ - it was the fault of writer Russell T Davies, who,...
Like many well-known horrors, The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s 1973 film about a young girl possessed by a foul-mouthed demon, polarises opinion.
For some, it’s a hoary shocker that’s more ludicrous than scary. For others, it’s a terrifying, feasible glimpse of evil that’s so intense it’s a trial to even look at the DVD cover. Film critic Mark Kermode has called it “the best film ever made”.
For me, it’s a powerful slice of movie-making; the top dog of...
It’s Friday afternoon at the Empire in London’s Leicester Square. A few days ago, the billboard out front declared that the venue was home to Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, but now… well, it’s all gone a bit X-certificate. A Nazi demon prowls the crowded foyer looking for victims, while the gathered clientele are dressed to kill, a variety of horror-themed T-shirts literally rubbing shoulders as they wait for...
Okay, where the heck is everybody? It’s Bank Holiday Monday, 9.20am: day five of FrightFest, London’s annual horror-movie festival. An undead apocalypse is supposed to kick off in Leicester Square in 40 minutes, but the only sign of its arrival is a couple of rather brave zombies in medical garb, sitting in the corner on a bench. Kudos to the doctor and his lovely assistant, but there’s no way I’m going to ‘zombie up’ in...
I’m at What’s Cookin’, at the Sheepwalk, a pub on Leytonstone High Road, and the upstairs function room is functioning just fine. Decked out in flowers, retro lamps and pink fairy lights, with framed photos of country (and some rock) stars adorning surfaces both horizontal and vertical, the room feels more like a shrine than a venue. Crossing the threshold is like stepping into Narnia. It’s a world away from the standard sweat-sodden London stage, its only real...
Taking a page or 20 out of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, here are my top 10 moments from the gig I attended last night: Dan Baird & Homemade Sin at the Borderline.
1. Dan dedicating two lines of Nights Of Mystery to his bandmates: “There’s some people they grow up crazy” (Dan points to Warner). “And there’s some people that never bother to grow up at all, y’all” (points to Keith).
2. Dan nicking Keith’s hat and singing Neil Young’s Helpless...
The 11th Doctor’s costume? What the recently released press picture doesn’t show is the white stick and K-9-style guide dog. Remember, you heard it here first - unless, that is, you attended the Doctor Who talk at last weekend’s London Film & Comic Con at Earls Court Two. It was here that one of Matt Smith’s Time Lord predecessors, Tom Baker, put his hand over the side of his face, imitating the young actor’s floppy hairdo, and...
