Bruce Campbell – Blood and Porridge

August 17, 2026

Attack ‘n’ Byrne

In the past few weeks I’ve been fortunate enough to attend two of the best musical concerts I’ve ever experienced. Both took place at Singapore’s Star Theatre.

On July 29^th, the Star hosted the English trip-hop collective Massive Attack. Formed in Bristol in 1988 by Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall, Adrian ‘Tricky’ Thaws and Andre ‘Mushroom’ Vowles, Massive Attack is less massive in terms of members nowadays. Only 3D and Daddy G remain, Tricky and Mushroom having left in 1995 and 1999 respectively. What we got on July 29^th still sounded massive, though.

In the 1990s, I loved the band. Their three albums from that decade, Blue Lines (1991), Protection (1994) and Mezzanine (1999), are all-time favourites of mine. I found their sound irresistible: its hypnotic melodies, its measured pace, its building crescendos, its atmospherics, its lurking orchestral grandeur – composer John Barry never seemed far away – and, unpinning everything, its relentless drums and basslines. After hearing them, I had a hard time getting songs like the soaring Unfinished Symphony or the sublimely restless Safe from Harm from Blue Lines, or the haunting Teardrop from Mezzanine, out of my head.

My ultimate Massive Attack song, though, was Mezzanine’s Angel, which after a slow but remorseless build-up lets fly two minutes and 19 seconds in. That’s the best crescendo in music ever. It would make a terrific accompaniment to a movie sequence where there’s a brooding sense of unease, then an explosion of action. It has been used in films, actually, but the only one I’ve heard it in was the forgettable 2004 remake of Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). I know it turned up in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000) too, but I’ve never watched that one.

The one time I saw them live during the 1990s was in insalubrious circumstances. They played at the now-defunct Scottish music festival T in the Park in 1999. The crowd was boozed-up and raucous and I’d been at the front of it all afternoon, before they performed, watching earlier bands on the bill. These included the then-popular rock band Reef. While Reef were playing, someone bodysurfed past me and accidentally struck me in the head with a boot. A week previously, I’d been the victim of an assault, which resulted in me getting multiple stitches in the back of my head in an A and E department. The body-surfer’s boot opened those stitches and blood leaked out everywhere, including down my face. Consequently, when Massive Attack came on, I looked like I’d just strolled off the set of a horror movie.

It didn’t help that a crowd-member then flung a bottle at the stage, which smashed down close to their frequent collaborator, the reggae roots singer Horace Andy. They continued playing, but looked extremely pissed off. (They should have followed the example of Jim Kerr, the frontman of Simple Minds. Supposedly, once, when somebody chucked a bottle at Simple Minds during a Parisian gig, he told the crowd, “I hope whoever threw that dies of cancer.”)

So, what a contrast to see them again, 27 years later, from a vantage point high in the circle of the grand and comfortable Star Theatre. On the stage, 3D, Daddy G and their team of travelling musicians were ensconced, in near-darkness for much of the time, among their instruments and consoles while the theatrics were provided by dazzling visuals that materialised on giant screens above them to accompany each song. In fact, ‘visuals’ is too lame a word to describe what the audience saw. A reviewer in Australian Musician wrote that the band used “monolithic LED screens, archival footage, political imagery and dreamlike sequences to create a constantly shifting portrait of a world where personal freedom, privacy and even human emotion are increasingly commodified.”

As the visuals shifted wrenchingly from the picturesque Swiss lakeside city of Zug (where much equity money ends up, apparently) to Africa and impoverished locals having to dig up precious minerals in wretched conditions, from worrying graphics illustrating the global reach of mass surveillance to gibbering headlines about celebrities, from Peter Thiel quotations about why democracy is a bad idea to bald statements that could have come from 1984’s Ministry of Truth (‘WHAT IS PURPOSE?’), I was reminded of the work of radical documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. Later, I learnt that Curtis and the band have enjoyed a long association and he worked with them to put these digital displays and film clips together.

Not that the visual show was entirely serious. I was delighted to see the great horror actor Bruce Campbell get chased through a cabin by the forces of darkness in The Evil Dead (1982) while a message flashed up telling us we can’t escape ‘the algorithm’. Later, another great horror actor, Boris Karloff, appeared as the title character in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) in an ironic commentary on the West’s tendency to blame China for everything. (See Covid-19.)

Musically, it was superb. The crowd gave roars of appreciation for Horace Andy, singing on three tracks, including – yes! – Angel; and for other longtime collaborators Deborah Miller, singing on Unfinished Symphony and Safe From Harm, and Elizabeth Fraser, who did vocal duties on Mezzanine’s Black Milk and Group Four and a cover of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren (1970). Fraser also brought the evening to a perfect close with the final song, Teardrop.

The gig was overshadowed by an incident at the end when, briefly, 3D and Daddy G brandished a Palestinian flag onstage. Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper reported that this broke a local law forbidding “the public display of foreign national emblems without a permit or exemption.” Afterwards, according to the Times, the authorities released a statement saying, “…the police… administered stern warnings to both men for the offences of Section 3 of the Foreign National Emblems (Control of Display) Act and Section 16 of the Public Order Act,” and “both men will be banned from re-entering Singapore.” The BBC, meanwhile, quoted an official spokesman as saying Singapore’s police “take a serious view of acts which could potentially harm the racial and religious harmony in Singapore”.

This leaves me with mixed feelings. I believe people should be free to express their opinions, so long as that expression doesn’t cause innocent parties any harm, and I don’t see how two 60-something men holding a flag for a few seconds in a theatre full of Massive Attack fans could cause much harm. However, I also believe in the old adage, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. Singaporeans are proud of the stable, prosperous, multicultural society they’ve created, in a region that, elsewhere, has often been troubled by ethnic and religious conflicts. For many people, having strict laws outlawing the display of foreign flags (and eliminating any possibility they could be used to stir up trouble) is a price worth paying. I didn’t see much sympathy for the band on local Internet discussion-forums, where the sentiment was largely, “Bloody foreigners, coming over here, breaking our laws.” “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said one commentator, evidently not a fan.

It’s worth noting that the UK authorities have given Massive Attack a hard time too for their pro-Palestinian sympathies. 3D was arrested in Trafalgar Square in April this year for carrying a sign expressing support for the proscribed, allegedly terrorist group Palestine Action.

Anyway, this furore obscures the fact that the concert itself was exceptional.

Then on August 7^th, singer-songwriter David Byrne – one-time vocalist and guitarist with legendary American new-wave band Talking Heads – performed at the Star to promote his 2025 solo album Who is the Sky? This gig didn’t begin well for me. When I bought my ticket via Ticketmaster, I got an email warning me not to try to enter the venue using a screenshot of it. I should have the ticket open in my Ticketmaster account, on my phone, ready for security staff to scan its QR code. Just before I set off for the Star, I discovered the link in the email was taking me not to the David Byrne ticket in my account, but to the Massive Attack one from 10 days earlier. This kept happening on my phone only. When I clicked the link on my computer, I was taken to the correct ticket. Finally, exasperated, I took a screenshot of the Byrne one on my computer and sent it to my phone, as proof I’d at least bought the ticket.

When I explained the problem to the ladies at the Ticketmaster table outside the Theatre entrance, they told me to use the screenshot on my phone.

“But your instructions said…”

“Just use it!”

The security lady looked at me tetchily when I presented the screenshot, but she scanned its QR code and it was accepted. I was in.

I wasn’t only me suffering technical difficulties. The gig was scheduled to start at eight o’clock but nothing happened onstage for another half-hour – except for a few minutes when David Byrne himself walked into view. He explained that some glitches were delaying proceedings and, by way of apology, entertained us with some sightseeing photos he’d taken that day in Singapore. He did this with much enthusiasm. His photos appeared on big screens above him and included one taken at Singapore’s marvellous Haw Par Villa, where you can stroll through a giant diorama depicting the 10 Courts of Hell from Chinese and Buddhist mythology. That photo depicted sinners impaled bloodily on a ‘hill of knives’, which Byrne cheerfully informed us was the afterlife punishment awaiting people who charge too much interest on loans. You know, bankers.

Byrne came across as someone with genuine interest in the places he travelled to and his good humour was greatly engaging. I’d always thought he was decent, but after this episode I decided he was an absolutely top bloke.

During the delay I’d observed how the stage was empty. It contained no instruments or equipment. When the gig finally started, I understood why. After the opening number, a static rendition of the 1979 Talking Heads song Heaven, which Byrne sang accompanied by two musicians playing a violin and portable keyboard (while the earth rose majestically through space on the screens behind), the show really became a show – a dance one as well as a musical one.

For each song, Byrne and eleven blue-clad co-performers went through a set of choreographed moves. Six of the eleven were dancers and background singers. The other five were musicians, carrying their instruments with them – guitars and keyboards, drums such as a tom-tom, timbale, snare drum and marching bass drum, and, when the song required, a violin or saxophone. The musicians especially impressed me, keeping focused on where they were going as well as on what they were playing. Meanwhile, the screens conjured up various backdrops: American suburbia, a forest, a skyscape, psychedelic patterns, a disorientating video where the same performers followed the same moves they were currently doing onstage but wearing animal-heads.

It felt part Broadway musical, part cheerleader routine, part circus (with Byrne as the ringmaster), part parade by a marching band. Byrne even reminded me at times of Willy Wonka, orchestrating his co-performers like Oompa Loompas. (I have to say, though, that with his blonde hair and cheery demeanour, Byrne looked more like Peter Isherwell, the sinister, ultimately incompetent billionaire played by Mark Rylance in the 2021 end-of-the-world movie Don’t Look Up.) It’s also pretty astonishing how Byrne can do all this, seemingly effortlessly, at the age of 74.

With a plethora of drums, the music was percussion-heavy, which suited the catchy rhythms of Byrne’s solo songs perfectly. I wondered if his Talking Heads songs would come across as well, but they did. Several (including 1985’s And She Was) were performed during the first half of the set, before the focus switched to his solo stuff. Then, near the end, out came the biggest Talking Heads numbers: Psycho Killer (1977), Life During Wartime (1979), Once in a Lifetime (1981) and Burning Down the House (1983). Psycho Killer got the biggest reaction from the crowd, who inevitably chanted “Fa-fa-faa-fa-fa, fa-fa-faa-fa-fa!” in unison. But I think it’s Once in a Lifetime that’s my favourite in Byrne’s oeuvre. I remember first hearing it on Top of the Pops (1964-2006) when I was 16 and thinking it was bloody weird. A week later, when I heard it again, I was hooked.

Anyway, this was a wonderful concert too. Maybe not quite a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but not far off one.

April 30, 2026May 19, 2026

Films I’d like to see remade (Part 1)

From imdb.com / © Rank Organisation

I still find it disconcerting when films I enjoyed in my youth are remade in the 21^st century: for example, 1980’s The Fog (remade in 2005), 1981’s The Evil Dead (remade in 2013) and Clash of the Titans (remade in 2010), 1986’s The Hitcher (remade in 2007), 1987’s Robocop (remade in 2014) and 1988’s Hairspray (remade in 2007). My immediate and automatic response to such remakes is, “What, they’re remaking that movie already? Have you no shame, Hollywood?”

This is followed by a feeling of horror as I realise just how long ago it was when those original movies were released. The first Evil Dead movie was 32 years old – 32 years! – when its remake surfaced, though in my mind it was only yesterday when Sam Raimi’s Deadites made their first-ever appearance and started making life difficult for Bruce Campbell. And actually, three of the films I remember most fondly from my youth, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) were remakes themselves. Body Snatchers appeared just 22 years after the 1956 original and The Thing appeared 32 years after its 1950 one. Scarface was an outlier, since the first Scarface came out in 1932, more than a half-century earlier.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so concerned about how soon after the original movie that a remake appears. I should be concerned about the quality of it – for remakes tend to be shite. I haven’t seen all those mentioned at the beginning of this entry, but the ones I have seen have been nowhere near as good as the originals. (The Evil Dead remake probably comes closest, but I still much prefer the ramshackle and low-budget, but resourceful, charm of Raimi’s 1981 film.) That said, remakes don’t have to be bad all the time – the aforementioned ones by Kaufman, Carpenter and De Palma testify to that.

So, without further ado, here are some films – and one series of films – I wouldn’t mind seeing remade in the 21^st century, with bigger budgets and better special effects. But remade decently.

From wikipedia.org / © Rank Organisation

Hell Drivers (1957)

Blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951, American director Cy Endfield moved to Britain where, half-a-dozen years later, he made Hell Drivers. Given the persecution Endfield had suffered, it unsurprisingly takes a dim view of American-style, cut-throat capitalism. It has that underrated but magnificent actor Stanley Baker as an ex-con who finds a job as a truck driver with a dodgy haulage company, which threatens its drivers with the sack if they don’t deliver loads of gravel across treacherous roads at breakneck speeds. The reason there aren’t more drivers employed to relieve the pressure, and reduce the danger, is because of a scam involving the local depot manager (William Hartnell) and its off-his-head Irish foreman (Patrick McGoohan, coming across like a brawnier version of Shane MacGowan). The latter soon becomes Baker’s nemesis.

As well as a political message, Endfield injects Hell Drivers with an American-style grittiness rarely seen in British films of the period. But what really makes the film a joy to watch nowadays is the cast. As Kim Newman has written of it in Empire Magazine, “how many other movies have an ensemble which includes the original Dr Who (Hartnell), the first James Bond (Sean Connery), the Prisoner (McGoohan), a Man From UNCLE (David McCallum), a Professional (Gordon Jackson), Clouseau’s boss (Herbert Lom), plus Alfie Bass, the excellent Peggy Cummins (of the cult items Gun Crazy and Night of the Demon), the inimitably boozy Wilfrid Lawson, Jill Ireland and Sid James?”

In 2026, with capitalism more cut-throat than ever, a remake of Hell Drivers would be timely. I don’t think, though, setting it in the wilds of Middlesex, West Sussex and Buckinghamshire, where the original was filmed, would work now, so it’d have to have its hard-pressed truck drivers pounding the roads of a less hospitable locale – the Alaskan tundra, say, or somewhere that retains some near-impenetrable tropical rainforest.

And to pay proper homage to the original, you’d definitely need a cast made up of actors who’ve played iconic roles in iconic TV shows or movie series. You could have one of the grittier Bonds (Daniel Craig or Timothy Dalton), one of the grittier Doctors Who (Christopher Eccleston or Peter Capaldi), plus a Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch, maybe), a Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), perhaps someone from the Breaking Bad universe (Bryan Cranston, say, or Bob Odenkirk)… The possibilities are endless.

From wikipedia.org

The Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies (1961-64)

This is a little different. I’d like to see the four movies made about Agatha Christie’s genteel sleuth of a certain age, Miss Marple, which had the delightful Margaret Rutherford in the leading role – Murder She Said (1961), Murder at the Gallop (1963), Murder Most Foul (1964) and Murder Ahoy! (1964) – rebooted as a TV show. Not just another show about Miss Marple per se – there have been ones with Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie – but one set in the universe of the four Rutherford movies.

Thus, its episodes would be set against the tableau of early-1960s England, with Miss Marple depicted as an obstinate, feisty old lady who refuses to know her place and keeps barging into and solving mysteries. There’d be as much as humour as tension and the show would have the films’ supporting characters, like the timid librarian Mr Stringer (Rutherford’s real-life husband Stringer Davis), who reluctantly helps Miss Marple out, and the exasperated copper Inspector Craddock (Charles Tingwell), who begins each instalment telling her to mind her own business but ends it taking orders from her. Meanwhile, Ron Goodwin’s jaunty Miss Marple Theme would burble in the background.

I suspect in a 2026 version Mark Gatiss would make a lovely Mr Stringer, while Daniel Mays would nicely fill the shoes of the long-suffering Inspector Craddock. But who would play Miss Marple – or more precisely, play Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple? Perhaps Dawn French, though she’d have to spend a long time in the make-up chair to recreate Rutherford’s famously jowly, hangdog features.

In the original movies, each murder that Rutherford / Marple investigated involved a British institution – a country manor, horse riding, the theatre and the Navy. She’d duly rattle establishment cages by sticking her nose in where it wasn’t welcome. So perhaps each episode of this hypothetical series would have her ruffling the feathers of other British institutions of the time – the Army, the House of Lords, Savile Row, Crufts, the country’s nascent rock ‘n’ roll industry… Miss Marple meets the young Rolling Stones? I’d pay good money to see that.

From wikipedia.org / © 20^th Century Fox

Von Ryan’s Express (1965)

I never had much time for Frank Sinatra, neither as an entertainer nor as a person, but he left an impression on my 10-year-old self the first time I saw the ripping World War II yarn Von Ryan’s Express. It’s the story of an American airman, Ryan (Sinatra), downed in Italy, who joins forces with some Allied prisoners of war, led by Trevor Howard. They attempt an audacious escape into neutral Switzerland by seizing control of a train and steering it up a railway line into the Alps. Much derring-do is involved as German troops and aircraft go all-out to stop them reaching their destination.

It’s great, crowd-pleasing stuff until the ending – spoilers are coming! – which is depicted on the movie poster, painted by the great Frank McCarthy. The train has almost made it to safety. Having fought a rearguard action against the Germans, Sinatra is running after the train and has almost caught up with it. But then…. What happened next put a dampener on things. But it also lodged the film in my mind forever.

With 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino showed his love for rip-roaring if cheesily improbable World War II adventures, so perhaps he could helm a remake of Von Ryan’s Express? To stick to the innocent, uncomplicated spirit of the original, though, he’d have to forgo his use of the F-word and N-word, and his fetish for close-ups of ladies’ feet, and his nerdish references to ‘film-study criticism of the work of German director G.W. Pabst’.

© Hammer Film Productions / Seven Arts Productions

Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

Hammer Films’ sci-fi horror film Quatermass and the Pit was based on the 1958 BBC TV serial of the same name. Both film and serial were written by Nigel Kneale. It begins with workers on a London Underground extension project digging up an alien spacecraft full of dead, horned, insect-like creatures that are identified by scientist-hero Professor Bernard Quatermass (Andrew Keir) as inhabitants of the now-lifeless planet Mars. It transpires that millions of years ago, these sneaky Martians arrived on earth and did some evolutionary tinkering on the apes who were the ancestors of modern humanity. This tinkering included implanting in the apes an urge to conduct occasional culls whereby those with pure Martian programming exterminated those who’d developed mutations and lost that programming.

When some TV news crews descend on the scene, a power surge from their camera-cables reactivates the spacecraft and it triggers a new cull. London becomes an apocalyptic hellscape where the human inhabitants who retain their Martian conditioning roam around, zombie-like, and use newly awoken telekinetic powers to kill everyone who’s lost it.

I still find Quatermass and the Pit impressive today, and scary, though inevitably there are special effects that reflect the limitations of Hammer’s budget. I’d relish the prospect of a modern, big-budget retelling of the story.

One thing that makes the film effective, and affecting, is Kneale’s portrayal of the scientists. Unlike usual movie-scientists, they aren’t cold-blooded, delusional, self-serving or plain weird. Instead, Quatermass and his colleagues, Dr Roney (James Donald) and Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley), are portrayed as decent human beings, working with an eager curiosity, a sense of duty and a sense of humour. Keir and Donald were both Scots, so maybe a modern movie could cast Brian Cox as Quatermass and James McAvoy as Dr Roney. Actually, I think a third Scottish actor, Karen Gillan, would be excellent as Barbara Judd.

To be continued…

May 28, 2022June 16, 2022

In the multiverse of Sam-ness

Though I’ve enjoyed some of the films produced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) in recent years, and though I was a big fan in my youth of the Marvel comics that inspired those films, until now I’ve not been tempted into a cinema to watch one of them. Usually, I’ve caught up with them courtesy of DVDs, streaming services or some airline’s in-flight entertainment system and seen them on a smaller screen. However, the other day, for the first time, I actually got off my backside, left the comfort of my apartment, made my way to the nearest cinema and bought a ticket to see the latest MCU offering, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).

There were two reasons for this. First, it’s Doctor Strange. And secondly, the film’s directed by Sam Raimi.

In the 1970s, when I was a kid and read any Marvel comic I could lay my hands on, I loved Spiderman, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men and the rest, but Doctor Strange seemed something else. The artwork by artists like Frank Brunner and Gene Colan was fascinatingly weird and psychedelic. The fact that the LSD-fuelled Summer of Love loomed large in recent memory might have had something to do with this. Also, the strip’s premise, whereby Doctor Steven Strange spent his time battling not science-fictional superpowered villains or alien beings but demons, sorcerers and other supernatural agents, gave the comic a special thrill. At the time I was living in Northern Ireland, which was heavily populated with hard-line, Bible-thumping, Christian nutjobs. To them even something as anodyne as the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) was an unspeakable act of blasphemy and a portent of the coming End of Days. Thus, reading a comic strip choc-a-bloc with demons, black magic and occult imagery felt, in that environment, to a nine-year-old kid, like forbidden fruit indeed.

Meanwhile, I’ve been a big fan of Sam Raimi’s work since seeing his horror-comedy movie Evil Dead II in an Aberdeen cinema in 1987. I found Evil Dead II a brilliant mixture of crude, lowbrow slapstick – evidenced by the moment where a female character swallows an eyeball flying from an exploding head – and knowing, highbrow humour – evidenced by the scene where the hero, the ever-beleaguered Ash (played by Raimi’s long-time acting collaborator Bruce Campbell), chainsaws off his own demonically-possessed hand, then traps the severed appendage under a bucket and weighs the bucket down with a hardbacked edition of Ernest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Raimi’s kinetic directing style and love of violent chaos seemed to owe as much to comic books as to anything in the cinema that’d come before him (though he was a big fan of the Columbia Pictures comedy team the Three Stooges). So, it wasn’t altogether a surprise when he directed the first big cinematic comic-book adaptation of the 21^st century, the Spiderman trilogy (2002-07) with Tobey Maguire. Mind you, Raimi had already made a superhero movie, the overlooked but fascinatingly scuzzy Darkman (1990) with Liam Neeson.

Supposedly, Raimi was disappointed by the critical reaction to his third Spiderman film and decided not to make another superhero one, but couldn’t resist the invitation to direct this, the second outing for Doctor Strange – the first was released in 2016. And when Raimi lets his imagination loose on such comic-book material, which had already been pretty out-there, the results are wonderful.

The basic plotline helps too. Doctor Strange, played by the impeccably caped and goatee-ed Benedict Cumberbatch, encounters a young girl (Xochiti Gomez) with the power to travel from one universe to another. Some universes are similar to ours but with a few discombobulating alterations, while others are bizarrely and surreally different. There’s a malevolent force in pursuit of the girl, wanting to drain her of this power, and before long she and Strange are barrelling from one universe to the next with a super-villain hot on their heels. Raimi has a field-day orchestrating the backdrops to their adventures, presenting us with universes that range from one resembling Salvador Dali in a hypothetical gothic phase to one resembling a topsy-turvy Jurassic Park to one where everything comes apart like a collapsing Rubik’s cube. There’s even a gloopy universe where everything is made of paint.

Equally, Raimi is allowed to let his horror sensibilities off the leash, which makes this easily the most macabre movie to come out of the MCU. That said, with Ray Harryhausen-style lumbering trolls and flying ghouls, a partly decayed but nice zombie, and several deaths that are gruesome in a determinedly bloodless way, I doubt if this will induce nightmares in anyone over the age of ten. Actually, as I watched Doctor Strange and his new young friend rush through portals in the fabric of reality, from one universe to another, I was reminded of the climax of Evil Dead II when Bruce Campbell’s Ash gets sucked through a portal, conjured up by black magic, and is thrown back in time to medieval Europe. This sets things up for the third and final film in the series, Army of Darkness (1992), which was also full of Ray Harryhausen-style creations. (I saw Army of Darkness in a cinema too, this time when I was living in the Japanese city of Sapporo. The Japanese, picking up on the fact that Ash, when he wasn’t fighting demonically-possessed zombies, worked in a rather shit-sounding hardware store – “Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart! Got that?” – retitled the movie Captain Supermarket.)

Thus, I liked the parts of the movie that show Raimi’s creative stamp, and I liked the parts that share DNA with the original Doctor Strange comic strip… But I could have done without the references to the rest of the MCU. And you get a lot of those. There are call-backs to the last two Avengers films, to the last Spiderman one, and to the Marvel TV series WandaVision (2021). Also, the cast features not only Doctor Strange regulars like Chiwitel Ejiofor’s Mordo and Benedict Wong’s splendidly imperturbable Wong, but also, later, a bunch of characters from the wider Marvel gestalt.

This didn’t mean there was an unnecessarily complicated MCU backstory that made it hard to follow what was going on – I had a working knowledge of the characters from the old comics, rather than the more recent movies, and I managed fine. It’s just that I prefer Doctor Strange, inhabiting his own little world where magic, the supernatural, the occult, demons, ghosts, etc., are realities, to be separate from the more conventional, sci-fi-style super-heroism of the rest of the Marvel canon. That was something that spoiled the first Doctor Strange movie for me too. You can imagine how peeved I was when Chris Hemsworth’s Thor turned up in its end-credits scene.

And I don’t recall the original Doctor Strange comics having much to do with the other Marvel superheroes, though perhaps I just missed reading the ones that did. I do remember, though, Strange having a crossover adventure in which he encounters Dracula, who was also a Marvel character at the time, courtesy of the comics Tomb of Dracula (1972-79) in the USA and Dracula Lives (1974-76) in the UK.

Admittedly, in this new Doctor Strange movie, I enjoyed the presence of Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch character, who in the MCU has chiefly been seen in the Avengers movies and the WandaVision TV show. I knew the Scarlet Witch from the comics of my childhood too and had always found her an enigma, never sure if she was a good ‘un or a bad ’un. One moment she’d be a henchwoman of the villainous Magneto, nemesis of Doctor Xavier in the X-Men; but the next moment, she’d appear as a member of the Avengers and suddenly be a good guy. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, this moral ambiguity is also evident – though you can probably predict which side, the dark one or light one, she ends up succumbing to. But even at the character’s worst, Olsen makes her a believable and even beguiling character. As she tells Strange, “You break the rules and become a hero. I do it and become the enemy. That doesn’t seem fair.”

To sum up: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is at its best when it’s being Sam Raimi-esque and Doctor Strange-esque. it’s not so marvellous when it’s being Marvel-esque. Incidentally, my happiest moment came when Bruce Campbell appears in a cameo as a belligerent git. Subjected to a spell cast by Strange, and in the great tradition of Evil Dead II, he starts inflicting slapstick violence against his own face. Well, what more can you want from a film?