Jeff Goldblum – Blood and Porridge

October 13, 2026October 13, 2026

More things that terrified the young me

From wikipedia.org / © Group Three Productions

Here’s the second half of my account of things that scared me, to the point of scarring me, when I was wee.

Space: 1999 – Dragon’s Domain (1975)

Even as a kid, I knew the TV show Space: 1999 was silly. I already had enough awareness of science to realise the ridiculousness of its premise – a titanic explosion on the moon in the then-future year of 1999 sends it, and 300 human beings crewing a base there called Moonbase Alpha, careering out of earth’s orbit and into deep space. Particularly ridiculous was how every second episode the moon hurtled into a new solar system and came close enough to an earth-type planet for the Moonbase Alpha folk to explore it. Space: 1999 depicted the universe as a giant pinball machine with the moon bouncing between earth-type planets like the silver ball bouncing between the machine’s flippers and bumpers.

And yet… A Space: 1999 episode called Dragon’s Domain petrified me. It has the runaway moon approaching a sinister graveyard of abandoned spaceships in which a horrifying, one-eyed, tentacled monstrosity lurks. Okay, seen today, the monster in Dragon’s Domain doesn’t impress, being a mass of wavy tentacles obviously animated by wires. But the barrage of things that accompany it still inspire fear – it initially materialises as a swirling pattern of lights, it makes hideous shrieking noises and its victims are battered by gusts of wind. Most horribly, moments after those victims are dragged into its maw, they’re spat out again as desiccated corpses, apparently drained of all their moisture.

There’s something about the episode’s ineluctability that got me too. It focuses on a Moonbase Alpha member (Gianni Garko) who’s encountered the monster before. While he was captaining a mission into deep space, it ate his crew and only he managed to escape. Now stuck on the moon after its unexpected departure from earth’s orbit, fate has cruelly decreed that he’ll meet the thing again.

The pictures in The Horrific World of Monsters (1974)

I might have been terrified by monsters like that Space: 1999 one, but I was also fascinated by them and in the mid-1970s I bought a hardcover, kids-orientated book called The Horrific World of Monsters by Dulan Barber. This provided an A-Z of monsters from myth, folklore, cryptozoology, movies, TV and comics.

© Marshall Cavendish

Lavishly illustrated, a couple of the book’s page-sized movie-stills troubled me, lodged themselves in my psyche and occasionally caused me nightmares. These depicted the mummy, played by Lon Chaney Jr in 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost, throttling a victim; a fanged, hairy Michael Landon pouncing on a victim in I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); and, in unflinching close-up, the title character of The Return of the Fly (1959), the second film in the series about a scientist experimenting with a teleportation device who gets his molecules mixed up with those of a fly and acquires a massive, insectile head. Just as well it wasn’t a close-up of Jeff Goldblum from late in David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly. That sight would have left me gibbering.

Eventually, I sold the book to a schoolmate called Geoff Simmons, who was a gifted artist and who used some of its illustrations as inspiration for pictures – I remember him showing me one he’d drawn based on the mummy. Geoff is now a graphic designer (and also a community historian) in London. I’d like to think The Horrific World of Monsters played a small part in shaping his future career.

Bodega Bay gets attacked in The Birds (1963)

By the mid-1970s, someone had informed me that the Americans and Russians both had ‘bombs that could blow up the world’, so I had a new thing to worry about – the end of humanity. Accordingly, apocalyptic movies frightened the bejesus out of me. For example, Steve Sekely’s Day of the Triffids (1963), a cheap adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel, scared me with its depiction of a world where nearly everyone has gone blind. Even at 10 years old, unfortunately, I could tell how shoddy its special effects were, especially the ones involving the triffids.

But the apocalyptic movie that traumatised me was 1963’s The Birds, directed by the impeccable Alfred Hitchcock and based on a 1952 short story by the equally impeccable Daphne du Maurier. Most traumatic for me was the part where Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor find themselves in a diner in the middle of the little coastal town of Bodega Bay, trying to convince the locals – who react with varying degrees of scepticism – that the area’s feathered population is behaving very strangely. After seven minutes of conversation that mingles humour with growing unease, and is brilliantly performed by character actors like Doreen Lang (as an increasingly frightened mother), Charles McGraw (as a gruff fisherman), Ethel Griffies (as an elderly, know-all ornithologist) and Karl Swenson (as a Bible-quoting Irish drunkard), all hell breaks loose.

Multitudinous seagulls swoop down and cars and petrol pumps explode (thanks to fuel spewing from a dropped hose), more cars crash, horses run wild and many townspeople get clawed and pecked. Hedren spends a nightmarish minute trapped inside a telephone booth with birds, plus one unlucky human victim, smashing into its sides. Taylor rescues her and gets her into the diner again, but… The atmosphere there is suddenly less welcoming.

From wikipedia.com / © Universal Pictures

Hitchcock’s orchestration of this blew me away. The telephone-booth bit was possibly the first time I’d been exposed to what film-fans would describe as ‘pure cinema’. But Taylor and Hedren’s return to the diner provides the chilling coup de grâce. The people inside are cowering in terror, including Griffies’s no-longer-cocky ornithologist, and already a superstitious irrationality is taking hold of them. This crystalises when a now-crazed Lang accuses Hedren of, basically, being a witch: “Who are you?” What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil. Evil!” No doubt a young Stephen King was taking notes at this point. Similar things happen in his 1980 novella The Mist, with many of its characters reacting to another apocalyptic event by succumbing to medieval-style hysteria.

Doctor Who – The Seeds of Doom, episode 4 (1976)

I could write a whole article based only on moments from the BBC’s long running science-fiction / fantasy / horror series Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-25) that scared me: the shop dummies coming to life in the serial Spearhead from Space (1970); the killer plastic chair in Terror of the Autons (1971); the murderous Morris dancers in The Daemons (1971); a scaly hand appearing over a boat’s gunwale in The Sea Devils (1972); an infected crewman removing his hand from his pocket and revealing it transformed into a slab of glistening green slime (okay, it’s really green-painted bubble-wrap, but hardly anyone at the time knew what bubble-wrap was) in The Ark in Space (1975)… But scariest of all was the 1976 serial The Seeds of Doom, about alien seed-pods that infect humans and transform them into malevolent, carnivorous plant-monsters. Episode 4 of The Seeds of Doom, to be precise.

One alien pod becomes the possession of an insane millionaire plant-lover called Harrison Chase – played by character actor Tony Beckley, who’d been in The Italian Job (1969) and Get Carter (1971) – and at the start of episode 4 it germinates, infecting one of Chase’s minions, a hapless botanist called Arnold Keeler (Mark Jones). Ignoring Keeler’s pleas to be taken to a hospital, Chase has him chained to a bed, purring in delight, “The rate of increase is astonishing… Protein absorption from the animal, of course… We shall have to give you some food soon… You’re changing into a plant, Keeler… a marvellous new species of plant!”

© BBC

With Keeler turning green, then fibrous, then tentacular, and Chase trying to speed up the metamorphosis by feeding him pieces of raw meat, what I was witnessing here was the icky sub-genre of horror known as ‘body horror’. But it was the performances of Beckley and Jones, one disturbingly malevolent, the other distressingly pathetic, that truly conveyed the horribleness of the situation.

Legend Horror Classics, issue 4 (1976)

The same impulse that made me buy The Horrific World of Monsters inspired me to purchase issue 4 of a British film magazine called Legend Horror Classics, edited by Gent Shaw, who’d also edited the scary-movie magazine World of Horror in 1974-75. Issue 4 of Legend Horror Classics was devoted to zombies, which until then I’d understood to be dead people brought back to life by voodoo and put to work on Caribbean sugar plantations. By the 1970s, however, thanks to the influence of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombie stories and films had become less voodoo-reliant and a lot grislier and more visceral. This issue contained several gruesome photos that, like those in the Monsters book, gave me nightmares.

However… Since then, I’ve discovered, indignantly, that the yuckiest pictures in the issue weren’t actually from zombie movies! There was one of the mouldering, prehistoric ape-creature inhabited by an evil alien intelligence in the Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing horror film Horror Express (1972); and one of a rotting corpse (not reanimated as a zombie) from another 1972 movie featuring Christopher Lee, Deathline. If you’re reading this, Gent Shaw, I’m accusing you of breaking the Trade Descriptions Act.

© Legend Publishing

The Nationwide report about the Hexham Heads (1976)

The Hexham heads were two little stone heads, possibly Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971. Reputedly, the heads triggered paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them. And that paranormal activity manifested itself spectacularly in the form of a werewolf that was glimpsed stalking through their homes after dark.

Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – normally a family-friendly TV current-affairs programme, which aired on the BBC every weekday evening after six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976. The makers of the report had the not-so-family-friendly idea of spicing it up with ghastly screams, images of severed human heads and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed lurching towards the camera in 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf. This approach traumatised every kid who happened to be watching, me included.

One eyewitness reported seeing the Hexham Heads werewolf after arriving home late at night – allegedly she spotted it prowling about her dark house before she switched on the lights. Soon afterwards, my family moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland. My parents frequently received invitations to Sunday lunch and dinner at the homes of Northern Irish folk they knew directly, or knew as friends of friends, who were now living in Scotland. After much food, whisky and blethering, we wouldn’t get home until late on Sunday evening. While my parents unlocked the front door and we entered a black, silent house, I’d think of the Nationwide report and wonder, “What if there’s a werewolf waiting in there?”

From wikipedia.org / © Archaeology Data Service / Dr Anne Ross

Footage of that legendary 1976 TV report on the Hexham Heads was long believed lost but it’s now been discovered and restored – see here and here.

Jon Voight’s dream at the end of Deliverance (1972)

By the time I was 12, I believed I was a mature, hardened type who’d seen everything and couldn’t be frightened anymore. But then on TV one evening I watched John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), about four Atlanta business men whose canoeing holiday in remote north Georgia turns into an ordeal, and was freaked out by it.

Oddly, it wasn’t the notorious sequence where some hillbillies rape Ned Beatty’s character and insist that he squeals ‘like a pig’ that upset me most. Maybe I wasn’t old enough to fully understand what was happening. No, it was the bit near the end where Jon Voigt’s character has a nightmare about the river they canoed on – which has since been dammed and turned into a lake – and sees a pale, bloated hand rising out of its water. The image of that emerging hand haunted me for weeks afterwards. I obviously wasn’t as tough as I thought I was.

© Elmer Enterprises / Warner Bros.

Thinking about it, I suppose I must have been a complete scaredy-cat whose childhood was one long procession of moments of terror. So now, half-a-century later, why do I write short horror stories under the penname of Jim Mountfield? I’ve had nearly 70 such stories published.

Perhaps it’s a case of ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em.”

July 23, 2026July 23, 2026

Uncle Sam (Part 2)

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

Continuing my tribute to the great New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who died on July 13^th…

Sam Neill got top billing alongside Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the highest-grossing movie of all time until James Cameron’s Titanic was released four years later. While it was gratifying that Neill’s career get a boost from his involvement in such a blockbuster, I have to say I’m not a great fan of it. That’s probably because prior to seeing the film, I read the book it’s based upon, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), wherein the story and characters are darker, more complex and more interesting than Spielberg’s interpretation of them.

As Alan Grant, a palaeontologist asked to assess the titular theme park where, it’s planned, visitors will pay good money to gawk at dinosaurs that’ve been cloned back into life using bits of ancient DNA, Neill is inevitably – and literally – dwarfed by his co-stars, the dinosaurs that Spielberg’s special-effects team, headed Stan Winston, created using then-cutting-edge animatronics and computer-generated imagery. Still, he invests Grant with enough quirks to make him memorable.

He’s sometimes curmudgeonly and not fond of children, even ones who like dinosaurs – see how he spooks one youngster with an account of how velociraptors killed their prey, or how he freaks out the grandchildren of park-owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) by pretending to get fried by an electric fence. Paradoxically, he can be child-like himself. When he first sees one of Hammond’s dinosaurs, his wonderment leaves him struggling for words and he almost faints. And he shows juvenile delight when he encounters a triceratops, which he hails as “my favourite when I was a kid… the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” (When I was a kid, the triceratops was my favourite dinosaur too.)

When Jurassic Park received a royal premiere in London, Neill found himself sitting between his 10-year-old son and Princess Diana. According to Neill, his son got so worked up at the film’s scary bits that he started farting uncontrollably, and Neill became paranoid about what his royal neighbour would think when she smelled the fumes: “Princess Di is being exposed to the horrors of a little boy’s fart, but she’s going to think it’s me. I am going to be subliminally blamed for my son’s crimes, and I don’t think she’ll talk to me afterwards.” However, gallantly, the princess did speak to him later and ‘never mentioned’ the flatulence. Jeff Goldlum commented drolly on Neill’s anecdote: “I’ve heard him tell that a couple of times and it’s just amazing the lengths that he will go to still blame the boy.”

Neill played Grant twice more, in the second sequel Jurassic Park III (2003), which I saw on TV and found pretty inconsequential; and the fifth one, Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which got lousy reviews and which I’m in no rush to see.

© Miramax / Buena Vista international / Jan Chapman Productions

As well as being in 1993’s biggest blockbuster, Neill was in the same year’s biggest arthouse movie, Jane Campion’s The Piano. He plays Alisdair Stewart, a settler in 19^th century New Zealand who, via an arranged marriage, suddenly acquires a wife, the mute Ada (Holly Hunter). He also acquires a piano, the playing of which is Ada’s only opportunity to express herself. Predictably, Alister and Ada don’t enjoy a happy marriage and the piano is the catalyst for trouble. It becomes the means by which Ada, unable to tolerate Alisdair’s sexual advances, instead discovers sensuality with a neighbouring settler, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), under the pretext of giving him piano lessons.

While Keitel’s character first seems weird and brutish, but gradually shows himself capable of tenderness and decency, Neill’s goes the other way – we initially have some sympathy for Alisdair, but he becomes a villain who propels the plot towards its climax of mutilation and attempted suicide (though, ultimately, it ends happily). In his 2023 autobiography, Did I Ever Tell You This: A Memoir, Neill wrote of the film, “I don’t think I can overestimate how important The Piano is for me in hindsight. It sits in my funny old CV like a medal on my chest. It wasn’t my film. It was Jane Campion’s. I wasn’t the star of the film. That was Holly Hunter. But there is honour to be found in the second fiddle. Or fourth. No one notices you much, you don’t get nominated for things. But you served. I was there in an important feminist film. I was there in the front line in an important New Zealand film.”

As many have noted, The Piano is an example of how Neill used his screen presence to generous effect. He didn’t hog the limelight but gave his co-stars space to perform to their full potential. This was especially so with his female co-stars. While Neill reined himself in a little, they got the chance to bloom in their roles – not only Holly Hunter in The Piano, but Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981), Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989), and reportedly – I’ve unfortunately never seen it – Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career (1979).

In 1995, Neill worked with cult American director John Carpenter and made the horror movie In the Mouth of Madness, which critics greeted unenthusiastically at the time but which, gradually, has been re-evaluated and is seen now as a misunderstood classic. It features Neill as an insurance investigator called John Trent, who’s hired by a publishing company to track down its missing star author (Jurgen Prochnow). The author’s name is Sutter Kane and though his initials, and massive sales, suggest he was inspired by Stephen King, his tales of cosmic horror and fearsome ancient beings called the ‘Old Ones’ indicate he’s based on the legendary Providence writer H.P. Lovecraft. Trent’s investigations bring him into ever-stranger situations where he encounters characters and settings from Kane’s fiction. It’s as if the writer is controlling what happens in reality – which is worrying, since his new novel concerns the end of the world.

© New Line Cinema

While I’m glad a movie involving Sam Neill, John Carpenter and H.P. Lovecraft has received some retrospective love, I’m afraid I agree with those unenthusiastic critics in 1995. Like many of Carpenter’s later movies, there’s just too much going on in In the Mouth of Madness and you get the impression the director’s throwing everything at the wall in the hope some of it sticks. That said, the movie has some memorable moments, such as a scene where Trent and a client discuss business in a restaurant, not noticing a mad axeman creating mayhem in the street outside their window. Carpenter also stages a spooky sequence wherein a night-time cyclist keeps inexplicably reappearing in front of a cruising car – and keeps changing.

I prefer an earlier Neill-Carpenter collaboration, Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), an adaptation of H.F. Saint’s 1987 novel of the same name, itself inspired by H.G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man (1897). It’s a somewhat awkward film – the tension between the studio, Warner Bros, who wanted an out-and-out comedy, and the star, Chevy Chase, who wanted to show he could do ‘serious acting’, is palpable – but nonetheless I think it’s underrated. I certainly enjoyed Memoirs of an Invisible Man more than director Carpenter did, who once said of it: “I really wanted to quit the business after that movie… I don’t want to talk about why, but let’s just say there were personalities on that film. He shall not be named who needs to be killed. No, no, no, that’s terrible. He needs to be set on fire… No, no, no. Anyway, it’s all fine. I survived it.” Presumably Carpenter was referring to Chase, who has a reputation for being, shall we say, difficult. Even an invisible Chevy Chase was too much for him.

Carpenter certainly didn’t mean Neill, who played the film’s slightly James Mason-like villain. “I love working with him,” the director said of Neill. “He comes prepared. He knows what he’s going to do. He reacts to other actors who are there. I mean, he’s just a dream come true.”

© Paramount Pictures / Golar Productions / Impact Pictures

Another horror movie Neill made in the 1990s, which initially got savaged by the critics but was retrospectively reassessed and lauded as a classic, is Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997). Set in 2047, it’s about an experimental spaceship that’d disappeared during its maiden voyage inexplicably reappearing years later with no sign of its crew. When a rescue mission, whose members include Neill, investigate, it becomes clear the ship’s hyperdrive system accidentally sent it into another dimension – a dimension known to religious folk as ‘hell’ – and back. And it’s returned with something nasty on board.

Well, I’m sorry to be a misery-guts again, but I also agree with the 1997 reviews of Event Horizon and don’t see it as an unappreciated masterpiece. It strikes me as a muddled mixture of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), with that old chestnut of ‘characters being tormented by their innermost fears brought to life’ thrown in. To be fair to Paul W. S. Anderson, the studio, Paramount Pictures, removed much footage from his original edit, believing it was too gory and horrific, and the finished product was not what he and scriptwriter Philip Eisner had envisioned. Incidentally, as Neill’s character is Australian, he had him wear a uniform with an Australian flag-patch – but one where the Union-Jack part of it has been replaced by the Aboriginal flag. Neill hoped that by 2047 a more tolerant, Pauline Hanson-free Australia would better honour its indigenous inhabitants.

By the start of the 21^st century, and his sixth decade, Neill had become something of an institution and seemed the personification of the word ‘avuncular’. A good example of this is in the Australian movie The Dish (2000), a gentle comedy in which he plays the boss of an Australian radio telescope that, in 1969, is landed with the job of relaying film-footage from the Apollo 11 moon-mission to the eagerly-awaiting world’s TV screens. This isn’t easy for Neill and his team as, first, they suffer a crippling power cut and then, on July 20^th, the day of the landing, a violent storm threatens to blow their dish over. Neill is reassuringly calm and reasonable throughout. Thinking about the film now, I can’t recall any moment in it where he didn’t seem to be wearing a cardigan or puffing at a pipe.

© Madman Films / Piki Films / Defender Films

He’s somewhat less avuncular, but still loveable, in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). He plays Hector, a grumpy old misfit who takes to the New Zealand mountains with his chubby, juvenile-delinquent foster-kid Ricky (Julian Dennison) when the latter panics about being returned to state care. They soon have police, social services, vigilantes and the media after them. Along the way they encounter hardship, killer wild boars and a literally tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic called Psycho Sam (Rhys Darby) but also form a genuine, father-son bond. Director Taiki Waititi creates an affecting and funny movie but avoids easy laughs and cloying sentimentality. Neill and Dennison’s characters take some hard knocks and their happy ending is hard won.

During the 21^st century Neill also became a fixture on television – appearing in shows like The Tudors (2007), Crusoe (2008-9), Happy Town (2010), Alcatraz (2012), Peaky Blinders (2013-14), Old School (2014), Tutankhamun (2016), The Twelve (2022-25) and Apples Never Fall (2024) – and on social media, where he regularly posted updates about Two Paddocks, his beloved farm and vineyard in New Zealand’s Central Otago wine region. Famously, Neill named the animals on his farm after celebrities he knew in showbusiness, supposedly because it made him less inclined to eat them: “Well, you can’t eat a friend… I’m not a vegetarian, but I have a ram called Jeff Goldblum. You wouldn’t want to eat Jeff, would you?”

This led to some memorable moments as, for example, Neill posted, “MICHAEL FASSBENDER ASSAULTED!” – his rooster, named after Michael Fassbender, had had his tail-feathers torn out by a rogue dog. Or a comment he made about Helena Bonham-Carter, one of his cows: “She’s had 16 calves now. She’s up for it, if nothing else.” Or a sad disclosure that Meryl Streep, a chicken, had been “…killed by a ferret recently.” During Covid-19, his gentle and good-humoured updates about his farm and its whimsically-named inhabitants was an antidote to the stress and boredom of lockdown. They certainly cheered me up more than, say , Gal Gadot and a bunch of her thespian pals crooning John Lennon’s Imagine on Instagram.

In a 2023 interview in the Guardian, Neill opined, “I’m not afraid to die but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses, and I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big… But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.” A lot of people would have loved to have got another decade or two of Sam Neill, and his acting talents, and his sense of fun. But we should be grateful for what we did get.

June 14, 2023July 18, 2023

Jurassic snark

As yet another grim reminder that time stops for no man or woman, and that I’m gradually de-evolving into a doddery, senile old git, I’ve just read in a newspaper that it is now, exactly, thirty years since the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the epic monster movie about dinosaurs being cloned from ancient bits of DNA to be put on display in a lavish theme park. It was based on a novel, published three years earlier, by Michael Crichton, and of course it led to a franchise of sequels and reboots that, despite being increasingly lame, generated billions of box-office dollars.

Wow! Thirty years? Was the original Jurassic Park movie really that long ago?

Anyway, readers, brace yourselves for a big shock. I thought the 1993 movie was pretty lame itself. Although a lot of people nowadays view the original Jurassic Park as a classic – here’s a hot-off-the-presses feature at the BBC website’s ‘Culture’ section praising it for how it ‘made scary movies accessible for young children’; and here’s another feature at the Guardian praising it for its prescient warnings about ‘self-styled geniuses’ who exploit new technology for their aggrandisement without thinking through the potential consequences – I found it a big let-down.

This was because I made the mistake of reading Crichton’s Jurassic Park-the-book before I went to see Spielberg’s Jurassic–Park-the-movie, and I felt miffed when what’d I’d visualised in my head during the book failed to materialise on the cinema screen. And before you read further, here’s a spoiler alert. This entry will give away a lot about the plots of both the book and the film.

Three decades ago, I certainly had high hopes for the film. Firstly, with Spielberg at the helm and a ton of Hollywood money behind it, Jurassic Park looked like being a very rare beast, a dinosaur movie with proper dinosaurs in it. I’ve always loved the idea of dinosaur movies, but apart from those ones where the prehistoric beasties were powered by stop-motion animation – like the silent-movie version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1925) and the original King Kong (1933), whose dinosaurs were animated by Willis O’Brien, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), One Million Years BC (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969), whose special effects were the work of the late, great Ray Harryhausen – dinosaur movies before 1993 had contained dinosaurs that looked, frankly, rubbish.

I’m thinking of ones where the dinosaurs were plainly stuntmen lumbering about in rubbery dinosaur suits, like The Land Unknown (1957). Or magnified glove puppets, like The Land that Time Forgot (1974). Or unfortunate modern-day lizards who’d also been magnified and had had fake spikes, horns and fins glued onto them to make them look big and fierce. The worst offender in that last category is surely Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 remake of The Lost World, during which Claude Rains exclaimed at the sight of one supposed sauropod: “It’s a mighty brontosaurus!” While I was watching the film on TV, at the age of ten, I yelled back: “No, it’s not! It’s just a stupid iguana!”

The big-budget Jurassic Park was going to employ all the latest advances in animatronics and computer-generated imagery to get its dinosaurs right, so I wouldn’t have to worry about having my intelligence insulted by the spectacle of men in monster suits and overblown puppets and lizards.

Secondly, there was a buzz about Jurassic Park because it was rumoured that, for the first time in yonks, Spielberg was going to do something dark. He’d spent the past dozen years making movies with unbearably-high schmaltz levels: movies about cute aliens phoning home (1982’s ET), and ghostly pilots moping about their still-alive girlfriends (1989’s Always), and Robin Williams turning out to be Peter Pan (1991’s Hook). Once upon a time, though, he’d directed punchy, at times nightmarish films like Duel (1972) and Jaws (1975). Prior to Jurassic Park’s release, I was told by more than one film magazine to expect Spielberg to be back to his old schmaltz-free best. Supposedly, Jurassic Park was going to be like Jaws on dry land.

As for Michael Crichton’s original novel – well, it would never be mistaken for great literature but, reading it, I did think that with cutting-edge special effects and a skilful director it could make a hell of a movie. Many of its scenes seemed intensely cinematic. Actually, this wasn’t a surprise because Crichton himself had made films. Most notably, he’d wrote and directed 1973’s Westworld, which is about a futuristic theme park that allows its visitors to enact their most homicidal fantasies in mock-ups of the American Wild West, medieval Europe and Roman-era Pompeii. These are populated by scores of human-like robots whom it’s okay to shoot or hack or stab to death because they can’t actually die. Of course, a glitch in the system eventually compels the robots to start fighting back and then it’s the holiday-makers who get slaughtered. Westworld, in fact, is a prototype for Jurassic Park, with the same theme-park setting but with robots instead of dinosaurs as the exhibits-that-turn-nasty.

I knew Crichton’s novel would get trimmed as it was turned into a film, but I was dismayed at how much of it was trimmed. While Jaws shed a few gratuitous sub-plots that’d made its source novel, the 1974 bestseller by Peter Benchley, seem flabby, and it was a lean, muscular movie as a result, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was pared to the bone. In its final reel the park’s pack of deadly velociraptors have escaped from their compound, the surviving humans are running around trying to avoid being eaten by them, and that’s about it. The velociraptors rampage through the book’s final chapters too, but there are other matters adding to the suspense. It becomes clear that some velociraptors have managed to board the supply-ship that services the island where the park is located, and there’s a real danger that they’ll reach the American mainland and become an ultra-lethal invasive species. The humans are also on a desperate quest to count the hatched eggs in the velociraptors’ nests, so that they can calculate just how many of the scaly killers are on the loose.

Also simplified are the fates of the characters. The main characters, palaeontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and the billionaire mastermind behind the park, John Hammond, don’t all make it to the end of the book. Malcolm expires from injuries sustained from a dinosaur attack while Hammond dies after he hears the roar of a tyrannosaurus rex, panics and falls down a hillside. (Ironically, the roar comes from the park’s PA system – Hammond’s two young grandchildren have been mucking around in a control room with some dinosaur recordings.) Meanwhile, certain secondary characters, like the park’s lawyer Gennaro and its game warden Muldoon, survive the dino-carnage. Gennaro is even allowed to show a degree of courage, which is unusual for a fictional corporate lawyer.

In the movie, though, Grant, Sattler, Malcolm and Hammond are played by big-name stars – Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and veteran British actor / director Sir Richard Attenborough – who clearly had it in their contracts that none of them would suffer the indignity of being eaten by a dinosaur. So, they all survive. But because this is a monster movie, which demands that monsters eat people at regular intervals, the supporting characters are gradually bumped off, including Gennaro and Muldoon. This makes the plot very predictable. Interestingly, one supporting character who got killed in the book but made it out of the movie alive is the geneticist Henry Wu. Played by B.D. Wong, he’s ironically become the character with the most appearances in the Jurassic Park franchise – Wu’s now turned up in four of the movies.

Meanwhile, the casting of Attenborough symptomizes one of the film’s worst features. The cuddly, twinkly Attenborough, who one year later would play Santa Claus in a remake of Miracle on 34^th Street, is way nicer than the John Hammond of the book, who’s a callous, conniving and delusional arsehole. He should have been played by Christopher Lee or Donald Pleasence.

Spielberg couldn’t bring himself to be nasty to Hammond, whom he probably regarded as a kindred spirit. Hammond at his dinosaur theme park, like Spielberg in Hollywood, is merely trying to wow the masses by giving them spectacles they haven’t seen before. How could he be bad? Thus, we get a maudlin scene where Hammond explains his motives to Dern’s character by reminiscing about his first venture in the entertainment business – a flea circus. (Attenborough also gives Hammond the worst Scottish accent in movie history, so he tells Dern how he brought his wee flea circus “doon sooth frae Scotland” to London.) Look how big the fleas are in his circus now, Spielberg seems to tell us. What a visionary!

The softening of Hammond’s character infects the rest of the film. Though some of the velociraptor and tyrannosaurus-rex scenes are scary, it’s all a bit too feel-good. Spielberg wants us to be awed by the dinosaurs, not shit ourselves at them. John Williams’ musical score adds to the problem – his Jurassic Park theme, according to Billboard magazine, oozes with ‘astonishment, joy and wonder’; but since this is supposedly a sci-fi horror movie, shouldn’t it be oozing with some old-fashioned fear too?

But my biggest frustration about the film was that while Spielberg portrays Hammond as being like Walt Disney, the park isn’t like Disneyland – and it ought to be. In the novel Crichton wonderfully juxtaposes the primeval and the high-tech. There might be hordes of monstrous reptiles from earth’s distant past stumping around the wilds of Hammond’s island, but at the same time the place bristles with state-of-the-art sensors and cameras and is honeycombed with service tunnels crammed full of power-cables. At its centre is Hammond’s console-packed control room where he squats like a space-age spider in a technological web. The joy of the book is watching all this technology slowly, gradually start to malfunction and break down – until finally it’s useless. And meanwhile, the prehistoric stars of the show are clawing at the scenery, hungry to get at the humans who’ve been pulling the levers behind it.

You don’t really get this impression in the film. Attenborough’s control room looks a bit dingy, like he’s set it up in his garden shed. And the dinosaurs just seem to be out in big fields with big fences around them – nothing in the background but foliage, nothing underneath but soil. This Jurassic Park is more like Jurassic Farm.

No, while I sat through Jurassic Park in a cinema 22 years ago, I didn’t feel like I was watching a classic. The main thing I felt was a huge sense of disappointment – crushing me as effectively as if one of the behemoths onscreen had suddenly stepped out into the auditorium and trod on me. For the authentic Jurassic Park thrill-ride, check out Crichton’s book.