By Roy Mathur, on 2026-01-18, at 23:11:48 to 00:55:50 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
Happy Christmas, happy Boxing Day, happy New Year, happy Makar Sankranti (14th), and welcome to the first pod of the year. Huzzah! Not so huzzah is this is the second taping due to gremlins squeaking in my PC, but that gave me the time to include Mum's story of Dad's trousers and a couple more TV series.
Roy's Christmas: I ate too much chocolate on Christmas Eve, giving myself a stomach upset, slept through most of Christmas day, then ate the few delicious morsels of Christmas dinner I could stomach later that evening. On New Years Eve and New Years Day I watched The Amazing Mr. Blunden before midnight and Late Night with the Devil after, then the Stranger Things finale later over a dal puri dinner. Later in the holidays, I started on the Doctor Who Christmas Specials, but didn't quite finish. Never did I get to the Hartnell era audio reconstructions. Whovian or not, I hope your own festivities were brilliant, bearable, or at least you didn't get sick. I was supposed to pod days ago, but I'm recovering from two bouts of illness (second one coming up).
On the 6th, the freezer packed up. As well as the various extras companies gouge you with for recycling, delivery, installation, etc., we had an Argos delivery date spanning weeks, that was then delayed again due to stock shortage.
My monthly London walk (on the 10th), curtailed somewhat due to injury (X-ray semi-related to that on the 15th), still comprised of Google Fit: 8034 steps, 20 heart points, 5.16 km. Since I can't take taxis because an unfortunate number of local cabbies are absolute bellends (see last pod), I took an Uber to the station and my first Lime Scooter back home from the station leading to freezing hands and face in the subzero temperatures. Also, the rickety scooter was only fifty pence less than the earlier luxury Merc rideshare. Addendum: the cold knocked seven bells out of me and I'm still recovering, which means I had to cancel Saturday's (17th) scheduled cryptid expedition.
Until I could understand Rainmeter (sort of can now), I programmed a shell script clock. Call it a Christmas project, and to prove to myself I still have wizarding skills.
Resolutions: writing, reading, riding.
Long-running BBC kid's TV series, Postman Pat's (1981--2017) simple story, music, Ivor Wood's stop motion animation, and black and white cat are delightful, but so very wrong. His uniform looks like a vintage New York copper, His vehicles are wrong, and even the way he collects and delivers the post is wrong. It's as if the creator, John Cunliffe, knew bugger about the job.
S. Craig Zahler's 2015 film starring Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, and Matthew Fox as a posse tracking townsfolk kidnapped by a mysterious and deadly tribe.
It's an effective and nasty horror western, but it absolutely revels in disgusting torture porn. While it doesn't gloss over the genocide of the natives, it others another fictional race, in the end championing civilisation over tribal. I hated it.
Ryan Johnson's series returns in this 2025 comedic fiendish how/whoddunit of eccentric priest's murder, in which his younger assistant takes centre stage with Blanc coming in later to apply his deductions to a small community of suspect parishioners.
Like all films in the series, the secondary co-star demands great acting. That is provided by English Josh O'Connor playing wrong side of the tracks young American priest. Daniel Craig's own accent accent falters, but his Benoit Holmsian charisma doesn't. Overall very good, better than Glass Onion, but the first film is still my favourite.
Ethan Hunt and his IMF team are back in 2025 to attempt to save the world from the rogue AI of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning in 2023.
Amazing stunts including wing walking, incredible travelogue, beautiful young women improbably attracted to the 63 year-old Cruise, and an utterly stupid central plot disguised with barely probable technobabble.
The first Tom Cruise MI film will always be the best, but I loved the stunts in these last two. Thanks, Tom.
Emma Stone's 2023 schlocky comedic horror in which a pregnant woman who committed suicide is given the brain of her unborn baby and then revived by mad scientist.
This is My Fair Lady, Frankenstein, Brimstone and Treacle, and Tommy. It's too pervy in a male gazey and unpleasant way.
2025. Jared Leto as Ares, the Grid's Master Control security program, enslaved by Dillinger's grandson as a weapon, then turning against his creator to help a tech entrepreneur perfect her dead boffin sister's technique to materialise beings from the Grid into corporeal existence.
Slightly better than Legacy, but Jeff Bridger's barely in it, it shoves in a few buzzwords for relevance, and uselessly stunt casts Gillian Anderson in yet another unoriginal nostalgic cash grab. Leto's good in the role, but what I know about the actor taints whatever he's involved in.
I watched this on a DVD over the Christmas holiday. Released in the UK on Christmas day, 1972, by actor, director, writer Lionel Jeffries and based on Antonia Barber's 1969 novel The Ghosts, and his next project after the phenomenal The Railway Children (1970). It stars a lot of people I don't know and some I do, like Rosalyn Landor, Diana Dors, Madeline Smith, and Laurence Naismith. It is about an impoverished WW1 war widow, given the dream job of caretaker of a stately home in the countryside. What the kindly, mysterious lawyer doesn't tell them is that the house is haunted by long-dead children.
Unexpected touches of Salkind-type adult humour, the expected Hammer-type gothic, more nasty and more magical and science fictiony than I remember, and an ending that I don't. I was dreading the end, which in my faulty memory turned out badly for the heroes, but was very pleasantly surprised.
As is usual for one of my "everything" pods, I have brutally cut down this review for an excellent film that deserves one of my long-form revisits. In conclusion, this U certificate children's film is perfectly suited to the adult connoisseur of vintage British horror.
Also, turns out I live an hour north of the mansion. Though the Langley Park is mentioned in the script, are actually the exteriors of Heatherden Hall, Pinewood Studios, which is not publicly accessible, but also about an hour south.
Channel 4: weirdness in 2023 horror film with talk show host (David Dastmalchian) staging a special Halloween 1977 episode featuring a possessed girl.
Good period re-creation, messy in an Exorcist way, but the cultic angle is left dangling. Not apparently a comedy, but I found it funny and somewhat reminded me of The Exorcist's screenwriter William Peter Blatty's directorial debut, the psychedelic The Ninth Configuration.
Coming in the middle of 2026 is Christopher Nolan's retelling of the Odyssey, featuring the perilous and fantastical return journey home from Troy of my favourite Greek hero, the wily captain Odysseus. At least he was until I found out the non-kid's ending many years ago. On his return, Odysseus finds his wife, Penelope, beset upon by suitors (also boyfriends of the housemaids; not sure how that works) and sets about shooting and spearing them, then hanging the maids.
That horrible ending to look forward to aside (the impressive trailer unsurprisingly does not include a bloodbath massacre by our hero), there are also the historically inaccurate costumes, a reproduction viking ship standing in for an ancient Greek one, and the filming taking place in an illegally occupied part of the Sahara.
Latterly Netflix 2020 German historical drama about Arminius's rebellion of German tribes against the Roman Empire. The makers have been careful to slap down the use of Arminius as a folk hero of nationalistic imbeciles (Hitler loved this guy) and is addressed in the script.
Even though this Arminius's is a story I'm fascinated by, as a study in colonialist brainwashing gone very wrong (also the subject of Blake's 7: Horizon), I'm out because the violence and trashiness reminded me of Starz' Spartacus.
We have talked about the series extensively in the past, most recently the last pod, and the penultimate episodes (S05E05--07) were released on Christmas Day 2025 and the finale (episode 8) on New Year's Eve.
In the multi-pronged coordinated attack culminating in the very extreme final slaying of Vecna and the Mind Flayer, (seemingly) Kali is shot by soldiers and Eleven sacrifices herself on the other side of the portal to stop the military starting the programme again using her blood. With the portal permanently closed, normality returns to Hawkins. The nerds graduate and carry on playing DnD, while also passing the torch to the kids with the Mike's younger sister, Holly, DMing. The older teens go their separate ways, but agree to stay in touch. As for the adults, Joyce accepts Jims proposal and that's a wrap... perhaps. I did say "seemingly", remember?
I wish the cast and crew well and thanks for the ride.
BBC1 2016. Tom Hiddleston is a unassuming hotel night shift manager embroiled in bringing down arms dealer responsible for his lover's murder.
Not bad, but the production turns typically dry John Le Carre into an Ian Fleming Bond romp, replete with exotic travelogue wrapped around Bond villains, henchmen, dames, and explosions galore. NB the 2026 sequel is unrelated to Le Carre.
Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad's Sony on Apple TV 2025 SF, in which cynical author of trashy sword and planet romance, Carol Sturka, is left behind when the rest of the world succumbs to a happy hive mind via an alien formula.
I put off watching because the trailer seemed so Sleeper and Idiocracy. I'm glad I gave it a try though, because in SF terms it's like an adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as if written by Harry Harrison instead of Jack Finney, with a splash of 28 Days Later and touch of Walter Tevis's melencholic writing.
The celebration of Star Trek's 60th anniversary continued into this year with a new series from CBS and Paramount.
In the far future post-Burn Discovery universe, the Federation begins to rebuild itself, including Starfleet Academy in San Francisco. They appoint Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter), a disillusioned captain as chancellor, and Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti) pops in an out as a bad guy/father (?) of Caleb, an ex-criminal Starfleet student looking for his mother and Nahla's redemptive special project as she arrested his mother.
Like New Who isn't Classic, it's nowhere near TOS, and it's set in the Discovery universe and puts alpha males centre stage which irritates me, but it's recognisably Star Trek. Robert Picardo reprises his role as the tetchy EMH doctor from Voyager, there's a peacenik Klingon medical student and an aggressive Jem'Hadar-Klingon hybrid, Nahla's second-in-command, Lura Thok, I like, and Giammati, isn't chewing the scenery, he's gulping it down. Effects, costumes, and creature design are all outstanding, as we have come to expect from New ST (or is that Nu Nu now?)
In 598, I said Ace dispatches Daleks with a bazooka. That's not a bazooka! When I gathered pics for the social media upload, I saw that it was actually a one of those rifle launched rocket thingies.
In 599, I redundantly described various books as, "random miscellanea", when that is what miscellanea is by its very nature. I also mistakenly called EXORDIUM a 2023 film, when it was released in 2013. I used "gracefully" and "gracelessly" in place of "graciously" and "ungraciously" when talking of Tom Baker's MBE quotes. And finally, sorry about the wheelie wheelie weak pun regarding Wheelie Yellow.
Even more content, replete with more errors, omissions, and general dimwittedness, that have to be redressed later, like I'm doing now, can be delivered to your ears via this pod.
Hello to new listener, Paulo. In the absence of reviews, ratings, or indeed any communication whatsoever in recent years (despite impressive download counts), your ears (and my Mum's, who I catch listening sometimes) are a welcome addition.