EOFFTV

A Garfield Christmas Special (1987) When he first introduced the character of Garfield to the public in 1976, initially as a supporting character in the comic strip Jon, first published in the Pendleton Times of Indiana, he could sca…

The ever-popular overweight orange cat brings his trademark cynicism to the season in A Garfield Christmas Special (1987), a reasonably engaging half hour that underpins its jokes with a commendable streak of sadness.

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Why Hide? (2018) If it’s known at all, James Edward Cook’s British chiller will likely be known by its re-issue title, Christmas Presence. It’s a better title certainly, though a misleading one as…

Why Hide? (2018) is perhaps better known under the title Christmas Presence. By any name it's a dull one, full of annoying characters trapped in an old mansion while something never full explained picks them off during a Christmas get-together.

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The Christmas Dragon (2014) Watching The Christmas Dragon, it becomes obvious very quickly that director John Lyde, his writers Shylah and David Addante or indeed all of them, are huge fans of The Lord of the Rings. They&#821…

The Christmas Dragon (2014) doesn’t feature much dragon action and Christmas keeps getting lost along the way as well. Instead it's a rather dull fantasy quest featuring children trying to save Father Christmas in a fantasy world - or something...

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I should have mentioned the icy patch, it really is a good running gag!

A Muppet Family Christmas (1987) Jim Henson and his muppets have a long history of Christmas films and specials, stretching back to Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (1977). Later titles include Christmas Eve on Sesame Street…

The Muppets have a Christmas party in A Muppet Family Christmas (1987). It's very far from the best of the Muppets Christmas offerings but it still has bags of charm, some decent gags and the largest gathering of Muppets ever caught on camera.

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Great stuff! You're in for a treat there!

Thanks Gareth!

I've seen a few, and so far... they're all dreadful. One lousy joke in search of a plot that no-one ever finds. Best avoided!

I've actually had this conversation in the real world twice in this past week. No-one, least of all me, can explain why I do this to myself. Some weird form of masochism is all I can think of... 😁

The Mean One (2022) In recent years there’s been a trend for taking beloved fictional characters aimed at children and putting them into gory horror scenarios: Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), Winnie-the…

The Mean One (2022) adds the Grinch (never actually referred to as such) to the recent trend for childhood literary characters being forced into gory horror scenarios. And it's bloody awful in almost every respect...

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This week on HAMMER TIME we open up Princess Ananka's tomb and face THE MUMMY (1959). Join Kevin (@eofftv.bsky.social) and me as we chat about another Christopher Lee monster movie, and potentially have our first podcast parting of ways, opinion-wise 😬😅 Listen wherever you get your podcasts 🎧

I should have posted these a few weeks ago as I'd promised @bunnydarke.bsky.social I'd find them - cast your mind back to the Hammer Time podcast on Dracula and I mentioned behind the scenes shots of Carol Marsh enjoying tea and biscuits on the set. Well, here they are - better late than never!

Star in the Night (1945) Everyone has to start somewhere and sometimes those starting points can be a bit incongruous. A decade before he directed the science fiction masterpiece Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) and l…

Star in the Night (1945) was an inauspicious debut for director Don Siegel, a short film retelling the story of the nativity in 1940s America. He was a very long way from Dirty Harry (1971)...

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Elf-Man (2012) Did Christmas really need its own superhero? After all, Santa Claus has been a fixture of western yuletides for centuries, so what could a superhero bring to the table other trying to gorge on left…

It's December so that must mean Christmas film reviews, and we start with the execrable seasonal superhero "comedy" Elf-Man (2012). I've a feeling this is going to be a very long three weeks...

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Thanks Gareth! And yes, the finger rises early in this one!

This week on the podcast, Hammer takes on Arthur Conan Doyle and the result is a magnificent adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles!

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We surprised ourselves a bit and just how much we had to say about this one. A real gem!

He certainly does!

Toomorrow (1970) By 1970 Val Guest was a long way from the glory days of the Quatermass films or The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961). When he was contacted by producer Harry Saltzman in March that year, Guest beli…

Toomorrow (1970) is very far from Val Guest's best work, an abysmal tale of a bland pop group (a pre-fame Olivia Newton-John is the lead singer) being abducted by aliens for reasons too ludicrous to go into here.

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Phase IV (1974) Ants have long been a popular antagonist in genre movies – giant ones in Them! (1954) and chasing Joan Collins in Empire of the Ants (1977), normal sized ones terrorising hotel workers in It …

Saul Bass' Phase IV (1974) is a deeply flawed (thanks to studio interfering) but fascinating addition to the "nature in revolt" films of the 70s, pitching ants against a trio of people stuck in a desert research base. But what are the ants really up to?

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The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) Following the successes of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), Hammer signed a new distribution deal with Columbia which resulted first in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp film Th…

Frankenstein's back in The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Hammer's first Gothic sequel, calling himself Dr Stein but still up his old monster making tricks.

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Soy leyenda (1967) First published in 1954, Richard Matheson’s hugely influential novel I Am Legend (George A. Romero used it for inspiration for Night of the Living Dead (1968) and it virtually created the pos…

Soy leyenda (1967) is an unexpectedly good student adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend that manages to hit most of the beats of the book in 36 sometimes rough and ready but always atmospheric minutes.

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The Trollenberg Terror (1958) By July 1957 the venerable Southall Studios in West London, home to many a low budget British film since it was opened in 1924 by G.B. Samuelson and recently home to Robert Baker and Monty Berman&#…

Mountaineers are being killed by something alien in Quentin Lawrence's The Trollenberg Terror (1958), that "something" being revealed as large eye-like creatures that are up to no good though exactly why, we never do learn...

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For this week's episode of HAMMER TIME, Kevin (@eofftv.bsky.social) and I are back with Peter Cushing's Dr Franck or Stein (spoilers: it's Frankenstein) in 1958's THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN 🧠
Listen now wherever you get your podcasts 🎧

I like the way you think!

Two by Kunio Kato With only a handful of short films under his belt, Kunio Kato is one of the lesser-known Japanese animators. But in the basis of his small filmography, he deserves much more love and attention. A g…

Kunio Kato isn't the best known of Japanese animators but on the basis of his two most widely seen shorts, The Diary of Tortov Roddle (2003) and the Oscar winning The House of Small Cubes (2008), he should be.

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Thank you Rob - you're going to see a lot of that finger in the coming weeks and months!

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) Made at Pinewood Studios and on location in Switzerland, Portugal and England by Peter Hunt, making his directorial debut after a career as an editor (he cut all of the previous Bond films), On Her…

George Lazenby takes over the role of James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) for the first and only time but ends up in arguably the greatest Bond of them all.

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Highlander (1986) The first in a series of lucrative – though mostly terrible – film and television sequels and spin-offs, Highlander was the breakthrough film for Australian director Russell Mulcahey&#8…

Highlander (1986) is an overblown and sometimes pompous fantasy film about immortal warriors battling through time but it's a fun one, dazzlingly directed by Russell Mulcahey.

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Jubilee (1978) The brief but noisy explosion of punk rock into the British mainstream in 1976 led to a great many things, not all of them particularly good. Over almost as soon as it had begun, it opened the door…

Derek Jarman gave the British punk scene it's first film with Jubilee (1978) featuring a time travelling Queen Elizabeth I visiting a dystopian near future London. The punks were outraged and promptly threw it straight back at Jarman...

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