Last Night's Viewing

Doctor Who : in which the Doctor, Donna and a selection of vaguely familiar faces are menaced by dust. Yes, the dust you can see in shafts of lights is in fact millions of air born tiny piranhas. They can eat you in two seconds flat it seems, so be afraid and put that vacuum cleaner on maximum!

In nice bit of convention skewering the character that wonders off by herself is shown to be really stupid beforehand, guess that's what a St Trillian's education buys you; no smarts but a good range in racy uniforms.

It seems that someone already knows the Doc but he doesn't know here, oh the mystery, what are the odds on her being Moll Flanders? Or for those of us with shorter memories, an ER doctor?

Overall this went down quite well in Our Front Room, what with natty spooky after-death voices and an earnest effort to make kids more afraid of the dark than ever.

John Carpenter's Vampires : When even the continuity announcer starts taking the pish you know you are in trouble. So decades after 'ol John appears to have made a couple of good films by mistake he brings us this. The latest in his self monikered series of trash, this one stars James "I'm So Much Better Than This" Woods and Daniel "Cheapest Of The Brothers " Baldwin fighting a Anne Rice throwback out in Texas. The one good idea appears after five minutes with the heroes using a tow cable to drag neck botherers into the sunlight, sadly after this it goes drastically downhill as the 'terrifying' gore is ladled onto of 'gritty' character interaction and 'tense' drama as a ho picked up by the boys gets strange cravings that have nothing to do with having a bun in the oven.

Still the real question is what happened John? This is the guy who between '76 and '82 knocked out Halloween, Assault On Precinct 13, The Thing and Escape From New York (which is admittedly ropey but still fun). I'm starting to wonder if it's the same guy. Maybe he was kidnapped by 'B' movie lovin' hermits and forced to endlessly act out The Thing with a bag of sticks and a dead raccoon or something. And a near-by lighting rigger saw his chance, popped on a straggly false beard and grabbed the limelight and it's the need to constantly convince people he is Carpenter that leads to all his output bearing his name, just in case we suddenly go, "Hang on, you're not...."