Over the years, there have been quite a few movies, thrillers mostly, concerning strange denizens lurking beneath cities in the underground system -- among them Luc Besson's Subway, Michael Apted's Extreme Measures and the recent Hungarian picture Kontroll.
One of the most celebrated, something of a cult movie in the early 1970s, is Death Line, in which inspector Donald Pleasence investigates a series of strange disappearances around Russell Square Tube Station, London, and discovers that cannibals have been breeding in an abandoned tunnel since 1892, when their ancestors were trapped while building an underground station beneath the British Museum.
Christopher Smith's directorial debut Creep is deeply influenced by Death Line.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FOX.
The unending horror show that is the London underground tube system is still an under-used resource for splatter pictures, which is why this strange Anglo-German co-production grabs attention -- for a while at any rate.
It is a very, very yucky slasher film starring German actress Franka Potente (from Run Lola Run). It implies that there is a direct connection between the London tube's justly notorious Northern Line and the stinkiest sewer tunnels, and also a secret but semi-disused subterranean hospital lab for experimenting on children.
Those of us who have to travel on the Northern Line have suspected as much for years.
Potente plays a wild child funlover who's heading to a VIP party in London where she hopes -- oh the dreams of youth! -- to shag George Clooney. But instead she gets stuck, in the immortal words of the Jam, down in the tube station at midnight. She finds that all the gates are closed, the platform is utterly deserted and the place is swarming with rats, which are allowed to romp around the passenger concourses at night.
Traumatized, she climbs aboard a creepy ghost train that carries her to all sorts of gore and mayhem. It all gets very nasty and explicit.
Creep has some intriguing location work and interesting ideas, but nausea and boredom soon overtake the chills.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist