My latest reviews up at Television Heaven include Alien: Earth, the best installment of the Alien franchise since 1986, and the last two serials of Doctor Who season three, The Savages and The War Machines. I should hopefully have more up before the month's out.
Next on the blog itself I'm planning to review Strange New Worlds season three, and mabe get back onto the Lower Decks and Prodigy reviews when I have time.
Fifty boys walk in a straight line at three miles per hour for as long as they can. If they slow down or stop for too long, they’re shot dead. If they try to escape or even step off the road, they’re shot dead. The last boy walking wins untold riches and his heart’s desire.
It’s a grim premise for a story, and slim basis for a film. Frankly, that Stephen King managed to wring a novel out of it is impressive enough. The fact that he was nineteen when he did so is even more impressive, although it also explains a lot about the story, an angry adolescent polemic against society. Long dismissed as unfilmable, The Long Walk has actually been rattling round Development Hell for years, until finally being picked up by Vertigo with Francis Lawrence as director.
It's probably going to be my film of the year.
It’s one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time, albeit one that I will probably never watch again. It’s a harrowing experience as you are pulled along with the young men as they trudge painfully on. There’s levity there, but it’s gallows humour, the brutal laughing in the face of misery that so many of us learn in order to survive. The original 4 mph rule of the book was knocked down for being frankly impossible, but even keeping up 3 mph for hundreds of miles without rest is pretty unfeasible for all but the most immaculately trained superhuman. (You just know there are some hypermasculine pricks in the audience scoffing and insisting that they could win it.)
Cooper Hoffman is excellent as the central protagonist Ray Garraty, perfectly cast as a believable but damaged everyman, but it’s David Jonsson who really steals the film as the resolutely optimistic Pete McVries. The friendship between the two is the heart of the film, a friendship built in the most unfriendly of circumstances. We see the best of masculinity as well as the worst, with even the most unpleasant of the walkers (that’ll be Charlie Plummer’s Barkovitch) being sympathetic as we know they are all here out of desperation. Not one of them truly grasps just how brutal the Walk is going to be, with the possible exception of the stoic Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), and even he isn’t truly prepared for it.
Even with the novel’s hundred walkers reduced to fifty, there are too many to fully focus on. Tut Nyuot, Ben Wang and Joshua Odjick all give strong performances as Baker, Olsen and Parker, respectively. Olsen, one of the more unlikely contestants, is especially likeable, but in a way that only drives home how unsuited he is for the gruelling challenge. There’s an unpleasant complicity in the Walk from the audience, spectating from comfort just like the gawping onlookers at the roadside. The brutal Walk is fiction, of course, but the cast still walked for miles in order to get realistic footage, with Hoffman reporting that on some days they walked for up to fifteen miles in the heat.
While King wrote and seemingly set his novel in the 1970s, and the aesthetic of the time has been carried over to the film, there’s no real indication of when the film is set. This is to the film’s benefit, since the themes are timeless and can’t be pinned down to one era. Many have read an allegory for the Viet Nam War in the novel, and while there’s a clear parallel between signing up for the Walk and volunteering for military service (down to youngsters lying about their age to get in), it’s a broader story of desperation and hope amongst hopelessness.
Whenever it’s set, The Long Walk occurs in some distorted alternative history, where the USA has become a fascist dictatorship and undergone economic collapse after an unspecified war devastated the nation. The idea that it would take a war to inflict this on America is laughable; given what you people actually voted for last year, a lot of you practically volunteered for this dystopia to be delivered. As outlandish as the idea of the Walk is, it’s also depressingly easy to believe that it would be enacted, for inspiration or entertainment, and that desperate souls would sign up for it even knowing that it would almost certainly mean a painful death.
So much of the film is spent just waiting for the inevitable, a chilling feeling that makes it an uncomfortable yet compelling experience. None of it would work were it not for the depth of the cast’s performances. While the boys, particularly Garraty, are our way into this disturbing world, it’s brought to life by Mark Hamill’s gloriously loathsome Major, seemingly the head of the military junta in this reality and a snarling figurehead for the oppressive regime. In contrast we have the always wonderful yet still sadly underrated Judy Greer as Ray’s mother Ginnie, who essentially represents all that is good and all that is feminine and nurturing in this brutal state.
There are no punches pulled in this film. Injuries and illness are depicted graphically; there are no clean, screen-friendly gunshots here. Lawrence lingers on the violence just long enough to feel repulsed before forcing us to move on with the rest of the walkers. For all that the Walk is a deliberately contrived kind of brutality, it’s none too far removed from reality in the worst places on Earth. Right now, Palestinians are being marched through Gaza for miles at gunpoint, while men and boys have been forced to walk in front of tanks as human shields. It’s disturbing to think that in Gaza, Sudan or Congo, young men likely would sign up for a gruelling trek with a 1-in-50 likelihood of survival if it meant a chance of escaping and providing for their families.
The film marches along with the boys with a crushing inevitability until we are left with only two. The ending is somewhat predictable (although different to the original ending in the book), yet this only makes the sense of the inevitable more foreboding. Throughout, the cast force you to care about the poor bastards you know you’re going to watch die. And yet, like the best of King adaptations, The Long Walk has an uplifting message at its core: to never give up and to go down fighting.
Good news from Pencil Tip Publishing: Roving Reporter II, the second collection of new adventures for Sarah Jane Smith will be available before the end of the year. This will feature my story "Remembrance" as well as a host of prose and graphic stories, such as Russell McGee's "The Cocoon of Despair," which you can now explore in this timelapse artwork video.
In the meantime, the original Roving Reporter (featuring my story "Exposure") is available for a short time again via Lulu. A full library of PTP fiction and non-fiction books are also available, such as the recent What the Fans Think - Space: 1999, for which I had the dubious honour of reviewing "Space Warp."
I'm roughly 47 years behind on everything I want to write, thanks to many, many real life concerns; however, I have managed to get a few write-ups and reviews done lately. September marked a couple of notable pop culture anniversaries that warranted some attention.
30th September 2025 marks the official 60th anniversary of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's classic series Thunderbirds. I've reviewed the first episode, "Trapped in the Sky," for Television Heaven. Meanwhile on TVH, we've been cracking ahead with season three of classic Doctor Who, with Galaxy 4, The Myth Makers and my beloved The Gunfighters as my latest contributions. I'd written up The Ark previously and Laurence Marcus has also added Mission to the Unknown. I've also reviewed Bookish, the wonderful new murder mystery series from Mark Gatiss.
In other media that gives you square eyes, 13th September was the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. and thus the Super Mario franchise (although, of course, Mario goes back three years earlier, to 1981's Donkey Kong). Head over to Vocal for my two-part play through of every 20th century Super Mario platformer: Part One covers the 1980s (Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario Land) while Part Two takes on the 1990s (Super Mario World to Super Mario 64). Summer also saw two notable Nintendo anniversaries, with Yoshi's Island and Donkey Kong Land both hitting thirty. Just like my TV reviews, I can't help but delve into the history of the games as well as replaying them.
Here's a treat: Paul Hanley, who you may recall provided the original art for Forgotten Lives, as well as a whole host of other Doctor Who, cult film and original art, has teamed up with Bret Herholz, another excellent artist and graphic storyteller with a penchant for all things Who, to create The Vampire Inversion, a completely free new comic featuring the Shalka Doctor (as played by Mr. Richard E. Grant back in 2003, and fleetingly appearing onscreen again in 2024).
For this adventure, Paul has written the script and Bret has provided the art, and his scratchy blac-and-white style really works for this gaunt and foreboding Doctor. The Vampire Inversion is a postmodern adventure into vampire cinema, which also explores the hidden corners of Doctor Who's own mythology. As the cover page teases: "Two Doctors, vampires and... Andy Warhol?!" When you've enjoyed the comic itself, you can also read Paul's original script.
Paul and Bret have provided this comic for free, but do suggest that you might like to make a donation to one of the charities they've chosen to support:
The Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT)
TRACTION (Trans Community Action)
The Central Florida Emergency Trans Care Fund
So, go on. Have a bite.
