While we’ve compared live-action and animated versions of movies before – Wicked City, The Guyver and City Hunter – with Spawn, it’s the first time two have come out so close together. Both are very much driven by Todd McFarlane, creator of the original comic-book: he’s been able to keep a firm hand on the tiller because, as he says, “what could Hollywood offer me except fortune and fame?”, and as creator of the top-selling comic in America, he already had plenty of both. Though it seems odd he authorised two such similar projects the same year. The common plot has government killer Al Simmons’ resurrected as Spawn, and follows as he comes to terms with his new role in Hell’s army, resulting from a demonic pact accepted after his death. He wants to break the contract, but where can a horribly disfigured dead man go? Certainly not back to his wife, now married to Al’s best friend and with the daughter she long craved. He also has to deal with the Clown, a satanic mentor who keeps an eye on Spawn to snuff out any signs of goodness.

The HBO animated series was first and is undeniably grittier, meriting an ‘R’, especially in the video version. In it, Spawn becomes entangled with the mob, intelligence community, and the child-killing relative of a US senator who wants to be the president. You’ll hear familiar voices, notably Ronnie Cox as both Senator McMillan and the psychopathic Billy Kincaid, and Mike McShane, cast heavily against type as a seven-stone weakling [The only way to keep him in character was to make him stand motionless, arms by his sides — as soon as he moved, he started to lose it!] William Hurt was originally down as narrator Cogliostro, but a throat infection ruled him out, so the part went to Richard Dysart, who played Doc Copper in The Thing. In one of those coincidences, that film marked the debut of actor David Keith as Childs. 15 years later, Keith and Dysart are reunited, since the former is the voice of Spawn…

Enough name-dropping; is it any good? Well, from the very start, it’s patently obvious that Spawn certainly ain’t no Disney film; not with the amount of body fluids, nudity and swear words which are spattered around. This is done in a refreshingly gleeful manner that evokes anime more than any American TV show — even one intended for broadcast on cable at midnight. The animation is decent enough, if not exceptional; though there are times when the Korean studio occasionally forget they are no longer working on My Little Pony, the storyline and voice acting manage to hold your interest, and there’s an appealing, bone-dry humour which runs through much of the script. The various facets of the production build upon and support each other, making the end result probably better than the sum of its parts. The atmosphere is heavily aided by Shirley Walker’s score, which rumbles along ominously in the background, distinctly reminiscent of the soundtrack to computer slaughterfest Doom.

There are loose ends flailing, notably a Spawn-hunter named Angela who turns up, kicks ass and then vanishes from the storyline. One presumes she’ll re-appear in the second series, to which the end of the sixth episode points unsubtly. But McFarlane manages to avoid the obvious clichés of an episodic structure — they don’t all have to end with a big battle, and watching the compiled version, it’s almost impossible to tell where one part stops and the next begins. Overall, it’s striking, original, and reasonably impressive stuff, whose success will hopefully spawn (ho ho ho) a host of imitators. If so, it might signal a new, more adult direction for the American animation industry: with rare exceptions, it still lives in a quagmire of ‘family entertainment’.

The live-action movie was originally passed ‘R’, “for thematic elements involving the demonic underworld, violence, intense fantasy action and crude humor” according to the MPAA, and was cut to gain a ‘PG-13’ certificate. This perhaps summarises the major problem with it: while the TV series was pitched at a slightly older crowd – college age, according to McFarlane – the film is aimed lower, with an inevitable toning- and dumbing-down as a result. Thus, the body count is low, there’s very little blood and nobody says anything worse than “asshole” even when the end of the world is nigh, and the fart jokes would seem to have escaped from Beavis and Butthead. The plot is a great deal simpler, with the multiple threads of a conspiratorial web replaced by something more akin to a James Bond film: evil villain (Martin Sheen, with an appropriately devilish beard) plots to take over the world, although he is being manipulated by the Clown into triggering Armageddon.

There are significant differences in the telling of the story; it begins before Simmons is killed, and the role of Cogliostro (Nicol Williamson, with definite echoes from his Merlin in Excalibur) is expanded greatly, from a mere narrator to Spawn’s guru. Terry, Al’s best friend, also has his part in things seriously expanded, and in a slightly puzzling twist, also changes from being coloured into a white dude. I guess one black hero is enough for Hollywood to handle in any movie not specifically targeted at an ethnic audience. An odd similarity is that, as in the animation, the live-action version also has a groovy kick-ass femme fatale who singularly fails to do anything of real interest: here, she’s Jason’s hench-babe, and is swiftly killed the first time Spawn and Jason meet.

Much of the production seems to have taken place inside a Silicon Graphics work-station, and the film’s special effects overpower everything else, even though they greatly vary in effectiveness. Spawn’s cape is amazing, an excellent showcase for the power of computer graphics, plus a lot of the virtual sets are also superbly detailed, an area in which animation cannot compete. However, the final battle in Hell leaves a great deal to be desired: apparently, their Satanic majesties inhabit offcuts from a budget computer game.

John Leguizamo does a fine job as the Clown, bringing a lot of personality through the make-up, which must have been hell to wear (ho ho ho). He’s helped by having all the best lines — neither Nicol Williamson, nor Michael Jai White as Spawn, can match him when they try and come out with the snappy one-liners required of any self-respecting comic-book hero. White is okay; there’s not a lot an actor can do, when all you can see are his eyes, and half the time they’re hidden behind some optical effect or other. The musical score, by Graeme Revell, isn’t really memorable, and has its work cut out trying to fight its way past the gratuitous interference of tracks from the (near-inevitable) soundtrack album.

Pitting the two against each other, I’d have to go for the animated version. It scores a telling blow with its darker, more cynical and adult edge, making it a more faithful reflection of the attitude inherent in McFarlane’s original comic. However, the cinematic experience certainly does add to the spectacle, and I suspect if the animation were blown up, it would rapidly fall over since it was made for the small screen. Both are interesting takes, despite leaving out background depth, especially the more metaphysical aspects. Conclusion: watch HBO’s series, then go rent the live-action version for additional fun!

Previous issues of TC have chronicled trips to both east and west coasts of America, but rumours persisted that there were some bits in the middle, between California (movies/sun/earthquakes) and New York (shopping/pizza/er, more shopping). To test the validity or otherwise of these reports, a two-week expedition was planned, sponsored, albeit unwittingly, by the Halifax, and the other nice building societies who decided to hand me a wodge of free shares. Having just safely returned (well, most of me, my brain would seem to have been held up at Customs. Jet lag, doncha just love it? All of the problems of being drunk with none of the pleasures. What time is it? What day is it? Which continent is this? Who am I?), I feel a need to get the (ir)relevant details committed to paper before the need for outright fabrication exceeds EC permitted levels.

When you cross off all the bits of America that lie next to oceans, one destination stands out like a beacon in the middle of the desert — precisely because it is a beacon in the middle of the desert. I mean, of course, that Disneyland for adults, Las Vegas. It’s a place that not only meets expectations but passes way beyond them: it is even more crass, commercial, garish, naff, flashy and shallow than you imagine. But yet, just as a bad movie can become a source of great pleasure, so Vegas transcends the tackiness which infects its very essence, and is perhaps the best place on Earth to spend a weekend. No more than that, mind, for it will chew you up and spit you out like a piece of used gum – except probably with slightly less personal wealth.

The first experience of the city was driving along the Strip from the airport. Luckily I wasn’t driving, having been met at the airport by TC-er Chris Fata, who had kindly agreed to see me through the first wave of culture shock. This was undoubtedly a Good Thing: I’d have managed about fifty yards, tops, before provoking a gawp-induced accident, since my mouth was so wide open it would have severely interfered with the brake pedal. The city has to be one of the Seven Artificial Wonders of the World (alongside Pamela Anderson): where else can you see the Court of King Arthur, comfortably nestling – if any building a hundred yards in each dimension can be said to nestle – between a large-scale replica of the New York skyline, and an F-sized pyramid made of black glass?

Said pyramid was my destination, the Luxor hotel, decorated throughout in appropriate decor — even the shampoo came in little plastic obelisks. It was undoubtedly the coolest place to stay, since it was the only one that looked good both during the day and at night. The Excalibur next door was a fairy-tale castle after dark, but the sun revealed it to be a ghastly multi-coloured pile of precast concrete. The Luxor was immensely cool during the day, and vanished completely at dusk, making it the world’s first Stealth Hotel. Or rather, it would have vanished, if it wasn’t for the beacon on top which shone up into space, for no apparent reason beyond being visible from 250 miles away. And that was after they’d toned it down because it was screwing up jets as they approached the airport…

If any city can be said to have a purpose, it’s Las Vegas: it is dedicated to the painless removal of wealth with a single-mindedness which would have impressed the Spanish Inquisition. This is despite the fact that, thanks to competition, the average house margin is tiny: on most slots, it’s a mere 5%. It says something about the sheer volume of cash flowing through them, that this 5% is enough to cover all the capital costs; subsidise the shows, food and drink; provide spectacles like pirate battles; and still leave enough left over to turn a healthy profit and make Las Vegas the fastest-growing city in America.

The appeal is simple: everyone thinks they can beat the odds, and win the startling jackpots on offer. To anyone used to ten quid machines in pubs, the prospect of winning a Harley-Davidson bike, a car, or simply $7.7m in cash is difficult to grasp, but the lure is obvious. Needless to say, I did not win any of the above: I topped out at thirty dollars, though I did come delightfully close to winning a thousand on one delirious occasion. Personally, however, I got the same buzz out of playing the dime slots, and with the good payout rates, you could play for ages without losing too many Halifax shares.

The hotels are designed to be self-contained. The punter should not ever need to leave them, and probably will never want to, as it’s rather warm outside, even at the end of September. Between the restaurants, shops, thrill rides and IMAX cinema in the Luxor, it’s quite possible to spend a fulfilling trip without seeing natural light, as I proved on my second day there, though I did cheat slightly and took the air-conditioned walkway to the Excalibur for King Arthur’s tournament. This is horse-riding, jousting, sword-fights and so on, in a central arena, while the audience eats a meal with their fingers, Just Like In Medieval Times. Two millennia of civilisation has brought us the freedom to throw it all away and regress. But in its defence, a) they’ve been restaging Arthurian legend since the 15th century, and b) it was pretty good fun, especially the fighting, though I could probably have done without the musical numbers. On balance, however, I’d have been as happy with a couple of Xena episodes and a kebab.

The individual casinos have slightly different personalities; one will perhaps be more family orientated (Circus Circus), the next might contain a good video arcade (New York New York), a third has tackier entertainment — the Mirage wins hands-down here, thanks to the presence of the amazingly camp Siegfried and Roy and their white tigers, not to mention the volcano in the front lot which actually erupts. Every 20 minutes. Despite this, they all blur together eventually into one cacophony of flashing lights, ringing bells, and clattering cash. Not only are there no windows or clocks, which might alert the unwary gambler to the passage of time, but exit signs are few and far between. Once you get into the middle of a football-field sized array of gaming devices which reach to head height, retaining your orientation is almost impossible. It’s easy to imagine stumbling across the skeleton of a Japanese tourist who took a wrong turning on the way to the bathroom in 1979.

Eventually, the appeal of the casinos will fade, and you will then realise that there is actually little else to do in Las Vegas. The downtown area is worth a visit, for the stunning light-show that happens every hour in Fremont Street: a massive array of computer-controlled lights above your head depict everything from the Amazonian forest to a fighter fly-by, in typically vivid and hyper-real Vegas style. But once you’ve seen that, and gone up the 108-storey Stratosphere Tower [actually, they’re only virtual storeys, as it’s a concrete pillar with nothing in the middle hundred or so], what else is there to do?

Er, well…there is perhaps one other thing. Think Showgirls. Think Kyle McLachlan and Elizabeth Berkeley. No, not the bit in the swimming pool with the spouting dolphin — what visit to Las Vegas would be complete without a lap-dance? I’d solicited advice on the subject from slightly more knowledgeable sources and opinion was that the best establishment was Olympic Gardens. So, armed with a fistful of dollars, I went to experience a lapful of bimbo.

The layout at the Olympic had several small stages, on which a steady procession of girls disported themselves, between which were armchairs and sofas in which the lap-dances themselves occurred. Oddly, it seems that city regulations prevent full nudity and alcohol from being served up in the same establishment, so the girls never went further than G-strings, although these appeared to be made of dental floss. And the artistes themselves were, without exception, quite stunning. However, mere beauty was not enough. What I needed was someone with whom I could connect on a higher level. And then I saw Darlene — or rather, the Hello Kitty lunch-box in which she was stashing her tips. How could I possibly resist a fellow student of Japanese pop culture?

The experience itself was undeniably very pleasant, even beyond the obvious level (my, what is the Stratosphere Tower doing here in my underpants). You know how it’s an ego boost if a pretty girl smiles at you? Well, think what it’s like when the girl is writhing over you like a nymphomaniac, not so much with ‘come-to-bed eyes’ as an entire come-to-bed body. And my ego is not so fragile as to be bothered by the fact that it cost me twenty dollars — the Sisters of Mercy song, Lucretia, My Reflection, will never seem the same again… Sweetly, she was perfectly willing to hang around afterwards and chat without demanding I buy another dance (I did, but that was entirely of my own free will – or what was left of it): she seemed a genuinely nice person, a fan of Beverly Hills 90210 who lived in California, and worked part-time at Olympic Gardens. All told, I was happier to have spent my money on her, rather than giving it to one of the casinos.

Clearly, though, it’s not the sort of thing you could cope with on a regular basis, and as mentioned previously, Vegas burns you up fast. You just run out of astonishment. As an example, on my last night, I had planned to go to the Mirage for their exploding volcano, but when the time came, I simply couldn’t be bothered. I had succumbed to an overload of excess. It was time to move on.

I was heading for Phoenix, but since the route there took me within inches of the Grand Canyon, it seemed churlish not to pop in. At least, it looked like inches on the map. I’d forgotten this was western America, where most single states could swallow up Britain, with Ireland for afters, and so the journey necessitated both getting up at 5:30 a.m. and an overnight stop on the way. But it was undoubtedly worth the effort. Neither words nor photographs can do the scale of the Grand Canyon justice, so I won’t bother much. I’ll just say:

It is enormous.

I was amazed, and I was somewhat ready for it — imagine what the reaction of the first people to see it must have been; ‘Grand’ doesn’t do it justice, but I guess ‘Fucking Huge Canyon’ would have been vetoed by the cartographers. I envisaged something U-shaped, yet it actually has incredibly crinkly edges (I think it was one of the bits of Earth designed by Slartibartfast): this doesn’t come across in photos, which inevitably portray only a narrow section. It’s the closest you can get to flying with both feet firmly on the ground, and is stepped, which somehow makes it seem deeper; rather than one inconceivable drop, you get half-a-dozen slamming off into the distance. Combined with the different shades of colour in the rock, it looks like a chocolate layer cake attacked by a hungry but discerning pack of mice.

Speaking of layer cake, I have got to mention the quite incredible meal I had that night in the Arizona Steakhouse at the Bright Angel Lodge. A 16-ounce steak was so delicious and fresh you could almost sense the bovine bewilderment – “Hang on, where’s the meadow gone?” – and was followed by the most awesome slab of chocolate layer cake, doing much the same on my tastebuds as Darlene had done on my crotch. Altogether, it has to rank among the top five meals I’ve ever experienced. The total cost, including soup and drinks, was under twenty pounds. Things like that make me seriously contemplate shipping out to America permanently.

One of the problems which always stood in the way of this possibility – the lack of decent beer – has largely been solved since my previous trips, when the choice was limited to Bud, Miller and, if you were lucky, Molson. The incredible rise of the micro-brewery has meant that every area now has a plethora of entirely palatable choices, available in all but the most backward establishment. The only problem is that these are only distributed locally (Samuel Adams is a notable exception), so when you move somewhere else, you get a totally different selection, and have to begin the sampling process all over again. What a pity…

I want to say a few words about the bus journeys from the Canyon down to Phoenix, which was in two parts. For the first, Grand Canyon-Flagstaff, I had the bus to myself, so sat up front and chatted to the driver, who was a nice guy. This was great fun, and I was quite sorry to see the journey end, not least because his views, which had started off on innocuous subjects like the weather, were notably drifting into “how immigrants are screwing up America” and I’d have liked to have seen how long it took before he started to advocate things involving fertiliser, fuel oil and Federal buildings. But he was at least polite and friendly.

Perhaps this was an omen for the second leg, the Greyhound from Flagstaff to Phoenix. The bus station was bad enough; I scanned the low-life scum inhabiting it, trying to work out who was the psychopath, as my subconscious gleefully played scenes from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The worrying thing was that everyone looked a perfectly viable candidate… For let me dispel absolutely one myth about American life, maliciously propagated through adverts for Wrigley’s gum. Attractive women do not use Greyhound buses. Those who do fall into three categories:

• Recently returned ‘Nam veterans, now retraining to be mass murderers.
• Their mothers.
• Students.
• Better make that four: naive tourists who really should know better.

But as a general rule there is absolutely nobody with whom you would want to want to share air, let alone your chewing gum. As a rough idea, imagine a rush-hour National Express coach with less gun control.

[Down in Phoenix at last, to my immense relief, I was met again by Chris — who deserves a formal tip of the TC hat for efforts that go well beyond what was expected, and without whom, I would have seen and experienced a great deal less. If every tourist to America received the same level of personal service, there’d be nobody left in Britain. For showing me the most delightful sights possible, and for tireless work not just as chauffeur, but in every other position, I am utterly grateful. End of fulsome praise, before Chris’s head swells excessively!]

Scottsdale, where I was based for the next three days, is a sprawl of a city, in which a car is not a luxury but an absolute necessity, not least because the ferocious heat makes walking any distance an ordeal. Mind you, having said that, my first day there, the populace were running in all directions as the media did a striking impression of Cassandra over the tail end of hurricane Nora, allegedly about to sweep across the state, bringing death and destruction in its wake. Much filling of sandbags by the nervous later, it finally hit, drenching Phoenix in a torrential… er, 0.03 inches of rain. I was distinctly unimpressed, although the lack of any drains in the road meant a surprising amount of surface water.

This was encountered that evening on the way to ‘Rawhide’, a pseudo-Western tourist attraction on the outskirts of Scottsdale featuring gunfights, saloons, etc. While hugely entertaining in a deeply shallow sort of way, the highlight was the restaurant where I chewed down on another new breed of dead animal: deep-fried rattlesnake, complete with backbone on the side to prove its origins. Tasted like chicken more than anything else. Despite the irony present in sinking my fangs into something which would happily reciprocate given the chance, the day was a salutary reminder that life in America is not entirely without peril, especially on the natural side of things: hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes are something with which we just don’t have to contend. And we’re a bit short on animals that endanger your health as well, unless you count things coming off boats from the Caribbean — such as West Indian fast bowlers. But even they pale into insignificance beside venomous snakes, spiders, ants and scorpions: one of the best souvenirs I picked up was a plastic paperweight containing an especially evil-looking scorpion, lurking with sting poised. To add the final touch of trash value, the entire thing glowed in the dark…

The time in Scottsdale was so laid back as to be near horizontal. While undeniably just as entertaining as Vegas, it provides little true tourist action on which I can comment in these pages. I was pleased, however, to see that American talk shows continue to plumb the sort of depths to which we British can only aspire. A personal favourite was Jerry Springer, who has since acquired a cult following on ITV. If you’ve not seen him, he favours deep and searching topics like “My Teen Worships Satan”, and derives both guests and audience from the sort of trailer trash beloved by John Waters. A typical show might have a couple, with the woman revealing to the man that not only has she been cheating on him, but with another woman. Turns out he’s been unfaithful too: either with a) the same woman, or b) a man — I only watched a week’s worth, and saw both. This is roadcrash television at its very best.

One day, however, we headed North (indeed, almost back to Flagstaff) to see Sedona, which is a bunch of rocks — in the same way the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground. These were red and eroded into the most remarkable, fluffy cloudlike shapes. Slartibartfast must have had some help from Salvador Dali around that corner of the world. On the way back, darkness fell, revealing the sort of shimmering sky I had forgotten existed after ten years living in the South of England. We pulled off the highway and just bathed in the splendour of it all: stars, planets, meteors, satellites and our galaxy, sweeping majestically across the sky like a spilt tin of condensed milk.

10 titles from Spy Headquarters
1. Build Your Own AR-15 2. Everybody’s Knife Bible 3. Home-Built Claymore Mines 4. Improvised Explosives 5. Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives 6. Pipe and Fire Bomb Designs 7. The Butane Lighter Hand Grenade 8. Successful Armed Robbery 9. Execution: Tools and Techniques 10. Kill Without Joy

I must also mention two shops in Scottsdale — I hadn’t actually intended to do any real purchasing until I got to New York, but this pair both succeeded in talking me into some fairly drastic plastic action. Zia Records had the biggest selection of second-hand CDs I’ve ever seen. Now, compact discs are cheap enough in America anyway, so the opportunity to pick up ultra-recent titles for $7.99 was certainly not to be sniffed at. I don’t think anyone had ever asked them for a shopping basket before. The other one was Spy Headquarters. There are a couple of similar places here in Britain, but they pretty much stick to tedious stuff like bug detectors, for legal reasons. No such problems in Arizona, and the main delight of Spy HQ was the delicious publications on offer [see side-bar], as well as the chance to purchase signs that read “Warning: Trespassers Will Be Shot. Survivors Will Be Shot Again” and “Nuke Their Ass and Take Their Gas” bumper-stickers. Needless to say, I loaded up; I’m grateful that airport X-ray machines don’t show up books…

With sadness, I waved goodbye to the friendly natives of Arizona, and headed down to New Orleans. This was the part of the trip I was least certain about: I had a fairly good idea of what I was going to do the rest of the time, but New Orleans was something of an enigma. I’d seen plenty of movies set there, but on reflection, most were definitely on the dark side: Angel Heart is hardly a promotional device for the local Tourist Authority. My first encounter with the city seemed to confirm my worst fears, as I walked along the world-famous Bourbon Street, only to find it combined the most unpleasant aspects of Ibiza and the West End of London. Hideously touristy, powered almost entirely by alcohol, and with any jazz drowned out by the thumping disco beats from the numerous night-clubs which line its length. How long did I have to stay here? Three days. Er, is there any chance of changing my flight?

It has to be said that once you get away from Bourbon Street, the city improves beyond all recognition. It’s the only place in America I’ve been to that has any significant sense of history i.e. it has buildings built before the war — and the Civil War at that. Since I was brought up in a house which dates back to 1815, nothing younger provokes much in me, but the French Quarter has a timeless quality which makes it very pleasant to stroll around. [Slowly. Very slowly. Any activity beyond that causes immediate metamorphosis into a puddle of sweat] I didn’t bother going out of that area, apart from a bus tour, having heard dire stories about murder and robbery. I suspect, like most things, a certain amount of exaggeration has taken place, since dead tourists make good tabloid fodder — if you just exercise a modicum of common sense, as you should do anywhere, I don’t think you would have problems.

In the end, I had no trouble finding things to keep myself occupied, and indeed, there were a few that I wanted to do but had to miss out — would have liked to head out to the zoo and find a black panther to kiss, in the vague hope that it’d turn into Nastassja Kinski. [‘Cat People’ is another fine advert for the New Orleans Tourist Board] I also, sadly, didn’t get to see the musical version of Pretty Baby which was on at a local theatre… Instead, the highlight of the time in New Orleans was not the palatial homes in the Garden District, or the paddle steamer trip down the Mississippi to the site of the Battle of New Orleans (where the Americans kicked British ass — I suspect if the opposite had happened, it might not be getting quite as much tourist traffic 185 years later). The last night, I took a walking tour round haunted houses of the French Quarter, and the guide told some quite hair-raising stories. Naturally, these have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but the best of these is worthy of early Clive Barker, and concerns one Madame Lalaurie who…hell, I’ll give the story the space (and font) it deserves.

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Madame Lalaurie: She-Wolf of New Orleans

In 1830’s New Orleans, Madame Lalaurie had a certain odd reputation, despite being one of the leading lights of contemporary society. Her slaves were notoriously jumpy, flinching whenever you went near them, and there was also the mysterious, unexplained death of one girl who ‘fell’ from a third-floor balcony in Lalaurie’s house at 1140 Royal Street, a block down from Bourbon, an accident for which the owner was merely fined.

Then, one fateful day in April, 1834, a fire broke out in the kitchens. It rapidly spread beyond what the slaves could handle, and the fire brigade arrived, eventually bringing the blaze under control. As was required, they checked the house for trapped people and smouldering embers, and came across an attic room, sealed by a heavily barred door. They broke through, only to be sent reeling by a stench which, though hideous, was but a mere appetiser for the room’s contents…

To quote a contemporary newspaper, “Seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated, were seen suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other…These slaves…had been confined by the woman Lalaurie for several months…merely kept in existence to prolong their sufferings, and to make them taste all that the most refined cruelty could inflict”. Some of the slaves, of both sexes, were fastened to the wall; others were tied to makeshift operating tables. Organs and severed body parts were scattered around, and also kept in rows of jars on shelves. Most of the slaves were dead, but those still living were barely recognisable — one woman had all her limbs amputated, and most of the flesh removed from her skull, reducing her to a human caterpillar. Another woman, confined in a cage, had so many bones broken and reset, that she looked more like a crab than a person. On one wall was hanging a male who had apparently been the victim of a crude sex-change operation.

When word got out, an angry mob gathered at the house, but Lalaurie and her husband burst through them in their carriage, headed for the Mississippi, and fled, never to be seen again. People took to crossing the street rather than walk past the house, as some claimed to hear screams, moans and cries for help coming from the deserted residence, and it remained vacant for forty years. Eventually, the house was taken over by a group of Italian immigrants, lured by the cheap rent, but they were driven out after encounters with a white female phantom swinging a blood soaked whip, and ghost slaves bound in chains. Another future tenant, a furniture store owner, found his stock mysteriously ruined by a torrent of muck and filth; he waited, that night, with a shotgun for the vandals to return. The next day, the replacement goods were ruined, and the owner was teetering on the edge of lunacy. He didn’t stay around either.

The final, chilling edge came in the 1960’s; redevelopment work dug up the floor of the ballroom, on which many leading lights of New Orleans had danced in their day. Under it, lay corpses, numbering in the dozens: more victims of Lalaurie’s insanity. Worse still, scratch marks on the underside of the floor indicated she had disposed of her household before her departure, by the simple method of burying them alive. Those people who said they heard voices from the house, calling for help, had not been mistaken…

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Leaving New Orleans with pleasant thoughts of hideous medical experiments going through my head, I flew on to New York. This in itself was something of an experience, as part of the trip took place on the smallest plane I have taken on a commercial flight. To someone used to bigger craft – I went across the Atlantic on a Boeing 777, the largest passenger-plane in service – the sight of…well, propellers, was a throwback to an earlier era. It was reminiscent of the fan in my New Orleans hotel room, positioned right above the bed, which ran with a pronounced wobble and gave the distinct impression that it might crash down onto the bed at any moment. The plane sat only three abreast, and had less than a dozen rows — I almost expected the air-hostess (singular) to hand out flying helmets and goggles before the flight. Had a nasty moment, as we taxied out to the runway with only one engine running, the propeller on my side staying resolutely still. I was just working out how I should bring this to the attention of the stewardess (“Excuse me, miss, shouldn’t that be going round every now and again?”) when the pilot realised he’d forgotten something and turned it on…

I like New York. It’s somewhere else I can see myself living, apart from London, as it possesses the same degree of life and intensity – there’s always something going down – and it has the same cosmopolitan mix of people. Not quite living together like ebony and ivory-y-y-y, but it’s a city that seems to work despite the inevitable deficiencies and problems, like the bumblebee which flies because everyone has forgotten to tell it that it can’t. [Actually, that’s a myth, but why let scientific truth stop a good simile?]

There isn’t much to add about my time in New York, since I spent more time in Virgin, HMV and Tower than anywhere else. I had wanted to take in a baseball game, but the end-of-season playoffs had just started, and I never did quite work out how tickets were sold. Still, watching them on television had a certain decadence, sprawled on the bed of my tiny hotel room, with a six-pack of beer, eating cheese and crackers, like some low-life from a Martin Scorsese movie. I also got to see Michael Gingold again, whom I’d met the very first time I visited the city, when he was then doing Scareaphanalia. He’s now deputy editor of Fangoria, which is rather more career progression than I’ve managed over the intervening years. Beers were consumed, more excellent food eaten, and vast quantities of scurrilous and (probably quite unprintable) gossip discussed.

The flight back was notable only for the worst turbulence I’ve ever encountered — so bad that they had to stop serving dinner and strap the stewardesses in. [Lino, stop drooling!] We’re probably not talking anything really significant – the odd spilt glass of wine, perhaps – but what would have been minor on a roller-coaster takes on a great deal more significance at an unsupported 30,000 feet. I was more than mildly relieved when we came out the other side of the storm.

And so to Tulse Hill, pondering on how gravity is a lot stronger in Britain than America — what else can explain the massive apparent increase in weight of my luggage between JFK and Heathrow? It was a quite superb fortnight, with more jaw-dropping experiences than on any previous trip: while generally, you get maybe one or two per holiday, I was closer to one per day, especially in the first week. It had been a while since I’d been to America, but on the basis of this trip, it’s not going to be very long before I return once more.

Over the past year, there’s been a mini-tidal wave of cinematic Shakespeare, most taking the Bard out of his historical era in, presumably, an attempt to add contemporary relevance. Thus, Branagh moved Hamlet to the 19th century and Richard III saw Ian McKellen operating just before World War 2. The most savage dislocation, though, is Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-heavy Romeo and Juliet — passing Brixton Ritzy, which had it and Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, I was reminded that it’s certainly not the first gang-war version. Beside the well-known West Side Story there is also Ferrara’s China Girl, about love between the Italian and Chinese communities.

The romance at the heart of his 1987 movie is merely a symbol of larger events: when a Chinese restaurant opens in the rapidly-shrinking Little Italy, some Triad members want to “invade” Italian turf and collect their due. This brings them into conflict with their own race as well as, inevitably, the power of the Mafia. It requires no special skill to predict that the poor teenage couple in the middle will catch a great deal of flak. Unknown to them, they have surprising allies in the mob bosses of both communities – “peace is good”, says one Triad leader – but will that be enough?

In some ways, the film prefigures Ferrara’s King of New York, in which Christopher Walken played a mob boss also faced with rebellion in the ranks. The central theme of both is “loyalty in a changing world”; this should also be familiar from the Hong Kong movies of John Woo, where chivalric heroes try to adapt to the fact that honour no longer means anything, and the lead characters in China Girl must decide whether to go with their hearts or their heads. Like Woo, Ferrara is an “independent”, lured to Hollywood by the promise of big projects such as Bodysnatchers. His recent updating of the 50’s paranoid classic (already remade once before) had none of the lasting value of the original and was, like Broken Arrow, a spectacular empty shell. It never delivered on the promise of his earlier work and, unlike John Woo (who finally got it at least half-right with Face Off), Ferrara now seems to have returned to his roots. His vision of New York is as immediately identifiable as Woo’s Hong Kong: at first glance, this sense of place may seem about all the pair have in common, but in China Girl it’s possible to see other similarities to Woo’s work.

The New York it portrays is very male-dominated, something true for most of Ferrara’s movies, save Angel of Vengeance (Ms. 45), where Zoe Tamerlis was fearsome, yet plausible and sympathetic. Certainly there are women in China Girl but they are secondary, reactive characters: even relatively strong-willed, modern Tye (Sari Chang) takes little action on her own, requiring prompting by her boyfriend. This criticism is commonly levelled at Woo, whose ‘classic’ movies have hardly a single notable role for a woman. [It’s also true of Luhrmann’s Juliet, who does little save mope in her bedroom] Religion is clearly important to both directors, though with different levels of cynicism. Bad Lieutenant is shot through with Catholic symbolism and overtones, yet is more warped and twisted than any Woo film, where “faith” of some kind remains pure and untainted, even if all around crumbles to dust. China Girl has a brief shot of a statue of the Virgin Mary shattering, which has distinct similarities to The Killer and its climax in a church.

The parallels are imperfect. In Woo’s films, there is rarely any doubt over who are good guys, and who are villains — not quite black and white, certainly, but at least ‘slate’ and ‘cream’. The morality in China Girl, and Ferrara’s work in general, is much less clear-cut. He adopts an ambiguous tone, where the boundaries between heroes and villains is largely a point of view. In addition, Ferrara seems fiercely averse to happy endings, his heroes are not only killed, but usually fail to achieve their goals. this contrasts markedly to the “heroic bloodshed” pioneered by Woo, whose characters tend to die with the satisfaction of a job well done. Despite this, China Girl remains more a John Woo film than most he’s made since coming to America. But Woo at least seems happy with his current lot and it’s hard to envisage him returning to low-budget films in the near future. Only time will tell if either, both or none of these directors is able and willing to sustain a fully satisfactory critical and commercial transition to Hollywood.

Slightly more recognisable as Shakespeare – at least in some ways – is Tromeo and Juliet, a wild and twisted take on the Bard directed by Troma’s head honcho Lloyd Kaufman. To some extent, it is perhaps truer to the spirit than Luhrmann’s more technically accurate version, since it shifts large chunks of the dialogue into the 90’s too. Thus, we get: “A word with me? How about a word for me? Or better yet, how about a word for you? Let’s see, a word for Tyrone Capulet. Goofball. Dickbag. Peon. Freak. Cocksucker. Shithead. Ratcatcher. Geek…”.

Kaufman takes the text of Shakespeare as little more than a jumping-off point, from which spirals a typically Tromatic spin on the battle between the Capulets and the Ques — the latter provoked some puzzlement until it was discovered that the head of the family was called Monty. [Think about it…just not for too long…] This frees the makers from the agony of deciding whether or not to produce a full-length version (Shakespeare was the Tarantino of his day: overlong scripts padded needlessly with excessive, albeit very clever, dialogue) and the ending abandons R&J altogether, drifting closer to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But what is taken out is probably less important or interesting than what is added: severed body parts, creepy child abuse, an excruciating mondo nipple piercing, Lemmy the narrator (keeping his record of about one film every five years!), incest, a penis monster, plus Juliet and her nurse in a pleasant lesbian sex-romp. Given the makers, none of this is surprising and I think it’s safe to say that Kaufman is not exactly overawed by his subject matter.

If you know Shakespeare, you’ll get more out of this since it’s stuffed with in-jokes and appropriately warped references to his plays. However, it’s not required — anyone who ever sat through an English class will appreciate the porno CD-Rom, ‘As You Lick It’. The performances are good by most standards (and thus awesome by Troma ones) and while the production remains unashamedly cheap-jack, it’s a viable contender for the best Troma-made movie since the original Toxic Avenger. Which is probably a better reference point than any Shakespearean adaptation; if you enjoyed Toxie, you should like this screwed-up and thoroughly warped spin on the tale. Oh, and as ever with Troma, be sure to read all the end credits…

Irish set dancing may seem a slightly unlikely subject for this august publication to be covering, but I’ve been something of a fan since a Dublin trip in ‘96. Suspicions this interest might be put down to excessive Guinness consumption were dispelled on my mother’s 60th birthday, when we went to see ‘Riverdance’. If seeing three dancers operating in perfect synchronicity is impressive, seeing forty is bordering on the amazing. Besides, the appeal of seeing attractive women in short skirts, bouncing up and down, should really require no further explanation here.

That Michael Flatley, the former star of Riverdance, is one hell of a dancer can not be doubted. He has feet to compare with Fred Astaire, Ryan Giggs, and that bloke at the end of Drunken Master 2. Flatley supposedly left the show which either he made a star, or which made him a star (depending to whom you listen) over the old artistic chestnut of creative control, but since then, Riverdance has sailed serenely on without the slightest problem. As the trip to Dublin showed, light-footed Irish people are not exactly thin on the ground — anyone wandering round Temple Bar has to beware gangs of masked set dancers who leap out from around corners and tap-dance relentlessly for you. They just pulled in some bloke who was nine-times All-Ireland light-heavyweight Set Dancing champion, and have continued to play to packed houses across the nation and around the world, as well as shifting shed-loads of video-cassettes and so forth. At Easter, you could hardly avoid seeing it: I think there were four separate programs devoted to Irish set-dancing over the long weekend.

Flatley, however, not a man to take replacement lightly, came up with his own show, and it is quite, quite brilliant — albeit in a strikingly tacky way. Riverdance took traditional Irish dancing and prodded it gently into the 20th century, with obvious affection. Lord of the Dance drags it down the Hippodrome and pours margaritas down its throat. It’s the terpsichorean equivalent of ‘Showgirls’: wildly entertaining, but you can’t help watch, just to see what will happen next. It may or may not be the product of an utterly bloated ego – but if someone with an utterly bloated ego were to produce a show, the result would probably look not unlike Lord of the Dance.

The first half is relatively traditional — on odd occasions, the show clearly desperately wants to be Riverdance, with similar moves and much the same music cropping up. The most significant variation is the addition of heady amounts of sex into the equation, for no readily apparent reason. Thus, you get two blonde violin-toting babes, who play a sprightly duet clad almost entirely in PVC, like a pair of fetishist Vanessa-Maes. This was followed by a flame-haired vixen oozing around the stage looking very nice, to be eventually joined by a bunch of girls who rip their skirts off. Now, this sort of dancing I can cope with, and it began to look like Flatley was making a single-handed attempt to destroy the prevalent belief that all male dancers are cocoa-shunters. Either that, or it was a touching tribute to Riverdance’s roots in the Eurovision song contest. So far, so not entirely unexpected, nor unpleasant, though I could have done without gratuitous close-ups of Flatley’s groin, encased in tight trousers and with what appeared to be an entire sock drawer down there (including the drawer). Much of the show revolves around his (seemingly pre-oiled) flesh, and his absorption and encouragement of applause was scarily vampiric in its intensity. But in the second half, that things really started to warm up — or down.

One advantage of being a star is that you get a big dressing room. If this isn’t enough, why not make up your own show, give yourself the spiffiest costume, and become the hero in s spectacularily shallow depiction of the battle between good and evil? For this is what you get here: a mutated strain of Irish folklore, infected with Judaeo-Christian mythology. A kid, pretending badly to play ‘Lord of the Dance’ on a penny-whistle, has her instrument stolen and broken by some blokes in masks [Behaviour which immediately endeared them to me]. Flatley, the self-styled Lord of the Dance, descends into hell, battles the forces of evil, is apparently killed and – get this – rises from the grave to victory. Resisting temptation by the previously mentioned flame-haired vixen, he prefers instead the inevitable Good Girl in a smock. Flatley sticks the kid’s whistle back together (the sleight of hand involved will not be giving Paul Daniels sleepless nights) and after a few dozen rapturous curtain calls, we live happily ever after, flogging $25 baseball caps.

Now, if my memory of R.E. lessons is right, the song ‘Lord of the Dance’ is about Jesus… And Flately has himself resurrected in a crucifix position… And for most of the show, he has something suspiciously crown-of-thorns like round his head… Yep, all the evidence suggests that for his solo debut, he has opted to start at the top and play Jesus Christ. Ladies and gentlemen, the ego has landed. And this is not any Jesus Christ, this is Christ Van Halen, with flashing lights, pyrotechnics and leather trousers. Think Spinal Tap doing Jesus Christ Superstar down your local faux-Irish pub and you’re getting there. All that’s missing is John Wayne turning up to say “Surely this was the Son of God”. [Incidentally, after the first take of that line, the director said “Very good, John, but could you do it with more awe?”. And, of course, next time, John says “Aw, surely this was the Son of God”. Sorry. I’ve been wanting to use that joke for ages, and since this article is looking likely to come up a few lines short of two pages, here seems like an ideal point]

Just as no-one lets Giggs run Manchester United, Flatley really should have been dissuaded from putting on his own show, or at least from making it so blatantly Michael-centric. The dancing is great, but beneath the surface lurks a monster of self-aggrandisement and artistic pretension, the odd tentacle languidly breaking the surface. His upcoming (TC print deadline withstanding) July show in Hyde Park may be his last, but Flatley has made noises about moving into cinema next. Hey, I can hardly wait…

In case you hadn’t noticed, the millennium is coming. This is affecting people in different ways: religious cults from California to Japan are preparing for the apocalypse (and starting it if necessary), the government here is building a big dome thing at Greenwich, and publishers are flocking like lemmings to open up publications on strange phenomena.

A trip to the newsagent can now easily turn into ATA — that’s Attack of the Three-letter Acronyms, as you are assailed by magazines about UFOs, BEMs, ABCs, MiB, and JFK. Such publications have always existed, but not so long ago, Fortean Times was only available through mail-order and specialist book-shops. Admittedly, in the general interconnectedness of things, it’s hard to prove cause and effect, yet there seems to be a massive increase in what might be generically termed “weird shit”.

Whether the popularity of The X Files is a cause or merely the most obvious symptom is an interesting question. Chris Carter certainly seems to have tapped into a rich vein of the collective unconscious, and this has been reflected in the publishing world. Most of the magazines make at least a nod to the X Files, and in some cases, it’s a lot more blatant.

So, in order to take the temperature of the world’s zeitgeist (as it were), I carried out a sweep of such publications, consciously omitting anything hard to find — everything below came from W.H. Smith’s, indicating just how mainstream previously fringe beliefs now are. Going by the strange looks from the sales assistant, the first thing I learned is that I’d probably rather buy £20 worth of porn than £20 worth of UFO mags. “Would you like a plastic bag?”, she asked; I mumbled acceptance and stuffed the ‘research material’ away. However, it was of endless interest to my work mates, proving its millennial fascination even in the financial institution where I toil away.

The common theme is an acceptance of the existence of strange phenomena with a near-religious faith, albeit one varying from the Agnostic to the Fundamentalist Islamic in intensity. There may be quibbles over whether this or that piece of evidence are valid, yet this rarely distracts from a general feeling perhaps best summed up by Fox Mulder’s poster: “I want to believe”. As the Heaven’s Gate cult showed, UFOs and religion are often intertwined parts of the same thing. And here are the results. These magazines lend themselves less well to quantitative analysis, as the blokemags did — after all, the ads are part of the experience, even (or perhaps especially) if they’re for deeply sad stuff like Star Trek credit cards. Instead, I’ve rated each in a number of areas:

• Boggle — How off-the-wall are the contents? Football rates low, but “aliens abducted Reagan and replaced him with a cyborg” rates high. Though thinking about it…
• Plausibility — The more bizarre your topic, the more authoritative you need to be. Just as with films, the best make anything seem viable through reliable, authoritative writing.
• Longevity — There are mags you read once and dispose. Then there are those you carefully file away for future use – and I have cupboards of the damn things to prove it…
• Amusement — Probably the most important thing, assuming you read them for the same reasons I do. Take these with a jaundiced eye and a six-pack of beer to hand…

Alien Encounters #11, £2.99, pp84. Though nominally based around the UFO theme, this covers a broad range of topics, connected tangentially. Mind control, drugs, and coverage of film and television are all included in a multi-disciplinary approach. The writing is good, making the abstruse tech stuff interesting and clear. It also benefits from an apparent sense of humour – they even had an April Fool’s joke – that to some extent defuses an especially unquestioning tone, which appears a common problem with Paragon Publishing titles (see Uri Geller’s Encounters). The Bubblegum Crash article also makes it probably the only UFO magazine to have a gratuitous anime reference…

Bizarre #2, £2.50, pp100. The major problem here is that it isn’t. Bizarre, that is. Despite coming complete with a free mini-booklet of “The World’s Most Bizarre Facts Ever” (Example: “slugs have four noses”), it’s only marginally left-field. Many of the pieces, such as one on being a Tornado pilot, could have come from FHM, Maxim or GQ — it feels more like Loaded, though it’s from the same publisher as Fortean Times. While not badly written, the blokish approach seems hideously inappropriate to some topics, and I suddenly realised this is really one of the men’s mags reviewed last TC. Against them, it’d stand up very well, but compared to the rest of this selection, it contains absolutely nothing to give you sleepless nights, apart from some great photographs. [On the other hand, they did get me to do a piece on Category III Hong Kong movies, so I guess we can at least congratulate them on their excellent choice of writers…]

Enigma #4, £2.95, pp68. Takes a slightly different angle, in that UFOs are just one facet of a broad picture, and is also the mag with the most space dedicated to the world of conspiracy theory. Needless to say, this gives it an immediate appeal to me. The articles tend to be longer than average, five or six pages on average, but often the better pieces tend to be the brief and punchy ones: the ‘Men in Black’ column is an excellent Q&A piece. Less gullible than some of its competitors, I loved its tongue-in-cheek suggestion that passport booth pictures are part of a plot by the government to embarrass people into not wanting to leave the country.

Focus, May 1997, £2.30, pp124. This is a long-running publication that used to be a hard-science mag, but now the cover trumpets “SPACE CONSPIRACY” — albeit, this turns out to be with regard to the Apollo 1 fire, thirty years ago. There are also pieces on exotic animals i.e. Surrey pumas, but you feel it has been driven, grudgingly, into covering the paranormal by the rise of its competition; it’s done without much enthusiasm, and it’s easily the most sceptical mag on offer. However, the mundane stuff is well handled and interesting, and it’s this that proves the saving grace. Worth it on that basis if you’re a science fan, otherwise, skip it. This feels horribly like the sort of thing that would have cropped up in your school library. Apparently, the #1 greatest invention of all time is sanitation. This comes from a combination of reader’s votes, and “the considered recommendations of the Focus team of experts”. Which pretty much says it all about this mag’s lack of imagination.

Fortean Times #98, £2.50, pp68. Another veteran, this has been chronicling the strange since ‘Carter’ was just that bloke off The Sweeney. However, they too seem to have changed, and been forced downmarket: no way would the old FT have printed a totally uncritical “Moon Landing Hoax” piece. Going monthly seems to stretch both the data (it’s among the slimmest of the regular titles) and the style a bit thin — I strongly suspect pressure from the publishers to dumb things down significantly, with the more esoteric stuff being hived off into their annual “Studies” volume. However, it’s tongue in cheek approach is unrivalled, and with every clipping assiduously dated and located, it’s rise from ‘zinedom to W.H.Smith’s is unsurprising. I do find the relentless promotion of Schwa merchandising a tad irritating though: they’re now big enough not to need it. Still the best, but should certainly be looking over its shoulder in a worried manner.

UFO Magazine Jul/Aug 1997, £1.95, pp68. Missed in the initial sweep, it was presumably between issues on its bi-monthly schedule. The contents appear to be angled towards the ‘hardware’ side, with pieces on hypersonic planes, a satellite launch platform based on an oil rig, astronomy, and a lot on Cydonia and the Pathfinder mission to Mars. This comes across as a little on the dry side, and the ‘book reviews’ section concentrates mysteriously on titles available from…UFO Magazine! Plus some sloppy proof-reading i.e. “cynagoen” instead of cyanogen, and a design style that includes such dainty delights as white text on a light grey background. Yuk. Some good stuff on Roswell’s 50th anniversary though. S’ok, s’pose, but I see absolutely no reason why it should be “The world’s best-selling UFO publication”.

UFO Reality #7, £2.85, pp76. Skates on the thin-ice of self-indulgence, and occasionally falls through, most notably with an 8-page interview with…the editor, in which we learn about his stultifyingly uninteresting life. Between that, the advert for his novel, and all the stuff he writes, this is teetering precariously on the edge of vanity publishing, but let’s be charitable and call it a glossy fanzine instead. It also suffers from too much that is pure speculation, but there are good photos, a lively letters column, and a nice little report on a trip to Area 51, in which the writer sees…nothing much at all. It’s always nice to leaven the weirdness with a pinch of mundanity; perhaps this could be the first in a series i.e. “I failed to see the Loch Ness Monster”, or “I have absolutely no idea who shot Kennedy”.

Uri Geller’s Encounters #8, £2.99, pp84. Though Geller’s name seems to have mysteriously shrunk on the cover. inside, he does get a two page advert for various products linked to him, most of which look totally dreadful (though the novel looks interesting, in an Incredibly Bad sort of way). Describes itself as “The world’s most paranormal magazine” — presumably this means it’s laid out via some method of thought transference, and then teleports itself directly onto Smith’s shelves. Another Paragon title, and credulous beyond belief, as you can tell from this sample quote: “Ever since the Beatles’ famous White album was released with the hidden backward message ‘Paul is dead’…”. Utterly gullible, an interesting game would be to see who could get the bizarrest tale printed on their “Reader’s Stories” page; there’s no effort to investigate or verify them. Chuck in simple factual errors, and the most amazing thing you’ll learn is that people buy this sort of over-priced dreck. Cheap laffs a-plenty, but precious little else.

The X Factor #9, £1.75, pp32. This is actually a part-work from Marshall Cavendish, though it’s not immediately apparent from the cover – it managed to fool me, and the title is obvious a blatant attempt to associate itself with a certain TV programme! As a part-work, it’s obviously less well-up on current events, and with its low page count and large type, probably contains the least data, though the lack of adverts and full-colour content make up for this to some extent. It loses points for a laughably ill-informed article on the Internet: apparently unsuspecting users can sometimes stumble across child pornography accidentally…[yeah, but what are they browsing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children for?] There is, however, a good article on electromagnetic weapons, and I suspect that it would indeed “build into a complete library” — and needlessly clutter up your bedroom floor until you needed the space for something else, as I recall.

Title	Boggle	Plausibility	Longevity	Amusement	Total
Fortean Times	* * *	* * * *	* * * * *	* * * *	16
Enigma	* * *	* * * *	* * * *	* * * *	15
Alien Encounters	* * *	* * * *	* * *	* * * *	14
The X Factor	* * *	* * *	* * * *	* * *	13
UFO Reality	* * * *	* *	* *	* * *	11
Focus	*	* * * * *	* *	* *	10
Bizarre	* *	* * *	*	* * *	9
Uri Geller’s Encounters	* * * *	*	*	* * *	9
UFO Magazine	* *	* *	* *	* *	8

There was, however, one publication that I failed to acquire, on which I do regret missing out, even if it is not strictly available from W.H.Smith’s. The following advert was clipped from an un-named publication and sent to me:

Despite sending off my stamp to the address, I have yet to receive a reply…