In Any Colour You Want.

There has been precious little zombie-orientated news here of late, and I can only apologise. Profusely.

I watched Black Sheep, and it's essentially everything you could expect from a movie about zombie sheep (and were-sheep), even if it's perhaps not everything you might want. It's funny, but not Braindead funny. It's clever, but not Braindead clever. It's gory, and I'm sure you get the idea, bright buttons that you are.

It was always set up as a spriritual succesor to Peter Jackson's gore epics, not necessarily the brightest move. Because, while it is a pretty good film all told, they seem to have been shooting for a 15 (or whatever the backwater equivalent is) and are just not prepared to invest in the sheer volume of high-velocity innards required to satisfy the sort of people that are the habitual audience of such films. Add to this some fairly unlikable characters, and a fundamental failure to grasp the fact that, just for two minutes of act three, your everyman / underdog hero must morph into Arnie circa The Running Man, and you have inevitable dissapointment.

Perhaps I just need to learn to switch off. Or start drinking like I used to.

Speaking of Half-Finished Tripe...

You might remember that a while ago I asked for the help of my loyal readership in navigating the choppy waters of the internet. And you might also remember not lifting a fucking finger to help me. So, I hope you're happy that I decided to use my newfound technologies to watch Torchwood.

BBC iPlayer is a hilarious thing. It's basically what everyone expected digital TV to be when it was first mooted, albeit in a viewable window the size of a small postcard. I do think that it's a genuinely brilliant thing, and so I feel a little disappointed in myself for only having used it for Torchwood. But then, as previously discussed, the blame lies squarely with you.

I originally abandoned watching the show a couple of episodes into the first series, and assumed that it would have maintained the same trajectory it had set out on. I fully expected, a full series on, that the folks of Torchwood 3 would be fighting (sexy) space crime using nothing but their genitalia. That was not the case, so chalk one up for pleasant surprise.

The episode I saw was called 'Out Of Gas' 'Fragments', and those of you that are vaguely culturally literate will already have gathered that it takes place as a series of flashbacks. In the midst of horrendous accident (and explosion set off by the malicious little cube things from Terrahawks), the history of how they all got together as the happy all-singing pansexual brigade of alien-fighting misanthropes. It is exactly the same structure as the aforementioned Firefly episode, but is written with less than a fraction of the elan.

At this point you might be thinking: "Torchwood? I've some puppies for you to kick if you need an easy target." But hold on. It (as is rapidly becoming standard in these rants) wasn't all that bad. Given that I genuinely was prepared for a show in which the most glamorous people in all Cardiff lined up to felate John Barrowman while disinterestedly waving a Luger with whichever hand they weren't using to cup, it was pretty good for the first twenty minutes. Cap'n Bigcoat's drunken ride through time with steely Victorian lesbians was genuinely entertaining. It all trailed off a bit after that though, until James Marsters appeared, playing a character called Peter Fanservice. He looked a bit like a pirate. But a holographic one. Which, by pirate standards, is pretty lame. Long story short - Torchwood is worse than most shows, but better than botulism. It has picked up somewhat.

As if to balance this unceasing generosity, we now come to The Simpsons Movie. I avoided this in cinemas, because I don't take disappointment in the cinema with anything resembling grace. My cries of anguish during Transformers gave birth to a new universe.

I finally picked it up, as it is now very cheap on DVD. This is because it is shit. It's shit of the highest order. There are no jokes per se, just a frantic rush to get a succesion of minor characters shoehorned in so they can have a tiny, unfunny character moment before they vanish again.

If anyone would like a copy, let me know. Otherwise I'm going to grind it up and sprinkle it on my cereal.

I'll be taking those puppies now.

The Welsh are Coming.

Jeff Minter is upset. This doesn't happen often, as he's a happy-go-lucky scamp. He spends his days frolicking in the Welsh hills, popping home every now and then to tend to his llamas, ingest mind-fucking quantities of mind-fucking psychotropic drugs, and program unplayable videogames.

Says Jeff:

"OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, ***** arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga. We'll shut up trying to do anything new then. Sorry for even trying."

Jeff's upset because an old, ***** arcade game, Frogger outsold his latest game, Space Giraffe by 10 to 1 last week. Jeff thinks it's unreasonable that no-one wanted his nice 'new' game. Jeff's new game is essentially another remake of Tempest, an old, ***** arcade game, but with different enemies and a more complicated scoring system.

It seems churlish to point out that people may have bought Frogger because they weighed up their options, and went for a game that doesn't make your brain slough away and trickle through your nose in fleshy chunks. But I did it anyway.

***** means shite, by the way.