The Dead Room, on PBS

Aubrey Judd is so old school, he largely built his reputation on radio. He still hosts the same long-standing ghost story program, but, much to his frustration, annoying hipsters now write most of the tales he reads. However, the script gets flipped in more ways than one in Mark Gatiss’s The Dead Room, which airs on participating PBS stations over the coming month.

Unlike The Tractate Middoth, this week’s Ghost Story (formerly “for Christmas”) is not based on a M.R. James classic. Here we have a Gatiss original, but perhaps he should have stuck with the master.

Regardless, hammy Judd is a perfect fit for the great Simon Callow. Frankly, Judd finds tonight’s story a bit tacky, because of the violence, but his new producer, Tara, believes it is the kind of contemporary work they need to spruce the show up. Ironically, they must record this week’s production in the old, shabby studio the show used to be produced in years ago.

Initially, Judd finds it rather nostalgic to return to his old “haunt.” At least that is what he tries to project for the benefit of Tara and Joan, their ancient, taciturn foley artist. Yet, he soon hears strange noises nobody else notices. Perhaps most ominously, the pages of his script in explicably re-arrange themselves into a completely different story. It rather unnerves him, but somehow he fails to recognize the significance of it all.

In terms of story, Dead Room is passable, but it is no M.R. James yarn. Clearly, Gatiss tries to bring “updated” contemporary social sensibilities to the venerable Ghost Story for Christmas tradition, but it possibly backfires. After all, Judd’s identity is central to his character and his actions, but they consequently lead to the sins he must account for.

Nevertheless, it is a pleasure to listen to Callow unleash his inner Vincent Price as he waxes poetic over great ghost stories and other assorted pleasures of life. Callow has the voice for it, so he ought to narrate more spooky tales for real.

The New Hammer’s New Doctor Jekyll

Is there a scarier name than Jekyll [Island], especially for gold standard advocates? Are you with me, monetary economists? Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its various films adaptations are also pretty frightening. The old classic Hammer made a gender-bender-ish version in 1971 with Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. That tradition continues in the first film from the latest corporate relaunch of the venerable British horror studio, Joe Stephenson’s Doctor Jekyll, which opens today in theaters and on-demand.

Dr. Nina Jekyll is a brilliant research scientist, just like her beloved grandfather, Henry (fittingly portrayed in a flashback by actor Jonathan Hyde). That is right, this is technically a sequel or a re-quel, which is cool. Ordinarily, Dr. Jekyll’s solicitor and confidant Sandra Poole would never allow an ex-con former drug addict like Rob Stevenson (can you guess his middle name?) apply for the position of Jekyll’s live-in care-giver, but somehow his application slipped through the cracks and the good doctor takes a shine to him. Poole is quite adamant about Jekyll taking her meds precisely according to schedule, but the ominous significance is initially lost on Stevenson.

Suddenly, Poole stops coming around, but Jekyll assures him everything is fine, so don’t worry. Nevertheless, Stevenson grows increasingly alarmed when Jekyll’s behavior exhibits marked signs of schizophrenia. On the other hand, he also feels pressure to stay and make the best of things, for the sake of his cancer-stricken daughter Stevenson has not yet been allowed to meet.

New Hammer’s new Doctor Jekyll has been billed as a transexual Jekyll and Hyde, but Dan Kelly-Mulhern’s screenplay so subtly establishes Nina Jekyll’s status as such, it will be lost on many viewers. However, the casting of Eddie Suzy Izzard arguably speaks directly to the point. In the past, Izzard has wisely counseled everyone to just chill out with respect to pronouns, recognizing both he and she are understandable in her case, especially when since she still plays roles of either gender, but in this case, she is indeed a she.

Regardless, Izzard is suitably creepy as both Nina and “Rachel.” She is suitably flamboyant for a modern-day gothic monster, but regardless of identification, she also still has sufficient size to tower over a skinny recovering junkie, like Stevenson. Frankly, this film probably would not work as well had someone else been cast. (That is not to say Martine Beswick was not convincingly lethal as “Sister Hyde.” She just represented a different, femme fatale kind of danger.)

The Pay Day, with Simon Callow

The best caper-heist movies are meticulously detailed. It’s that little stuff, like the umbrella catching the debris in Rififi that makes them fun. This film isn’t like that at all. In large measure, both the cast and characters seem to be making it up as they go along. However, if you adjust your expectations and settle in for some double- and triple-crossing trickery, there might be something to Sam Bradford’s The Pay Day, which releases today in theaters and on VOD.

Jennifer just got sacked from her London IT job, because her [former] boss is an exploitative shark. She already has an offer of sorts, but it is somewhat non-traditional. The mysterious mastermind calling himself Gates wants her to sneak into a big “City” bank’s corporate office to steal a list of dodgy accounts and their passwords. The source of the dirty funds is a bit vague and it seems to keep shifting from conversation to conversation, but she could certainly use her multi-million-Pound cut.

However, Jennifer has a harder time infiltrating the building than anticipated because of Gates’ junky intel. She also has to con her way around George, whom she assumes is an investment banker, but viewers can tell from his entrance, he is actually another thief trying to make the same big score. Yet, despite the circumstances, they have a weird flirty thing going on, even after she accidently shoots him.

As co-screenwriters, Kyla Frye and Sam Benjamin are more successful fooling the lead characters they play than the audience watching it pan out. However, it is rather lively. They made three previous short films together, so there is at least a pre-existing professional relationship there. Regardless, their chemistry in Pay Day works surprisingly well.

Macabro ’15: Chemical Wedding

While the fact is strenuously ignored by his subsequent devotees, L. Ron Hubbard was once an ardent follower of the notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley. That was when Hubbard and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) founder Jack Parsons were traveling in the same Pagan circles, so to speak. The relationship between the three men is indeed referenced in Iron Maiden lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson’s screenwriting debut, but it is the connection to Parsons that will have greater significance in Julian Doyle’s way-better-than-reported Chemical Wedding (a.k.a. Crowley, trailer here), which screens as part of a retrospective tribute (or whatever) to Crowley at the 2015 Macabro, the International Horror Film Festival in Mexico City.

In 1947, Crowley’s earnest young understudy Symonds was present at his death, but it will not be the last time he sees the dark magus. Flashing forward to 2000, Symonds has forsworn the occult as a respected Cambridge professor. As the Florida recount rages, Dr. Joshua Mathers arrives from Cal Tech to test his Virtual Reality simulator using the university’s powerful super-computer. Unbeknownst to Mathers, his Cambridge colleague Victor Neuman is also a budding occultist, who performs an off-the-books experiment, programming Crowley’s information into the computer while twittish classics professor Oliver Haddo is wearing the VR suit.

As you might expect, Haddo is a different man when he steps out of the Z93. His stutter is gone, replaced by an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible and a voracious sexual appetite. He is indeed Crowley and he has big plans. Symonds understands how dangerous it will be if he completes the resurrection process, so he advises Mathers and Cambridge student journalist Lia Robinson as best he can. Unfortunately, her red hair will attract Crowley’s attention, in a very bad way.

Frankly, the prospect of revered British character actor and Orson Welles biographer Simon Callow going all in as Crowley is reason enough to see Chemical, but Doyle & Dickinson also wrote a considerably inventive narrative around him. Admittedly, the logic and believability of their pseudo-science is hit-or-miss. However, ambition of its scope is rather impressive. Chemical stakes out the territory where metaphysics and theoretical physics intersect—and it is quite a bloody crossroads.

Perhaps realizing he will not have many more opportunities to exercise his Hammer Horror muscles, Callow makes the most of Chemical, luxuriating in Haddo’s agonizing stutter and feasting on scenery as the reincarnated Crowley. Similarly, John Shrapnel is aptly malevolent and larger than life as the 1947 Crowley. Although the film’s aesthetics are stacked against their conventionally unassuming characters, Kal Weber and Lucy Cudden still manage to show some presence and energy as Mathers and Robinson, respectively. However, it is Paul McDowell who really anchors the film and sells its third act revelations as the older and wiser Symonds.

For a demonic horror film co-scripted by a heavy metal rock star, Chemical Wedding is surprisingly tweedy and thoroughly British. It is indeed a throwback to old school Hammer-Amicus films, but one informed by post-Uncertainty quantum mechanics. Pretty cool really (and also available on DVD), Chemical Wedding screens this Thursday (8/27), along with the wonderfully eccentric Karloff-Lugosi vehicle The Black Cat, as part of the Crowley-inspired programming at this year’s Macabro.