Month: July 2021

Write Those Essays: On Letting Go of Limiting Yourself — BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog

By Susan Barr-Toman Four years ago, I attended an author event for Martha Cooley’s Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss. At the time I was stuck. I was a novelist, who couldn’t make stuff up anymore. Years before I’d studied fiction in grad school and had workshopped with Cooley. Back then, I was adamant about being […]

Write Those Essays: On Letting Go of Limiting Yourself — BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog

Apply the (Perhaps) Most Famous Fiction Exercise of All Time to Your Essays — BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog

By Michael Noll A few years ago, I talked my way into teaching a magazine writing course at a major university despite having almost no magazine experience. I focused on very short essays like the ones published by Brevity and introduced what seemed to me to be the major elements of the form, pointing to […]

Apply the (Perhaps) Most Famous Fiction Exercise of All Time to Your Essays — BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog

THE THORN BIRDS: MINI-SERIES. (1983) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©


THE THORN BIRDS. (1983) DIRECTED BY DARYL DUKE. BASED ON THE 1977 BLOCKBUSTING BOOK BY COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH. THEME MUSIC BY HENRY MANCINI.
STARRING RICHARD CHAMBERLAIN, RACHEL WARD, BARBARA STANWYCK, JEAN SIMMONS, BRYAN BROWN, CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER, RICHARD KILEY, MARE WINNINGHAM, PHILIP ANGLIM AND KEN HOWARD.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I absolutely loved this sprawling mini-series set in the Australian outback, on a massive old ranch called Drogheda built by originally Irish settlers. In Ireland, we would pronounce this word as, phonetically, ‘Droh-hedda,’ but the characters in the film make the ‘g’ hard and pronounce it as ‘Drog-eeda,’ a sound painful to the genuinely Irish ear, lol. You’d think they’d have consulted an actual Irish person regarding the pronunciation of this very Irish word, but how-and-ever…

On the one hand, it’s the story of the Irish Cleary family, headed by Paddy, who come from New Zealand to live on Drogheda in the early 1920s, as caretakers and labourers for Paddy’s older, millionaire sister, Mary. Mary is played by one of the queens of the old movies, Barbara Stanwyck.

It’s a hard, relentless life in New South Wales, with the weather and the unforgiving terrain constantly chucking curveballs at anyone brave enough- or crazy enough- to try to make a living there, and the arrogant, manipulative Mary never lets the Clearys forget who owns the land and the house and who controls the purse-strings.

Paddy is a plain honest labouring man who married the aristocratic, unsmiling Fiona- Jean Simmons- when she was knocked up and desperate. She spends the whole series looking down her nose at everything that goes on and bearing with an air of martyrdom the hardships and privations of her life with Paddy. She loves her sons, especially Frank, that wee cuckoo in the nest, but her youngest child and only daughter Meggie doesn’t get so much as a look in.

Don’t worry about Meggie, though, folks. She’s not doing too badly. She has something I never had as a child, and that’s her very own pet priest, the swoonsomely handsome and charismatic priest with the romantic name, Fr. Ralph de Bricassart, played by Richard Chamberlain. This is the main storyline of the four episodes, the theme of forbidden love.

Fr. Ralph is the padre to their neck of the woods in New South Wales. From the moment the pair set eyes on each other when Meggie comes to Drogheda at the age of about ten, a bond is formed between them that not even God himself can put asunder, even though the ancient Mary Carson has eyes for the priest herself and is savagely jealous of his relationship with Meggie.

Fr. Ralph is bewitched by the feisty, lonely little Meggie from the start, and she’s thrilled to have someone so kind and, it must be said, devastatingly good-looking, to dance the attention on her that she never gets from her parents. Paddy is just too busy, and Fiona doesn’t care about her daughter anywhere near as much as she cares for her sons, especially her eldest, Frank.

What’s a daughter, anyway, she muses later in the show, but a younger version of herself who’ll make all the same mistakes and endure all the same hurts and suffering as she did, because the life of a woman- in those days at least- is all pain and suffering and not a whole hell of a lot else.

When Meggie is a child, Fr. Ralph keeps her dangling on a string like a little adoring puppet, probably because it’s great for his ego. He gives her a million mixed messages along the way, like, I do love you, Meggie, but of course I can’t marry you, because I’m married to God. A great cop-out for the holy man, and it never fails to unsettle and confuse Meggie.

But when Meggie grows into the beautiful, ballsy woman she eventually becomes and starts demanding real, grown-up love things like sex and a proper relationship and even marriage, Fr. Ralph finds it a lot trickier to come up with reasons why they can’t be together, usually falling back on his love of God and the Church to keep the red-blooded but frustrated young woman at bay, while never releasing her altogether from his thrall. Bit dog-in-the-manger, that.

But Meggie won’t be messed about forever. She even flounces off to Queensland and endures a horrible marriage to the sheep-shearing, cane-cutting emotionally constipated he-man Luke O’Neill- played by Bryan Brown- to show Fr. Ralph just how ‘over’ him she is. You’re fooling no-one, Meggie Cleary O’Neill…

Eventually, the love and physical attraction between Meggie and her padre will be denied no longer. It overflows in a long-overdue explosion of honest-to-goodness lust on a beautiful desert island, after which time the pair will never be the same again. It’s a time for decisions, for making one’s mind up, for putting one’s money where one’s mouth is. Who will Ralph choose, his God, or his Meggie…?

Parallel to the love story is the almost meteoric rise of the ambitious Fr. Ralph up through the ranks of Mother Church, thanks to a legacy of doubtful morality. Christopher Plummer is witty and wise as Archbishop Vittorio, Ralph’s mentor in no less exalted a place than the Vatican itself.

The clever, all-seeing Archbishop has designs on the Papacy and he plants the seeds of a similar ambition in Ralph. If Ralph was still just a humble and unknown cleric in the Australian outback, it might be easier to leave the priesthood for Meggie, but now he has the fabulous materialistic trappings of a religious career in Rome to lose if he decides to give up everything for love. Is it a case of I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that…?

The beautiful legend of the actual ‘thorn-bird,’ probably made up, is so poignant it had me in floods of tears. Summer is the perfect time to watch this epic and awesome mini-series with the gorgeous theme tune by Henry Mancini. It’s got hardships, privations, outback fires and wild boar attacks on the one hand, and civilised Greek theatre, sex on the beach and Kissing the Archbishop’s Ring on the other. Lol.

It’s only rated 12s, as there’s no nudity or swearing in it, so you can watch it with- most of- the family, and, if you’re looking to end July in a glorious blaze of doomed romance, it’ll do the job perfectly.

Plus, as a nice little bonus, it features some serious members of Hollywood royalty in it too, the stars of such classic films as DOUBLE INDEMNITY, THE ROBE, SPARTACUS and THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Ideal for those lazy, hazy post-lockdown days…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

DAILY ART FIX: New Painting “A Ghost from a Wishing Well” — THE REMODERN REVIEW

Richard Bledsoe “A Ghost from a Wishing Well” acrylic on canvas 16″ x 12″ Since my youth I’ve been haunted by a mysterious and beautiful song. I put those feelings onto a canvas. ************** RICHARD BLEDSOE is a visual story teller; a painter of fables and parables. He received his BFA in Painting from Virginia […]

DAILY ART FIX: New Painting “A Ghost from a Wishing Well” — THE REMODERN REVIEW

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: EPSTEIN’S SHADOW. (2021) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©


GHISLAINE MAXWELL: EPSTEIN’S SHADOW. (2021) A 3-PART DOCUMENTARY SERIES DIRECTED BY BARBARA SHEARER.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Wow. This story has it all. Tragic beginnings in Hitler’s Holocaust, two ridiculously wealthy and powerful self-made men dying in questionable circumstances, and the dramatic fall from grace of the beautiful, well-connected socialite who had been the right-hand woman to each of the two. I was glued to this utterly gripping ‘true crime’ documentary from start to finish.

Ghislaine Maxwell, now aged 59, is the woman in question. Her father, Robert Maxwell, most of whose family died in Auschwitz, was a sort of real-life Citizen Kane, a newspaper/publishing magnate who didn’t get to where he was in life by being a pushover. A polite way of saying that he completely lacked a working moral compass, according to some of the people who’d known him.

Ghislaine, the youngest of his nine children, was his pet, his princess, and, in later years, his social ambassador and the woman he preferred over his wife Betty to have on his arm at social functions.

Betty was, seemingly, a rather nondescript wife and mother who never stepped in to protect her children from their notoriously bullying father’s wrath. But no matter, Ghislaine was his everything, and he was hers.

Ghislaine, we’re told, lived the high life during her father’s ‘reign’ in a way we peasants couldn’t even begin to imagine. ‘Champagne lifestyle’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. Luxury yachts, private jets, holidays all over the world, clothes, jewellery, an address book stuffed with rich and powerful connections, you name it, she had it.

That particular era of her life came to an end when her almost universally loathed father was mysteriously found dead, floating in the Atlantic ocean near his yacht, the ‘Lady Ghislaine,’ in November of 1991.

Much is made in the documentary of the fact that when Ghislaine arrived at the yacht after the news of the death broke, she immediately started ‘shredding documents,’ supposedly related to Daddy’s ‘shady’ business dealings…

Maxwell’s publishing empire collapsed after his death. His name was utterly disgraced and blackened when it was discovered that he’d stolen millions of pounds from his own company’s pension funds to save himself from bankruptcy.

In the documentary, Ghislaine, a proper Daddy’s Girl if ever there was one, looks visibly shaken at his funeral in Jerusalem, but don’t worry, folks, she doesn’t remain down in the mouth for long.

She goes to live in New York and re-invents herself there, with the money from her trust fund (eighty grand a year), as a glittering socialite. Not exactly a huge leap for the woman of whom it is said in the film that, when she was greeting and air-kissing you at a party, she’d be busy looking over your shoulder for someone richer, more powerful, more influential than you. Nice lady, huh?

She hooked up with dodgy financier Jeffrey Epstein around this time. Some people maintain that she’d known him since the late ‘80s when she was introduced to him by her father in London, while most people seem to think she met him in the early ‘90s in America. It probably doesn’t really matter when she met him. What matters is what they became to each other…

Ghislaine quickly became a number of things to Epstein. Varying reports describe her as being everything from his Girl Friday, housekeeper and administrative assistant to his glamorous girlfriend, his entrée to social circles he might otherwise have been denied and his sort-of-wife.

He’s described her himself, rather unflatteringly, I think, as his ‘best friend,’ and, knowing what we now know about Epstein’s predilections for sex with teenage girls as young as fourteen, I’m not even convinced that they had a proper man-woman sexual relationship. He mightn’t have even been capable of such a thing.

It seems to be generally accepted now that Ghislaine procured underage girls for sex with Epstein and a ‘ring’ of his rich, powerful male friends. The private plane that flew girls to his idyllic island hideaway, nicknamed ‘Paedophile Island,’ was itself dubbed ‘the Lolita Express’ by the local Virgin Islanders.

Jeffrey had an insatiable sexual appetite, it seems, and at least three young girls a day were required to give him the infamous ‘massages’ that ended in sex, or in his ‘pleasuring’ himself in their presence. Eeuw, seriously.

When the girls left his fabulous 71st Street Manhattan apartment in tears, Ghislaine would explain to their ‘door-lady’ Maria Farmer, herself a victim of the pair, that they’d failed an audition to model for Victoria’s Secret, a company with which Jeffrey was connected through his billionaire mentor, Leslie Wexner.

It’s mentioned in the documentary that Ghislaine often had to hang around school gates in order to recruit these girls. She apparently targeted girls who didn’t look ‘rich,’ because rich girls had nannies and au pairs and were picked up by chauffeurs and had people who checked up on them and what-have-you. Poor or working-class girls, not so much.

This fact is extremely significant. If these girls had been rich or connected, the authorities might have worked a little harder to put Jeffrey Epstein behind bars when reports of assaults and sexual irregularities began to trickle through to them. Maria Farmer, an artist, is extremely articulate, presentable and likeable, and, in the film, her frustration with law enforcement comes through loud and clear.

Money talks, and we all know it. Money is what ‘saved’ Jeffrey Epstein from the worst effects of the first tranche of allegations against him in the ‘Noughties. It didn’t save him, however, from a lonely ‘suicide by hanging’ in a prison cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in August, 2019. There are reasons to suggest he died under questionable circumstances, but we, the reading public, are unlikely to ever be privy to the real truth.

Ghislaine languishes now in a Brooklyn prison cell, awaiting trial on charges relating to the sex trafficking of minors. The trial is set for this November and she’s denying all the charges. Her lawyers will probably try to use an immunity-for-Ghislaine clause in the Jeffrey Epstein ‘sweetheart deal’ of the late ‘Noughties to get her off.

Failing that, they’ll probably claim that she was as much a victim of Epstein’s depravity as the girls he raped. That would be so hard for the victims to bear. I feel sure they’re dreading the prospect of Ghislaine slithering off the hook like, in a way, Jeffrey Epstein did, by utilising the ultimate cop-out of suicide.

The film makes much of the fact that Ghislaine went from the arms of one uber-powerful alpha male, i.e., her dad, to another such man, Jeffrey Epstein. Does the fact that this is the kind of man she gravitates to excuse her behaviour? I doubt if the victims would think so, but it’s almost a certainty that her lawyers will bring this up at trial and try to make it count for something.

Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew are all pictured with Ghislaine and Jeffrey in the documentary, in the photos we’ve come to know so well by now. After the photo of him with the underaged Virginia Roberts Giuffre went public around the world, Prince Andrew tried to rescue his reputation in that disastrous television interview of late 2019, but even Lady Victoria Hervey, one of Ghislaine’s former friends, thinks he’d have been better off keeping his trap shut.

So, what will happen to Daddy’s Little Princess, who once said of the victims, ‘These girls, they’re nothing,’ in her trial of November, 2021? How will the story of Ghislaine Maxwell eventually pan out? Will there even be a trial?

Will her lawyers get her off on a technicality, or through a spectacular loophole that we haven’t even thought of yet? Will justice be done, or will money kick justice’s arse yet again? One thing’s for sure. We’ll all be watching…  

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

SPACED. (1999-2001) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©


SPACED. (1999-2001) DIRECTED BY EDGAR WRIGHT. CREATED AND DIRECTED BY SIMON PEGG AND JESSICA STEVENSON. STARRING SIMON PEGG, JESSICA STEVENSON, NICK FROST, MARK HEAP, KATY CARMICHAEL AND JULIA DEAKIN.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a very British sitcom, of both the satirical and surreal kind, about a group of twenty-somethings who have watched a huge amount of television and films and played an enormous number of computer games in their time. Ditto their creators. It’s only just come to my attention, twenty-odd years after its conception, and I’m glad it has.

I really enjoyed it and found it entertaining, except where they were basing storylines on things I hadn’t personally watched and didn’t care for, like ROBOT WARS. Also, believe it or not, I don’t much dig the whole STAR WARS franchise, although I did laugh at the bits where Simon Pegg’s character had been traumatised by the ‘90s trilogy of prequels, was it, that kicked off with THE PHANTOM MENACE. I know a lot of die-hard fans had trouble accepting Jar Jar Binks into the STAR WARS family.

Oh, and I hated the bits of SPACED that were all about guns and paintballing and masculine pursuits like that, although I loved the character of Mike, who’s in the Territorial Army and positively lives for guns and tanks and military manoeuvres and such-like. But let’s go back and start at the beginning, shall we? I’ve heard that that’s a very good place to start…

Simon Pegg (SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ, WORLD’S END, PAUL) plays Tim Bisley, an occasionally unemployed graphic artist who works in Bilbo Baggins’s comic book shop. Bilbo is played by Bill Bailey, by the way, the co-star, along with Dylan Moran, of the superb BLACK BOOKS which came along shortly after SPACED.

Tim is very boyish-looking and even more boyish in manner. All he really wants to do is go on the Play-station with Mike, his best buddy who’s in the TA’s, and simulate battles with him, whether on the computer or physically, on and around the couch.

Mike is played by Nick Frost, by the way, Pegg’s partner in the Cornetto trilogy of movies, and he- Mike- once stole a tank while in the TA’s and tried to, ahem, invade Paris. Yes, I said Paris, and, no, I don’t know why…

Tim puts Mike and their comic-book-and-movie-related conversations and re-enactments ahead of anyone or anything else in his life, and yet he’s still surprised when his girlfriend Sarah dumps him for his supposed friend, Duane Benzie. Duane is a real man, as opposed to Tim’s very obviously still-a-boy-and-likely-to-remain-so-unless-he-gets-some-kind-of-rude-awakening persona.

Maybe Sarah doesn’t want a boyfriend who takes recreational drugs until he hallucinates and puts skateboarding and science fiction conventions ahead of her in the pecking order. I can’t say I blame her. There comes a point in every woman’s life when she needs a man, a real man, and not a lad who wants to make a working robot to impress his mates more than he wants to be with you…

Daisy Steiner, played by comic genius Jessica Stevenson (THE ROYLE FAMILY, BLACK BOOKS), is an unemployed wanna-be writer living in a squat when she meets Tim by chance in a café. Tim is homeless now too after being dumped by Sarah, so the two of them, Tim and Daisy, decide to get a flat together, which would solve their immediate housing problems.

They end up pretending to be a ‘professional couple’ in order to rent a flat owned by their new landlady, Marsha Klein, a game old gal who’s got two ex-husbands and a bit of a wild past life under her belt. She hasn’t too much to do these days and so takes a keen motherly interest in the lives of her tenants.

Marsha has a bolshy teenage daughter called Amber whom we never properly meet, and she’s (Marsha) a chain-smoking alcoholic who’s almost certainly had sexual relations with Brian, her younger lodger; he’s a conceptual artist who specialises in painting his own angst, lol, and possesses very little in the way of social skills.

Marsha is probably my favourite character, next to Daisy. She’s been there and done that- just ask Mick Jagger and the lads!- and wouldn’t mind finding a little love again before she’s tossed unceremoniously onto the romantic scrapheap, as happens to us all at some stage. Could love in fact be right under her nose, in the form of a certain Mike…?

Daisy and Tim quickly settle into their new surroundings. They get an adorable Scottie dog called Colin, Mike is round all the time calling for his soulmate Tim to come out and play, and Daisy’s shallow fashion victim bezzie mate Twist falls for Brian, much to poor Marsha’s distress.

Tim gets fired from his job at the comic book store for refusing to accept THE PHANTOM MENACE into the STAR WARS franchise, and Daisy also becomes unemployed after writing a few pieces for magazines. She wants to be a writer, but she can’t seem to just get her arse in that chair in front of that typewriter (typewriter???) and bloody well write something.

I feel her pain, lol. I’ve hardly typed a word myself since this wretched heatwave began. Any excuse to bunk off. First it was the pandemic, then it was the American presidential election, now it’s the ruddy heat, haha. What will it be next? Global warming…? Could be, could be…

Tim gets a new girlfriend called Sophie, but, typical bloke that he is, he fails to notice the feelings that Daisy clearly has for him, bubbling away just under the surface of her bright ‘n’ breezy exterior.

Will he see what’s so obviously right under his nose, or will he blow it and just stand by and watch Daisy as she slouches sadly off to Colwyn Bay to a job she doesn’t want, because she thinks there’s no future for her at the house in Meteor Street…?

The series is bursting with references to films and popular culture, everything from PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK to THE SHINING, from THE ROYLE FAMILY to TRAINSPOTTING, from THE MATRIX to, of course, the much-mentioned STAR WARS and all its bright shiny constellations, including THE PHANTOM MENACE and the despised Jar Jar Binks, lol. Some references I didn’t get because I’m not a bloke who spends his life playing computer games or reading graphic novels, but the ones I got I loved.

The familiar faces you might recognise popping up as one-off characters include Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith from THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, Ricky Gervais, David Walliams, Bill Bailey- him that won STRICTLY COME DANCING in 2020!- Kevin Eldon and, of course, Peter Serafinowicz as the deliciously deeply-voiced Duane Benzie. Remember when he talked Fran to orgasm in BLACK BOOKS once? He’s one of those blokes about whom it is said that they could recite the phone book and birds would find it sexy…

SPACED is a lovely warm nostalgic comedy with some very clever writing from two people who clearly love films and the horror genre, and, quite honestly, it livened up an exceptionally dull week in this rather confusing post-Covid (or, are we post-Covid yet?) world we’re inhabiting at the moment.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m taking my entertainment where I can get it these days. Every day could be your flamin’ last. So head off to Meteor Street and see who’s about. At the very least, there’ll be a bottle of something cold and wet standing open…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1781994234

CRAWL. (2019) A TERRIFIC CREATURE FEATURE REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

CRAWL. (2019) DIRECTED BY ALEXANDRE AJA. WRITTEN BY MICHAEL RASMUSSEN AND SHAWN RASMUSSEN. CO-PRODUCED BY SAM ‘THE EVIL DEAD TRILOGY’ RAIMI.

STARRING KAYA SCODELARIO AND BARRY PEPPER.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Wow. Note to self. Never, ever go to Florida, for any reason. Florida has two things I can well do without in my life: Category 5 hurricanes and giant alligators. The movie CRAWL contains both these elements. It’s a film about a young woman called Hayley Keller, her injured father Dave and their adorable bow-wow, Sugar, who are all trapped in the crawl space of their house during a hurricane.

Thanks to the hurricane, their town’s levees have burst their banks and the town is flooded. Ergo, the crawl space in question is rapidly filling up with water. They might have known this would happen; their town is rather tellingly called ‘Coral Lake.’ Coral Lake, people? Lake equals water equals flooding in a hurricane equals, well, drowning.

What makes Hayley and Dave’s situation even worse- trust me, it can get worse- is the fact that their crawl space is also rather swiftly filling up with giant alligators, nature’s most amphibious predators.

I mean, sharks are scary but you’re not likely to meet one in the Walmart car-park, are you, whereas alligators… You see what I mean? Stay the hell out of the water and JAWS won’t get you. (Yes, I call the shark Jaws, lol; do your worst, JAWS purists!) But alligators are a double threat.

Things Hayley and Dave have going against them: the hurricane, the flooding, the giant alligators, Dave’s injury, the fact that the giant ‘gators have broken Hayley’s phone, the little blighters, and eaten the one person who might actually have helped/saved them. The peril/danger/tension has been ratcheted up to the highest level, pretty much.

Things in Hayley and Dave’s favour: Hayley is a superb swimmer, the ‘apex predator,’ whatever that is, of the school swim team. Also, Hayley is courageous to the max and as resourceful as MacGyver trapped in a pressure cooker with only a woman’s brassiere and a stick of gum about his person to help him find a way out of his predicament.

Hayley is gritty and determined. She’s going to get her old man out of the crawl space and away from the giant ‘gators if it costs her every limb on her body and, judging by the way the ‘gators are snapping and chomping on her like she’s the piece de resistance at the buffet table, it just might come to that.

Also, she and Daddy have been somewhat estranged since Daddy broke up with Mummy- it’s not really either of their faults; sometimes this shit just happens- and she’s not going to let him die before she’s had a chance to properly thrash out her unresolved feelings of guilt and anger towards him. Can she save both her father and their troubled relationship…?  

The alligator action is superb and consistent. Unlike in JAWS, where you only catch glimpses of the shark before the grand finale, there’s no shortage of toothsome action, which I like.

CRAWL will deservedly take its place amongst other terrific croc-and-shark creature features such as ROGUE (2007), BLACK WATER (2007), 47 METERS DOWN (2017) and BAIT (2012), DINO CROC AND SUPER GATOR (2010), THE REEF (2010), OPEN WATER (2003) and OPEN WATER 2: ADRIFT (2006).

The addition of dozey looters Marv, Stan and Lee (geddit???) is a nice touch and, of course, the movie is co-produced by Sam ‘EVIL DEAD’ Raimi. Kaya Scodelario is an excellent actress and she has no trouble at all carrying off her leading role with grit and panache.

It’s been suggested by some that the climate change element of the film is more troubling than the alligator storyline. Given what’s happening in Europe at the moment with the flash floods that have actually destroyed homes and taken lives, and the unaccustomed heat here in Dublin, Ireland that has me confined to the chaise-longue all day, one could well believe it. But, credit where credit’s due, the giant ‘gators steal the day.  

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books: