Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a hugely unexpected movie for me. I had been anticipating a complete disaster - Planet of the Apes was a great concept in the late 1960s, but Tim Burton's 2000 remake had seemed to demonstrate pretty conclusively that the concept didn't work in a contemporary film context. Too silly. Too easy to ridicule. Then along came Rupert Wyatt's film, which took an unexpectedly realistic approach to the idea, and I was pretty conclusively proven wrong. That film ended in a wonderfully open fashion as well, as a deadly influenza strain bred in a San Francisco laboratory started to spread across the world killing most human life as it went.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Cloverfield's Matt Reeves, picks up the story 10 years later. A small community of humans remain holed up in what's left of San Francisco. In the nearby redwood forests a parallel community of mutated, highly intelligent apes have formed their own primitive society. When a group of humans track into the woods in an attempt to restart a hydro-electric power station, these two communities collide with disastrous consequences.

Robin of Sherwood: "The Witch of Elsdon"

It's 5 May 1984, and time for Robin of Sherwood.

In the Nottinghamshire village of Elsdon, an innocent woman named Jennet (Angharad Rees) is falsely convicted of witchcraft. To earn her freedom, she agrees to help lay a trap for Robin Hood (Michael Praed) and poison his entire band of outlaws.

As Robin himself tends to say, 'nothing lasts forever'. That includes the quality of the series it seems, as things take an unexpected but definite nose-dive with this third episode. Subtlety is gone, depth has left the building, and what's left is some pretty tedious one-dimensional characterisation. Will Scarlet (Ray Winstone) is particularly ill-served by the script, which takes his character from aggressive attitudes and violent tendencies to puppy-dog eyes without any sort of proper justification.

White Mane (1953)

Albert Lamorisse was a French filmmaker who all-but guaranteed his place in film history with his 1957 short children's feature The Red Balloon, which was awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes. He was also, by the by, the inventor of the popular board game Risk. Less famous than those two cultural artefacts is his 1953 short feature White Mane, which predates The Red Balloon by four years but which already demonstrated a remarkable filmmaking talent and which still stands up as a wonderfully entertaining film today.

White Mane is set in the salt marshes of Carmague, France, where a group of ranchers attempt to corral a band of wild horses. One horse, a particularly wilful stallion named White Mane, constantly escapes them. While they continue to chase the horse down, it befriends a 12 year-old boy named Folco who works as a fisherman through the marshes. The boy and the horse bond as they escape the increasingly desperate ranchers.

Fast & Furious (2009)

The Fast and the Furious was a weak action film that broadly plagiarised Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break by simply replacing surfboards with cars and Patrick Swayze with Vin Diesel. It was a moderate hit back in 2001, and its success led to an even less accomplished sequel: 2 Fast 2 Furious. That film kept co-star Paul Walker but lost Diesel. The third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, pretty much lost everything bar the basic concept of illegal street racing. That's the point at which I tapped out, and left the franchise to do its thing without me.

Then I started hearing genuinely surprising things about the subsequent movies: that the unexpected fourth film, that reunited Walker and Diesel, was actually pretty good, and that from the fifth film onwards it had somehow metamorphosed into one of Hollywood's most entertaining action franchises. Given the fairly lacklustre experience of the first three films I was never in a particular hurry to find out if this buzz was accurate, but with the runaway box office performance of Fast & Furious 7 I finally decided to rent the previous three films and check them out for myself.

Blake's 7: "Orac"

It's 27 March 1978, and time for the season finale of Blake's 7.

Both Blake and Servalan travel to the distant planet of Aristo to capture "Orac", the mysterious technology for which the Federation will pay one hundred million credits. For Blake the mission becomes even more urgent: after their time on the radioactive surface of Cephlon his crew urgently need anti-radiation drugs to survive. Either the elusive inventor Ensor will provide them, or Blake's crusade ends here.

After being teased very effectively during the previous episode, Orac turns out to be a computer. Not simply any computer, however, but the master computer - one capable of hacking into and controlling pretty much every other computer in existence and exploiting its information. It also talks, and from here onwards becomes the final regular member of Blake's crew. When viewed today, it's a fairly ridiculous contraption made from perspex and Christmas lights. When viewed as a child, I thought it was one of the most wondrous technological inventions ever. I have so much nostalgia invested in this series that it's hard not to get excited when one of the more iconic elements of the series finally arrives.

Star Trek: Enterprise: "Observer Effect"

It's 21 January 2005, and time for more Star Trek: Enterprise.

Commander Tucker (Connor Trinneer) and Ensign Sato (Linda Park) return from an away mission suffering from an unexplained alien infection. While Dr Phlox (John Billingsley) races to save their lives, the crew's action are observed by a pair of non-corporeal life forms capable of possessing and controlling anybody on the ship.

After so many disappointing hours of television in Season 4, "Observer Effect" comes as a tremendous relief. Here's an episode that is well performed, tightly written and dramatic, that manages to play with old Star Trek continuity in an interesting fashion, and which doesn't feel shoe-horned in or weirdly disrespectful to the franchise's past. This is also entirely achieved without building a single new set, or hiring a single actor outside of the regular cast. That's actually a rather impressive achievement.

The Heat (2013)

Straight-laced FBI special agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) is dispatched to Boston to track down an elusive drug kingpin, and immediately butts heads with scrappy, unconventional police detective Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy). Together they must put aside their differences to crack the case, and so on and so forth. You really don't need a synopsis for this stuff.

Reviewing this kind of mainstream Hollywood comedy is always a tricky exercise, since the level to which you're likely to enjoy this film is conditional on several factors. Do you like this style of comedy? Do you like the two lead actors? Do you enjoy films produced within a fairly tight, traditional genre formula, or do you favour comedies that move out of that comfort zone and provide something genuine fresh and original?

There's no real originality to be found in The Heat. It is, for all intents and purposes, Neil Simon's The Odd Couple re-fashioned to be about police detectives. That it seems fresher than it is is largely down to director Paul Feig's casting of the two leads with women rather than men, which seems to be the general default for Hollywood productions of this kind.

The Pull List: 29 April 2015, Part II

My local comic shop suffered a highly unfortunate ship-pocalypse this week, with a large part of their comics order going AWOL somewhere between the USA and Australia. As a result I can't bring you my planned reviews of Batman, Daredevil, Silver Surfer or The Fuse. Let's keep going with what we have left starting with Image's new monthly series Pisces, from Rat Queens creator Kurtis J. Weibe.

Those trying this new book out based purely on Rat Queens are likely in for a shock. This isn't a comedic title like that one, It doesn't boast a female cast like that one either. It's also a slightly maddening experience: I enjoyed this first issue a hell of a lot, and it's definitely got me hooked into reading the second, but I couldn't actually tell you what the book is about.

We start with a man in a car, cut up and bleeding. He arrives at the hospital, and is confronted by another man. Just when we might be getting a handle on what's going on the comic shifts. Now we're in Vietnam during the war. By the time we get to grips with this aspect of the storyline, it shifts somewhere else entirely.

It's intriguing stuff, and it's well illustrated by Johnny Christmas with a style slightly reminiscent of Eduardo Risso. As a first issue of a comic, however? I'm not quite certain it works. I liked what I read a hell of a lot. I can imagine a lot of other readers getting frustrated. (4/5)

Pisces #1. Image. Written by Kurtis J. Weibe. Art by Johnny Christmas. Colours by Tamra Bonvillain.

Under the cut: reviews of He-Man, Knights, Multiversity and Plunder.