Mad God

A dinosaur with human teeth

The work of a genius though not quite a genius work, Mad God is a crazy phantasmagorical ride into a hellish underworld, a stop-motion encylopaedia of styles, some newly minted, others borrowed, which took 30 years to finally finish by its creator, Phil Tippett. If you don’t know Tippett, he’s an animator who’s won Oscars for both old-school stop-motion work and for computer-generated stuff he did after stop-motion fell out of favour. He was head of animation at Industrial Light and Magic in 1978, aged 27, worked on the original Star Wars movies, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Robocop and Starship Troopers. It was while working on the original Jurassic Park that he … Read more

Repo Man

Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in Repo Man

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 February Radium synthesised, 1936 The element radium had been discovered by Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre in 1898. They had taken a ton of pitchblende and from it separated out a tenth of a gram of radium chloride. From that, by 1910, Marie Curie had managed to isolate pure radium, along the way coining the word “radioactivity”. Sources for this useful metal (it was what made luminous watch faces and instrument dials glow) were scarce and when the Austrian government banned further export of silver-mine tailings, the search was on to find other radioactive elements, and to produce radium … Read more

Sid and Nancy

Gary Oldman as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 October Sid Vicious arrested, 1978 On this day in 1978, Sid Vicious, the former bassist with the punk rock band The Sex Pistols, was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. The two of them had been staying at the Chelsea Hotel. Vicious had woken up, groggy from a night of heroin-taking, to find his girlfriend dead from a knife wound. “I stabbed her but I never meant to kill her,” he later told police, though he also claimed that she had fallen onto the knife. Vicious, born John Simon Ritchie, was 21 and just over three months … Read more