Brrrrrmmmmmm!

Incase you don't visit the Groovy Age of Horror blog (and you should), or follow me on twitter (and, well, you can, but should? Not essential), here's sketch I did for it. Psychomania is a strange film I've mentioned on this blog before, Beryl Reid as a devil worshipping mam and Nicky Henson as her Hell's Angel immortal son.... what's not to like?

The Terminator

So, I had planned to do a different picture, but I was struggling a bit, so I decided to do something else, I will finish the other one though.
Quite taken with halftoning at the moment, might permanently add it to my personal catalogue of fx. Incase you don't recognise the scene, just picture Pill Paxton's corpse at Arnie's feet.
Er, what else? Hmm, the logo's 'inspired' by Monstermag stuff which I'm very taken with at the mo. It also reminds me of the logo for 'The Invaders'.... a Quinn Martin production!

Edit. A brief comment from Peter Bangs, allows me to ramble about my 'technique' :)
After scanning my line art I turned it red and removed the bg. In a seperate layer I filled in the main shape with a lighter red, then painted the tones in using white or varying degrees of transparency. Selected the 'colour halftone' from the pixelate/filter menu I set the 4 channels to the same degree to give the dots a uniform look. The I laid the original line work over the halftoned layer.
I used another layer to give Arnie a solid white bg and coloured the blood on his hand, this allowed me to make the fist nice and dark but still keep the halftoned shading effect (I also didn't like the way the fist looked when I tried colouring it as part of the halftone) - don't know how well it shows up, maybe better on the larger version.
Originally the bg was going to be a flat blue so as not to jar with the halftone, but it didn't work, so I went for something a bit more textured. The logo was a hand drawn after thought that I really like now, looks like The Cramps version of the Terminator or something.
And that's it, apart from the trial and error I went through to figure all that out:)

Red in claw

Kelvin's comments on my Nightmare on Elm Street pic have prompted me to update. Not a major difference, so I've added in a couple of sketches. As usual I sort of like the sketches more than the finished piece, aint it always the way.

Nightmare On Elm Street

Odd choice of pin up for me as I don't really care for Freddy Krueger, even a gore hound like me is a bit put off by the strange love people had for Krueger, as played up by each film where Robert Englund portrayed him as almost lovable with a quip for every occasion.
On the other hand I did like the inventiveness of the dream sequences, and all this is pretty hindsighty. But really, I did this because I suddenly had an idea for a visual and when I scribbled the twist curving figure I quite liked it.
Oddly the colouring is not how I originally intended, but I figured what the hell, mess around a bit.

Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly on DVD

At last! Only a few months to wait and pretty cheap. Danny turned me on to this and I've been waiting ages for a prohttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifper release (Redemption were supposed to bedoing it but that was ages ago), it sounds utterly fantastic and one of the main reasons I bought Jonathan Rigby's excellent - which clued me in to a load of brilliant sounding films.

Zardoz

Okay, I give up. Think this is as good as I'm gonna get it without starting from scratch. There's two big mistakes here. One was with the colour, I was aiming to do something with a limited palette and then throw the big red nappy and 'x' into the mix to make it jump out. Good idea, I think, but I haven't pulled it off, there's no contrast with the colours or shades. The other mistake was to fall under the spell of someone else's artwork. Still, a couple of important lessons there.
The original drawing had a few other figures in the background, but it distracted from Zardoz's big floaty head.
If you've seen the insanity that is John Boorman's 'Zardoz', you'll know that the phallic positioning of that gun is not accidental:)
BTW, haven't said this in a while, but all criticism is welcome.

Death Race 2000

The totally excellent Death Race 2000 was produced by Roger Corman and Paul Bartel directed it, a perfect meeting of exploitation and fun. Horrifyingly Paul Anderson maybe remaking it, so there's a good chance it'll suck.
Anyway, here's my stab at it with a pic of Frankenstein (played by David Carradine). I'm sorta chuffed with this, mainly cos of the background, which was a result of me not quite being sure how to do a half tone effect, in the end I got an effect I liked better. Going with the look of the bg I decided to go a little further and tried to mimic an off register effect on Frankenstein's leathers.

28 Weeks Later

28 Days Later seriously shook me up, it's combination of Wyndham and Romero was pitched just right and although it owed a lot to those two giants it struck out on it's own in fine style.
28 Weeks Later doesn't manage to follow suit. It's a great film, and I daresay if I hadn't seen 28 Days Later I'd have been blown away, with some striking and shocking imagery and some interesting ideas. The problem is that the ideas aren't fully explored, much more could have been made of Robert Carlysle's storyline, an actor who could've really explored the moral implications of his actions ends up being used as a boogey man. I also found his storyline had a touch too much convenience to it.
There was a fair amount of chat in 28 Days Later heavily punctuated with violence. Violence seemed to be the order of the day for the sequel, I've not got a problem with that, but without the chat the military aspect of the story wasn't fully explored.
None of this is what really let's 28 Weeks Later down though, the sad fact is that even though it wasn't just a retread of the original it didn't do anything terribly new either. If 28 Days Later is comparable to Night of the Living Dead the 28 Weeks Later falls short of Dawn of the Dead.

Iron man in good comic adaptation shock!?

Maybe if this pic is anything to go by.

Captain Kronos vampire Hunter

Welcome to anyone wondering here from the Forbidden Planet blog!
Thanks to a little help from Danny I've finally upgraded to beta which means I can tag all the various randomness.
Anyway, here's the skinny about the latest pic. Before Buffy, there was Kronos, and he was one seriously cool chap!
For those who don't know Kronos was a Hammer film and was written and directed by Brian 'Avengers' Clemens. It's one of the best Hammer films (which is saying something) and has some brilliant touches.
As I mentioned before I faffed about with the background, mainly out of guilt for the lacklustre Phibes background earlier. It's not the most detailed of bgs but I think it works at least.

Frightmare by Pete Walker

‘Making Mischief’ is the title of Pete walker’s biography and it’s aptly named. Walker’s supposedly best 3 films (I can’t say if they are or not having not seen all his films... yet) are all designed to create controversy, or as he put’s it ‘to rub people up the wrong way.’ Thankfully there’s a bit more to them than that. Walker’s films are bleak grubby cynical affairs with black humour and over the top concepts that brilliantly capture the 70’s, perfectly in keeping with the decade that spawned the excellent UK comic ‘Action’ (Pete Walker directing a film version of ‘Kids Rule Ok’ would be amazing. In fact he’d have been perfect for the previously mentioned ‘Psychomania’ come to think of it) and the once excellent ‘2000ad’.
So far my favourite Walker film is ‘Frightmare’ which funnily enough is the least controversy courting film of his loose trilogy and does seem to be the best (although ‘House of the Whipcord’ is a close second). Plotwise the film seems to try and play things a bit coy by not coming out and saying what it’s about, yet Walker’s exploitation pedigree and his obvious affection for liberal amounts of blood mean that the hints are less than subtle and nothing else about the film or the marketing implies that there’s meant to be some great reveal. Which is a roundabout way of saying I’m going to tell you what’s going on, so consider this a spoiler. ‘Frightmare’ is about a cannibal old lady. There, the cat’s out the bag.
When Walker first cast Sheila Keith he must have instantly realised he’d found his muse, either that or she was cheap/available/game for a laugh, either way both found the perfect match. In ‘Frightmare’ Keith adds something a little extra to her creepy old lady act (and a fine act it is too!), gusto. The literally lip smacking relish she displays when she goes in for the kill, especially the bit with the drill, is over the top genius that must make even Tom Baker turn an envious shade of green. It’s all the more effective when juxtaposed with her scenes as a slightly confused old lady.
There’s a bit more to the plot than that and it’s actually quite a good one involving teenage kicks far too loving husbands dopey psychiatrists and Peter ‘Manuel’ Sachs, but I’ve already given too much away. ‘Frightmare’ is available as part of an Anchor Bay boxset and it’s very nicely put together, 5 films, a fair amount of extras and available pretty cheap on amazon and no doubt elsewhere..... it’s also got ‘Die Marianne Die’ which has a title sequence that features Susan George wearing a very skimpy outfit and giving it some serious go go dancing.... just thought I’d mention it.

Possible V For Vendetta spoilers

Because I like to think I can listen to others I decided to check wiki for a synopsis and whatnot about the V For Vendetta adaptation. I’m glad I did as it’s confirmed my desire to not watch the film. Plotwise it’s incredibly disappointing to see what’s been taken out - such as inspector Finch’s attempt to ‘become’ V, which means he doesn’t get to have the same finale with V. The manner in which Evey and V part company (does that mean no ‘Land of do as you please’?), how she spends her time away from V and more importantly the way in which she is originally captured - not to mention the changes to her introduction; all different, all worse. The subplot about the wife of one of V’s victims appears to have been left out, which provided a great deal of depth to the story as well as some incredibly powerful scenes. Finch’s younger partner is eather gone or his role is greatly reduced which means that the parallels with V and Evey’s initial meeting are lost at the end. And V’s speech when he captures the TV station is criminally gone! No doubt Americans wouldn’t have liked the religious content.
Making it explicit that V is the man in room 5 eliminates the possibility that V could be Valerie (at least thatValerie was left in, I can only hope it’s as emotionally draining as the original - do we still see V watching her films and his reaction I wonder) - also the notion that V is scarred by burns from his escape undermines the reasons for wearing a mask.
Reducing Fate’s role in the story means we don’t get the reveal of how V is so able to plan as well as he does, which means Susan/Suter doesn’t get to react to it which dramatically reduces his character - I’m guessing he doesn’t go through the same drastic but inevitable character change he did in the comic.
All plot changes are for the worse and are designed to ‘streamline’ but what’s intended as streamlining comes across as pat and weak, and the cutting out of characters and subplots leads to disjointed storytelling which comes across even in the synopsis - it’s also telling that the things considered unimportant enough to edit out are things that gave V For Vendetta emotional depth and texture.
It’s easy to complain and list all these changes but the big horrible change seems to be in the philosophy of the story, V is no longer such a proponent of anarchy (so I suppose the brilliant scene of V’s conversation with Lady Justice is gone) out to wreck the forces of fascism, he’s now a sort of liberal freedom fighter. Yeah, it keeps a lot of the themes but in typical Hollywood style reduces and simplifies them, which for me takes it even further away from what made the comic so special.
It’s also pretty sad that V For Vendetta looks just like any big film, the comic had such a unique look, couldn’t a bit more thought have been put into the visual stylings.
Maybe if I had never read the comic, maybe if I hadn’t read it at such an impressionable age, maybe if it hadn’t been so brilliant, maybe then I would’ve been able to enjoy the film, but that might have been all I’d done, enjoy it , and that’s the problem, the film of V will be forgotten by many, that seems to be the fate of many big films nowadays, but V the comic is one of the most memorable ever written.
One bizarre postscript that I’ve not seen much about is regarding the novelisation of the film. The V book is written by none other than Steve (no relation) Moore, long time friend of Alan Moore. Considering Alan Moore’s opinion of the V film this seems more than a little odd, is the book an attempt by a friend to readdress the damage the film has done, has Hollywood tried to get one Moore and settled for another, or worse are they unaware of the difference? Weird.

Not see V

My sister tells me the V For Vendetta film is very good. I’m still not going to see it though. The reviews, good and bad, don’t bode well, the changes to the story make me cringe, Alan Moore’s treatment is deplorable and V is one of the few comics that I genuinely care about because Alan Moore is more than just one of my favourite authors, because of how old I was when he started I feel that he’s helped shape me - if that sounds lame or melodramatic then you’re either not a writer or shouldn’t be!
So many bad films have been mad from good source material, but worse so many forgettable films have been made from good source material. That’s the thing though, ‘source material’, the film industry is a money making machine that sees anything as grist for the mill, remakes, adaptations, sequels and films that are supposed to be new but seem suspiciously like a film you saw last week but forgot about because it was, you know, okay an’ stuff and had thingy in.
Actually comics aren’t much cop either are they? DC and Marvel choking the shelves with as much product they couldn’t care less about as possible just so there isn’t any room for competition.
That’s is, I’m officially a miserable old duffer.

I Drink Your Blood

Despite it’s lurid title ‘I Drink Your Blood’ is a surprisingly sensitive film chronicling the plight of a young boy stuck in dying town. Okay, that’s a lie, ‘IDYB’ is as lurid and as fun as it’s title suggests and any review of it is pointless as it’s the kind of film you’ll either love or don’t care about. I loved it. Great drive in fodder with a strong emphasis on gore. What is surprising about ‘IDYB’ is how cool the gore is, there’s some really choice moments which although not what you’d call convincing are effective.
Like ‘Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things’ ‘IDYB’ avoids the typical pitfall of this kind of film, ie dumb kids played by bad actors mill around doing nothing we care about until near the end when the director can finally spend the tiny budget on the effects. A bit of wit, something for the dumb kids to do and a lot of verve give ‘IDYB’ a solid pace, and they don’t wait until the end for cheap thrills either.
So, if you want a film with a plot that involves satanic hippies, LSD spiked old geezers, rabid dog infected meat pies and people running around attacking each other all to the strains of a very funky cheesy sound track I can give no higher recommendation than ‘IDYB’.

Psychomania

Getting their kicks the only way a group of bratty hell’s angels in early 70’s Britain know how, the biker gang ‘The Living Dead’ decide to kill themselves. But wait! According to the leader of ‘The Living Dead's’ mam ,who knows these things, if you truly believe that you will not really die then death will have no hold on you! Yes, ‘The Living Dead’ actually become.... the living dead! HAHAHAHA! Cue blackly humorous suicides and resurrection followed by more motorbike carnage.
‘Psychomania’ is ever so not quite as much fun as the plot suggests unfortunately. For some reason the director decides that camp is not the way to go and plays it a bit too straight, which is a shame because it’s undoubtedly a fun film very well done, just not quite the classic it deserves to be.
The devil worshipping mam is the biggest example of opportunity not played to the hilt. With a class act like Beryl Reid playing a character she could really get her teeth into the only thing a director needs to do is point the camera and ask her to go over the top. What we get instead is a good performance of a character that never really cuts loose despite being a rich devil worshipping druid/witch who uses her son to form a pact with said cloven hooved chap (for reasons unknown and pretty vaguely (but psychedelically of course) presented), she’s even a bit upset when her son uses his knowledge for evil for crying out loud!
Anyway, despite not running (riding?) with it’s fantastically daft idea (let’s face it Robert Fuest should’ve directed this, the man who gave us Doctor Phibes would’ve had a right old laugh with it.) ‘Psychomania’ is a great film with enough chuckles, thrills and British actors to go ‘oh it’s him, what’s his face, he was in thingy with that other bloke’ to merrily while away an hour and not quite a half.

God Told Me To by Larry Cohen

If I was a proper reviewer and had been making notes as I watched ‘God Told Me To’ the only intelligible words I’d have scribbled would be ‘wow!’ and ‘huh?’ over and over again like some Jack Torrance outtake.
Larry Cohen’s most recent success has been his script for ‘Phone Booth’ for Joel Schumaker (he’s also the man who gave us the calssic TV show ‘The Invaders’) but I much prefer his low budget films particularly when he’s writing, directing and producing them. He plays with genre very well and can usually be relied upon to come up with something weird and wonderful, and ‘God Told Me To’ from 1976 surely comes under the category ‘weird and wonderful’.
Random everyday folk suddenly go on killing sprees, giving the same reason, ‘God told me to’. The detective investigating one of the cases not only finds that these various cases are connected but that the killers are actually telling the truth. A mind boggling mix of horror, thriller and scifi with religion and genre ambiguity as it’s key themes I’m not kidding when I say I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it - although aspects of the plot seem to crop up in the ‘X-Files’.
‘God Told Me To’ is shot with lots of handheld camera work around New York making it look as fresh as anything you might see in modern US cop shows. Another plus in terms of feeling fresh and realistic (important in a film with such an outlandish plot) is Cohen’s love of old character actors, he clearly loves unique expressive faces and they repay him with memorable performances.
The DVD is available on Region 2 but it’s through Vipco and although I appreciate some of the titles they’ve released their presentations are not so good so I decided to get the Blue Underground produced Region 1 copy. The picture and sound are excellent and there’s a great commentary with some funny behind the scenes stories (as he was about to shoot a scene requiring a rifle with a telescopic lense Cohen found out that nobody had got hold of one and didn’t want to upset him by telling him. Seeing as the scene was being shot next to a New York apartment block Cohen simply asked if anyone had such a rifle.... sure enough someone did) and a easter egg of Cohen being interviewed at a festival.
I can’t recommend ‘God Told Me To’ enough, it’s fun, silly, strange, disturbing, smart and pretty cheap to buy online.

Hatchet for a Honeymoon by Mario Bava

After reading and hearing about mario Bava I finally got round to watching one of his films. The main impetus for watching was an interest in the ‘Gaillo’ genre (I quite like the old ‘Pulps’ and Gaillo (pronounced with a hard ‘g’) is the Italian equivalent; it’s even named for similar reasons, i.e. the look of the books - gaillo means yellow and this was the colour scheme of the books, yellow covers with suitably lurid illustrations) and Richard Sala is a big fan. Well, there’s only so long you can read about something before you finally dive in.
‘Hatchet For The Honeymoon’ is as stylishly and inventively shot as I’d been led to believe a Bava film could be. Interesting angles, carefully shot compositions and neat little tricks abound (lot’s of people’s faces only seen in reflections, particularly in the main character’s cleaver, was a nice touch), Bava’s grounding as a cinematographer is apparent and appreciated.
The plot is suitably bizarre and darkly humorous, the boss of a bridal fashion company murders brides to be in their gowns because each time he does a repressed memory of who killed his mother becomes clearer. The boss is creepily played by Stephen Forsyth (“My name is John Harrington, I’m thirty years old. I am a paranoiac... The fact is I am completely mad.”) a strikingly handsome man with rather cold and slightly feminine features making him an excellent casting choice even if his acting slips in a couple of scenes .
A brief subplot about his own wife haunting him turns up in the middle of the film, is dealt with, forgotten about and then resurrected near the end. I found it to be interesting but unnecessary her final scene could have been kept in without the previous scenes, and might have been a little more effective in fact. Other than that it’s a solid and very interesting film, possibly not Bava’s best but it’s got me wanting to watch more of his films.
Special mention goes to the soundtrack which had a nice ‘groovy nightclub’ track as well as some great discordant clanging moments.
The DVD is an Anchor Bay package and as such has more than just ‘Biography’ and ‘Trailer’ as special features. The documentary ‘Mario Bava: Maestro of the Macabre’ was a nice introduction to the director whose influence was on a lot more the just Dario Argento (a film expert pojnts out the some of Friday the 13th looks like it was shot on the same set as a Bava film such is the degree it take’s ‘homage’). Contributions from Kim Newman are always welcome and I was glad of the chance to finally see some scenes from ‘Planet of the Vampires’ after usually hearing it in connection to alien.

Late Night Shopping Spree

I did manage to curb myself a little though what with Christmas presents to buy.
Within a few days I should be recieving 'Hatchet For a Honeymoon', an early Mario Bava film. It was a toss up between that, 'Danger Diabolik' and 'Planet of the Vampires', a tough choice but I went for the one that I could get quickest as it was on region 2. No such concerns on the other DVDs
The others were tough to narrow down, but as they were all region 1 (meaning I'll have to wait a little longer for them) and I didn't fancy getting hit by an extra import charge from the postman I had to - another reason to go for 'Hatchet'. In the end I chose, 'God Told Me To', a film by Larry Cohen who cheered up my youth with 'Q The Winged Serpent' (and you can bet I ran out and bought the recent rerelease of that on DVD), 'The Stuff' and 'It's Alive'. I've never seen GTMT (and a few other Cohen films) but as it seems to be about mass murders done at the behest of Jesus as well as something to do with flying saucers I figure it's worth a look.
I decided to go for 2 fond remembered films from my childhood to round out the package. Death Line (or 'Raw Meat' as it'll say on the US edition) is a British classic (making it a bit galling to have to order it from overseas) featuring cannibals hidden deep in the London underground. It's a darkly humourous and ultimately sad and moving story, and after Anchor Bay rereleased the director, Gary Sherman's later film 'Dead and Buried' (another great, sort of 'The Fog' meets Nigel Kneale meets Bodysnatchers meets Romero.... maybe) I've been wanting to see this again.
Finally there's 'Psychomania' to look forward to. It really has been a while since I last saw this, maybe 18-20 years, but quite a bit of it has stayed with me. Mainly I remember it being about a gang of hells angels who, inspired by the leaders black magic worshipping mother (played by the brilliant Beryl Reid), kill themselves in order to be reborn as, well, living dead hells angels I guess. One scene that sticks in my mind is over one of the recently buried bursting out of his grave riding his motorbike (might have inspired the cover for Bat Out Of Hell by the great Richard Corben - we won't mention MeatLoaf).
The ones that didn't quite make it onto my list, and not for reasons of quality, just what I fancied now and what I could put off for a little longer were - 'The Final Programme', 'Six String Samurai', Spiderbaby', the Pete Walker boxset, 'Blood on Satan's Claw', 'Hell is a City' and a double bill featuring Ealing's 'Dead of Night'. The last one I decided to wait as I think it might be getting a R2 release, although I'm not sure if it's the Bob Clark ('Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things') one (which I also wouldn't mind).
In my travels on internet land for theses goodies I also came across 'I Drink Your Blood' which I might have to add to my list, it has a great cover and sounds suitably funny, lame and horrible (hippies terrorise a small town, an angered old guy chases after them, they make him take LSD so his grandson trickes them into eating meat pies infected with blood from a rabid dog causing them to go on a kill/infecting spree.... the 70's really did produce some classics.
Night everyone!

An (over)appreciation

The 70’s is famous for producing a broad range of excellent films. The Godfather, Jaws, Clockwork Orange, Badlands, Harold & Maude, Wickerman, Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Close Encounters and on and on. It’s a very long list. I firmly believe the Superman The Movie deserves to be placed highly on that list.
Superman as a character is seriously limited, the comic is not usually that good (there’s been exceptions, the early newspaper strips, Alan Moore’s masterful ‘The Man Who Was Tomorrow) and he’s so dated it’s doubtful he’s really worked in any decade since the 50’s. And yet.....
As an icon Superman has very few equals. As an ideal. As something positive, something to believe in. I don’t know why he appeals to me in that way, maybe as an atheist I need a Jesus substitute. Maybe it’s the typical geek dream of being secretly all powerful beneath the meek and mild mannered exterior. Either by design or sheer luck Seigel and Schuster tapped into something powerful and on the rare moments when Superman’s done right it’s just perfect.
When Richard Donner did Superman The Movie it was done right. Yes, has it’s cheesier moments, but the carefully constructed sense of fairy tale about the film, from the opening of it being in a comic, then a theatre and then becoming ‘real’ to it’s flight through a space that has more in common with what’s seen under a microscope than a telescope to a planet that very clearly represents Heaven just before it turns in to Hell. That sense of fairy tale sets it in realm where I never had any trouble swallowing anything that happened. It’s not just that sense of magical fantasy that carries Superman The Movie, it’s the little touches, it’s the performance that probably killed Christopher Reeve’s career. When an actor becomes something as absurd as a Superman and does it as believably as Reeve it becomes impossible to see him as something else. So in a film that sees the destruction of a planet, villains encased in a huge mirror and sent hurtling into space and a (super)man make the Earth spin backwards I vividly remember the moment when Clark Kent suddenly straightens up, takes a breath, stops talking in pinched voice and nearly tells Lois who he is and we actually see how such a flimsy disguise might just work; the moment when Superman gently lays the lifeless body of Lois down on the ground and lets out a little whimpered gasp as her head falls to the side. Those moments, that performance and the grand opera of Superman make it a very memorable movie for me.
And now there’s going to be a new one. Normally remakes and sequels, especially when the originals were doing just fine on their own, fill me with dread. But Superman’s already had his bad sequels and now he’s got Bryan Singer taking care of him. And I’ve just seen the teaser trailer, and I’m seven again and I’m not embarrassed at writing a gushing review about silly movies based on silly comics.

It's based on a very good comic you know

I want to see History of Violence tonight. But it’s not going to happen, I won’t see it tomorrow either, or all of next week because it’s not on at the local cinema. Yes the great city (not a town, oh no) of Lancaster has one cinema with 2 screens and doesn’t concider HOV with it’s masses of excellent reviews and star of LOTR to be worth putting on, lets have Pride & Prejudice for a 3 week running. Okay, I’m glad land of the Dead (excellent) is still on but the usualy spread 3 films across their 2 screens. The local arthouse cinema is pretty rubbish too, everything comes out about 2 months late and it’s either the same big budget bollocks the main cinema had on or it’s as left field alternative as possible to prove the places arthouse credentials.
There is actually a huge multiplex in town, but the funding was pulled after it was built and it now stands empty - does this make sense to anyone?