Retelling of modern Hollywood’s origin myths plays it safe

The Last Kings of Hollywood is a no-surprises retelling of the rise to fame, wealth and power of filmmakers Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.

Paul Fischer’s The Last Kings of Hollywood re-tells the foundational myths of the late 1960s/1970s era of American filmmaking. Despite naming the three famous filmmakers in its title, the book mostly focuses on the Coppola/Lucas relationship.

Francis Ford Coppola was a drama and film school graduate who achieved the unthinkable by getting into the film industry, a profession so closed to outsiders that at the time film schools were advising their students to drop out. George Lucas was the film school circuit’s star pupil. Both met on the set of Coppola’s Finigan’s Rainbow (1968), and together pursued Coppola’s dream of setting up his Zoetrope studio, an independent filmmakers’ community free from the interference of Hollywood.

Coppola supported Lucas when the studios hated his debut film, THX1138 (1971). The financial trouble that followed forced a reluctant Coppola to make The Godfather (1972). That film was a box office hit and to this day is widely regarded as one of the best ever made. Coppola used his new-found popularity to back Lucas’ second feature, American Graffiti (1973). It was also hugely profitable and that led eventually to his Star Wars (1977). That movie redefined filmmaking, merchandising and box office profit for everything that followed.

Spielberg’s career is given less coverage, with the author recounting the director’s standardised biography – the shy Jewish lad who dropped out of university when he landed a 7-year contract directing TV, only to find himself on set directing crew and stars decades his senior.  As the success of The Godfather made adapting bestsellers for the screen popular, Spielberg was given Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws. Fischer retells the famous story of the nightmare-to-box office triumph of that film’s production, sadly, adding nothing new. See Jaws at 50: The Definitive Inside Story (2025) for more detail and on-set footage.

Next, Fischer details the men’s mixed fortunes into the 1980s. Conflict between Coppola and Lucas followed Star Wars, as its unprecedented success inverted their power dynamic. Lucas was careful with his new-found wealth; Coppola took risks, always needed an investor and considered Lucas in his debt. The author repeats familiar criticisms of both men micromanaging their respective empires, becoming the corporate overlords they’d spent the 1970s criticising.

Coppola’s attempts at buying and running a major studio ended in multiple bankruptcies and he spent decades working as a director for hire – the very opposite of the personal filmmaking he had advocated in his earlier years. His self-funded dream project Megalopolis, released in 2024, lost approximately $75 million at the box office.

Lucas gave up making movies almost entirely, returning only to make his derided Star Wars prequels in the late-90s. He sold Lucasfilm and its properties to Disney for $4.05 billion in 2013. Coppola is often quoted as suggesting the success of Star War robbed cinema of Lucas’ wider talents. He never made the personal abstract movies he had intended. 

Spielberg went on to become a pillar of the Hollywood establishment and remains a name so influential autocorrect recognises it. This year’s alien conspiracy movie Disclosure Day will be his 34th professional film in 50 years. His net worth is said to be more than $10 billion.

The mixed successes of the directors’ careers show how the title The Last Kings of Hollywood is ultimately a misnomer – their careers owe more to the rapid rise and fall of despots and drug lords than the continuous reign of sovereign figures. Today, Lucas is an entrepreneur and philanthropist long retired from the industry; Coppola remains a controversial and marginal figure whose legacy has yet to solidify if the accounts of what happened during the filming of Megalopolis are to be believed. Spielberg rose steadily through the industry ranks, earning his knightly seat at ever-higher tables with each box-office hit. He might be a pillar of the establishment today, but it took his Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993) to shift his reputation beyond that of predicting public tastes, earning enormous box office returns and producing slick, if shallow, popcorn movies.   

Overall, Fischer’s book contains little that hasn’t been told and retold in many other places and adds little to the familiar narrative of two hippie dreamers and an industry professional working their way up the director’s career ladder. Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls remains the definitive text on that era as it widens the scope to cover other equally influential figures. The stories of the next decades of their careers are only simplistically glossed over. How well did Lucas run his empire? Why did he return to filmmaking? What happened to Spielberg as he branched out into producing? What was so special about Megalopolis that Coppola spent decades working on it and felt it worthy of risking his fortune on? All are questions left for another author.

In the end, this sticking to the known knowns does inadvertently prove the extent of Lucas and Spielberg’s influence on the wider culture, even on publishing, as their successes paved the way for today’s endless rebooting and retelling of no-surprises, safe stories. This book is a prime example. No doubt the subjects have very good libel lawyers.

The audiobook is narrated by Shaun Taylor-Corbett who sounds remarkably like voice actor Billy West. As a result, listening to Fischer’s book is reminiscent of listening to Fry from Futurama attempt imitations of various famous people. His female voices are cartoonishly bad, and his Martin Scorsese impressions are laughable. This is a book to read, not to listen to, but you’d miss little if you by-passed it entirely. Overall, it’s a disappointing retread of canonised Hollywood lore.

The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer is published by Celadon Books

Schindler’s Watch List

Forgotten and derided Nazisploitation movies expose the lost power of trash cinema and put today’s neutered McMovies to shame.

Of all the overused movie clichés, the inescapable prison doesn’t get anywhere near enough scorn. I lost interest in the recent Star Wars: Andor series at the sci‑fi prison with the electrified laser floor. Don’t start me on The Dark Knight Rises or those terrible Stallone/Schwarzenegger movies. Either these prisons are inescapable, and the film ends, or it’s just a lazy cliché included to pad the run time.

Yet, this inescapable trope hits right at the heart of opposing views of what cinema can be. For Hollywood, the prison represents personal triumph, the happy ending, the overcoming of adversity: the happily ever after. For exploitation filmmakers, it’s a brutal fate you are not going to survive. It’s a clear case of feel‑good versus feel‑bad storytelling. Hollywood has given us Schindler’s List and The Shawshank Redemption. A prison-you-aren’t-going-to-escape movie would look more like Sergio Garrone’s infamous SS Experiment Love Camp.

Nazisploitation

European exploitation movies are a relatively new experience for me. The sheer amount of them is hard to imagine today, as the nature of cinema has changed in the years since their production. Good luck finding them on streaming. The Italians made gore movies; Jean Rollin and Jess Franco made everything from soft‑core women‑in‑prison epics to horror slashers. Rollin’s Zombie Lake – about zombie Nazis – is particularly bad. Franco made a version of the same script. It was worse.

Nazisploitation movies were their own niche, again ranging from the soft‑core to the gory. Ilsa: She‑Wolf of the SS is a particularly notorious mix of both. The stories are all similar: the staff of a camp experiment on mostly female prisoners, all of whom have excellent make‑up and, in the case of the non‑Nazi nudie Gefangen Frauen, painted nails. Most end with either a prisoner revolt or the SS coming in and putting an end to the perversions of the officers. Everyone dies. ‘Bleak’ hardly covers it.

Italian exploitation cinema gave us SS Experiment Love Camp (1976) and SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell (1977) – virtually indistinguishable movies with the same cast. These movies, directed by Sergio Garrone, rank highly on any list of the banned and the controversial. To some extent, these are the crowning achievements of 1970s exploitation.

Garrone’s movies are not easy viewing, nor are they celebrations of the Holocaust or those responsible for it. The reaction to them today remains moral outrage. But why? It’s not as if they are as badly made as the soft‑core movies of Rollin or Franco. They aren’t Citizen Kane, but they competently tell their story. And that competence is precisely why they’re hated. If they were badly done, they could be laughed off. Instead, they slap you in the face. Hard.

While you laugh at Zombie Lake, no one laughs at SS Experiment Love Camp. This tone is why Garrone’s films are a better indictment of the subject than Schindler’s List. What in Spielberg’s movie compares to the barely alive bodies twitching in the cremation ovens in SS Experiment Love Camp? Spielberg goes for a dead child. Yes, it was taken from the book, but it is still almost too easy an image. It deserves the same contempt as having your hero rescue a stray animal. Garrone’s films don’t make you cry; they make you squirm.

From The Chain Saw Massacre to Lifeforce

To understand how the nature of exploitation cinema changed, we must look at two of Tobe Hooper’s films. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is a masterpiece of unsettling filmmaking. It’s not as gory as its reputation would have you believe and its power lies in the lead spending most of the movie screaming. Garrone’s pair of SS movies were clearly hand‑to‑mouth productions and dismissed as trash as a result. Yet, for sheer power, the films should be considered The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s equals. A movie can be irredeemably nasty and a textbook example of powerful genre filmmaking at the same time.

The likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were designed to be seen publicly on a big screen. They were pure shock, designed to sicken you to the depth of your soul. And then Spielberg, Lucas, and VHS happened. Suddenly, movies were designed to be rewatched at home, wondered at and had the comfortable rhythm of a roller-coaster. Hooper even made Poltergeist (1982) for Spielberg. His Lifeforce (1985) is a sci-fi/horror genre fusion with a Ghostbusters aesthetic and gratuitous nudity, absent the shock and the power to disturb. Spectacle and effects, yes; titillation, sure. It entertains; it just doesn’t affect. We’ve been left with infantilised supernormal stimulus alongside our popcorn. Anyone miss movies that made people vomit?

When we consider the difference between 1970s exploitation and 1980s home entertainment on VHS, we can fully understand why the former terrified so many. Yes, we can even feel some sympathy for the censor. As intentionally shocking as the 1970s films were, they were never intended for frequent re‑viewing. Video enabled us to focus on the lurid details. That’s when such movies got their reputation as pornography and where outcompeted in the marketplace. Spielbergian home entertainment was a different flavour of cinema entirely – Happy Meals with an equivalent decline in quality. They even came with toy lines.

Are exploitation movies – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre included – art? The naysayers miss that a dirty protest has something in common with a Jackson Pollock. They’re mistaking valid execution for comfort‑zone entertainment. Too many people conflate art with pictorialism and pretty landscapes. Caravaggio knew good art should also kick you in the feels. The exploitation movies we’re discussing are not family entertainment and not for everyone – but consider the ethics of what is.

Schindler’s List

The thing with sacred cows is the lingering aroma of bullshit. I’ve never been a fan of Schindler’s List, despite it being stunningly well made. I saw it the week of release and have never been fully convinced of its merits.

Many claim it is “serious drama”. Is it? Playwright David Mamet argued at the time that the film was Jewsploitation, based on the spectacle of Jewish humiliation. The first words on the screen are ‘Amblin Entertainment’. Terry Gilliam weighed in against it too.

The ending is terrible – Liam Neeson, whose acting has always been of questionable quality, having a good cry and perfectly articulating his feeling. Pretty sure nobody ever spoke that way. It’s the sort of subtext-free writing elementary writing courses deride. Furthermore, I hate how Ralph Fiennes’s Amon Goeth character has moments of self‑doubt. It’s a clichéd study of evil for liberals who think everyone is one rational argument away from being a Guardian reader. In Garrone’s films, the guards are all irredeemably psychopathic. Read the biographies of Rudolf Höss, Eichmann or their like – these people were true believers. That common humanity we all supposedly share is much rarer than you think. Some people are beyond redemption, which is a message liberal populists and screenwriters need to relearn.

The difference between Spielberg’s and Garrone’s films is that Garrone’s aren’t framed in Hollywood clichés. Schindler’s List is beautiful to look at, and it shouldn’t be. Your reaction shouldn’t be “Wasn’t the photography lovely and the music moving?” It should be: “I feel fucking sick.”

Read George Stevens’s accounts of how walking through a death camp felt, or Primo Levi’s about surviving one. See how you feel about it then. For six million Jews, the experience of the Holocaust was Rudolf Höss and Josef Mengele, not Spielberg’s vision of Schindler. It’s Spielberg who sanitises. All honest Holocaust movies should end in death. SS Experiment Love Camp is an obscene movie about obscene events. It’s about sadists being sadistic towards powerless victims. Nobody says it’s easy viewing. But isn’t shying away from the historical brutality obscene in itself?

Schindler’s List is palatable popular entertainment. It’s Jurassic Park with Nazis, with all the concessions to the Hollywood formula. I dare someone to make a movie about Mengele where he evades the consequences of his actions and lives long enough to drown on Bertioga Beach in 1979. That’s reality.

Either all movies on the Nazi topic are exploitation or none are. Should evil and suffering be depicted for entertainment value? How should atrocity be depicted, and in what medium? Should we censor the work of Robert Capa? Don McCullin lost his job at The Times because advertisers didn’t want his photos of dead children opposite their full‑colour adverts. Doesn’t that sound like what happened to the movies? Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and The Truce – despite being among the most powerful books ever written – have never been adapted for the screen. I suspect this is partly because of Levi’s insistence on how much luck played in his survival. His message – that only the worst of us survive – isn’t very Hollywood.

The Industrial Domestication of Cinema

Consider The Shawshank Redemption: “Hope sets you free.” Justice is done. Then consider the “If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness” message etched on the wall at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Doesn’t that seem more in tone with Garrone’s films? Many Nazisploitation movies end with one group of fascists killing another – and most of the victims. This trope seems far more reflective of the real world than everyone riding off into the happily ever after.

My maternal grandfather served on submarines protecting Atlantic convoys during the Second World War. He would never watch war movies, except for Das Boot, which he considered a documentary. My paternal grandfather thought the BBC’s farce about the French Resistance – ’Allo ’Allo! – was hilarious. It laughed at much that he remembered. From such examples, we can see clearly how creatives should approach the subject – honest depiction or ridicule. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) knew this and so did Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967). I fully appreciate that nobody wants a sitcom set at Auschwitz, but in Spielberg and his legions of imitators we can sense a reverence that is, in its own way, pornographic as it sanitises and packages real world horrors for conservative family audiences. Some crimes are so truly awful, making them accessible starts to miss the point.

The video‑nasties moral outrage of the 1980s blinded us to what exploitation cinema achieved. What needs rediscovering isn’t mere Spielbergian spectacle; it’s cinema’s lost power – the ability to disturb, confront, and offend without sanitising the message. The producers of today’s vanilla offerings have forgotten that we like being scared, shocked, and outraged.

We are not a high‑minded species; we like cheap and nasty if we are honest with ourselves. Cinema seems to have forgotten where it came from – and that it was always a vulgar medium. If the movies are to survive, then they’ve got to get under people’s skin again. Or as Hooper and Garrone taught us, they need to run around wearing it in prisons that cannot be escaped.    

The consumer 1980s you remember grew up and became Bangkok

Bangkok’s devotion to shopping means the city experiences three rush-hours a day. The third occurs when the shops close.

What would a world look like in which 80s-style malls and bricks-and-mortar consumerism survived to the modern day? In Bangkok today, Amazon is a coffee shop, online shopping is frowned upon, and the mega-mall dominates minds, public spaces and weekends.

Thailand has not allowed online shopping to hijack its consumer landscape. Amazon has no presence here. Local online equivalents have not yet earned the trust of Thai consumers. Physical stores are very much where it’s at.

So, if you’re in the mood for some throwback consumerism – or need to get out of the midday sun – Bangkok’s malls are your place. Be aware of the small cultural differences – local standards of customer service mean the sales assistants have a Velcro tendency – they attach themselves to you when you enter a store.

The brave and forewarned shopper should start at Siam Paragon. The Skytrain will take you directly there. Designer clothes boutiques fill the ground floor; more affordable, familiar brands fill the higher ones. Anyone new to Asia should make Japanese clothing manufacturer Uniqlo their first stop. Beware clothing sizes – items are labelled to reflect Asia’s slender frames. Bring your phone as the city has gone cashless. 

If Paragon is too upmarket or too crowded for you, CentralWorld is a five-minute walk away. It has the same stores but carries a wider variety of products in a more spacious environment. The grounds in front are always dominated by TikTokers and ring flashes documenting the ever-creative promotional attractions there. There’s always a food market too. The Apple store is frighteningly popular.

The recently opened Emsphere, at Asoke, is a highly decorated shop window expanded to cover several floors. The elaborate décor is changed to match the season. The ground floor is a maze of small food outlets, designed to mimic the packed back streets of Asia’s recent past. The shops on the higher floors are minimalist and trendy. You look here, rather than shop. It glitters, especially after dark.    

Icon Siam, on the Chao Phraya River, is a showpiece for Bangkok’s consumer excess. It can be reached either by boat or train. It’s spacious and gleaming interior reflects all those designer brands on an unsettling scale. The food areas all resemble the imagined Thai markets of the past and are designed to appeal to the locals missing their rural homes and tourists pursuing Thai authenticity. The Alangkarn Waterfall on the 6th floor makes the trip worthwhile.  

If you miss the mall – or just feel like shopping – Bangkok offers consumerism on an unapologetic scale. It’s no longer He-man and Transformers though. Today the stores are filled with Hello Kitty, One Piece, Harry Potter and iPhones. If you don’t know who Lisa is, you will by the time you leave.

Big Yellow Taxis Need to Park Somewhere

Are there uncontacted tribes in the concrete jungle? Or are we travellers just the mutant spawn of excessively photoshopped travel journalism and the white room horrors of package-holiday mind control?  

Step out and you’ll soon discover paradise is not a place, it’s a delusion occupied by seekers boarding the flight from reality. Out there, you’ll quickly realise where there’s land, there’s endless amounts of disagreeable people making recognisably ill-informed decisions. Those New World treasure hunters found only cursed golden idols worshipped by cannibals, grateful only to visitors for spicing things up. Yes, I’m comparing modern tourism to Cannibal Ferox. Travellers prepare, say I, for terminal disappointment.

Today’s equivalent jungle fever and gold lust is, of course, industrial concrete. It sits like mayonnaise atop the globe’s most celebrated corners. It functions, yes, but does little to enhance everything it’s poured over. Should we blame the chef or the paying customer?

Consider all those tropical islands with their crumbling concrete jetties and forested mountainsides laid with decaying concrete walkways. Perhaps refrain from sneering at the execution and instead applaud the utilitarian efforts to forestall decay. Consider the wider logic of paving that hillside only to have perpetually dissatisfied tourists LARPing up and down.

Look at these:

  • Bangkok, Thailand

Where might one assume such images were taken? The concrete is mundane and functional, lacking even Bauhaus pretension. The harsh shadows and the warm light suggest the tropics. Both were taken in Bangkok. “Thailand?”, you gasp. “Beach parties, sex tourism and spice-scorched sphincters? Surely not.”

That incredulous denial is the sound of sub-Turner-like visions of sublime Arcadia awkwardly confronting a man-made environment thrown together on a developing country budget. It’s your dreams shedding their illusions.   

Shocking as it may be, remote destinations suffer the same brutal economics and greater entropy than locations closer to home. Aesthetic ideals are rarely a consideration. The truth is these values are more the indulgent projections of western liberals imagining the exotic world as an en vogue exhibit pitched in the middle ground between the Prado and the Pitt Rivers.

My condemnation is reserved less for the creators of such brutalist monstrosities and more for the architects of this art-historical ideal. Yes, I’m condemning good old-fashioned Orientalism, masquerading as aesthetic criticism. The Lost Horizon adult colouring book this is not. Only the truly arrogant take the enlightened high ground when confronted by such pragmaticism. Don’t you think the locals know it’s a blight too? Alternatively, go take a bus in Britain and try recommending the experience.   

Today, the role of travellers is not to journey dreamily through the concrete-augmented reality our wanderlust called into being, but instead to trek honestly through the policy-ruined world discoverable along the way. If your experience of this world is no deeper than your last cocktail, you just holidayed in your own mind. Or to put it differently, your holiday fantasy is your problem. Come to terms with its falsity as there’s no sympathy for those dreaming in Instagram filters.  

Exploring the Peerless Piers of Thailand’s Koh Kood

Perfect blue skies. Perfect blue seas. The Thai island of Koh Kood is an affordable and accessible alternative to the Maldives, with the bonus of the world’s best cuisine.

Thailand’s islands are rightly popular destinations. Koh Samui and Koh Chang are perhaps the most visited; Koh Phangan is famed for its full moon parties. Many spend a lifetime dreaming of visiting such tropical exotica and, on the whole, these islands are pleasant, if crowded, destinations offering decent food, drink, sun, surf and diving. You might want an alternative.

The highlight of any island trip is always the ferry journey that gets you there. The sea breeze, the sounds of the water and the leisurely pace plug straight into calm. If you’re unlucky, you might be herded onto a speedboat, sat behind dirty glass and subjected to a Thai soap opera for the duration of the crossing. Stanislavski who? If you have a choice, always opt for the slow wooden boat.

When Koh Kood mercifully appears on the horizon, the side of the island facing the incoming boats presents only a small port backed by dense forest. Upon disembarking, a Thai woman with a whiteboard calmly points to the name of your hotel and a pickup truck with a hard bench in the back. Thais call them songthaews. Getting bounced around in one is part of the Thai experience.

You can do worse than stay at a glamping site called The Survival. Its gimmick is spacious teepees in age-of-exploration beige, comfy beds and reassuringly cool aircon. Showers and toilets are communal, uncrowded and well-maintained. The boat may get you there before check-in, but cocktails and larb gai on the beach make up for it.

If you’re unlucky enough to be someone who sears and sweats rather than glows and bronzes, you’re going to need industrial grade suncream and a hat. Dress for the cool you have, not the Italian cool you have no hope of emulating. Bring very dark glasses if you’re sensitive to bright light – even a decent pair of Ray-Bans will struggle to reduce the glare.

If you grow bored of cocktails, sunbaking and doomscrolling, you might give some thought to something more active, such as seeing the island. Diving, scuba and snorkelling trips can be booked at any resort. The water around nearby Koh Raet was full of tourist boats in the late afternoon.

A mainstay of any Thai adventure is renting a dubiously maintained motor scooter. The added thrill of not dying makes it all the more satisfying. Check the brakes before leaving your resort. The island’s interior is a modern road cut through forest. The roads are quiet and largely traffic-free. The only drama is the monkeys fighting in the trees.

The island of Koh Kood is located in Trat, on the south-eastern side of Thailand, close to Cambodia. It is the last of a string of linked tropical islands. You can easily get a boat from one of the other islands – a cocktail on the Cococape pier on Koh Mak is a worthy stop on the way through. Alternatively, book a resort package that includes pickup at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport.

The island can be easily explored in a leisurely paced day. You’ll see beaches and resorts, endless piers and the occasional deepwater port. Koh Kood is an Instagrammer’s playground. Look for the shoals of fish. The island has only its tourist good-life ecosystem and moves to the rhythms of the lapping ocean. The only mild annoyance is the choice of music in some of the resorts. Yes, you’re going to hear Gloria Gaynor singing about surviving and a lot of Hotel California. Given that islands swarming with hostile uncontacted natives do still exist, mild Ed Sheeran exposure is getting off lightly.

The island offers little in its interior besides a few waterfalls. Don’t expect much, as these run dry during the tourist season. The size of the well-eroded boulders in the dry riverbeds suggests they must be spectacular during the monsoon. The Thais have a peculiar love of waterfalls, alcohol and unsafe behaviour, so be cautious of how others are behaving.

Pick any beach, resort or bar when you fancy a break. Thai food is genuinely the finest in the world, and most menus will contain explanations in simple English that fail to do the cuisine justice. Authentic Thai food is an order of magnitude better than what’s served in restaurants across the world. If you hunger for the familiar, most places can knock up a fine burger or a decent pepperoni pizza. Vegetarians and vegans might go hungry. While most food is cooked to Western preferences, be aware that the Thai palate – especially in its colourful drinks – leans heavily towards sugar.

Learn the phrase ‘mai pet’, meaning ‘not spicy’, and be mindful that the Thai definition of this is still often hazardous to the Western bowel. Avoid finely chopped chillies and those soaked in the condiments served with the food. You run zero risk of food poisoning, but adverse reactions to chilli are another matter entirely. Avoid it unless you like bathroom interiors.

The day done, return to your resort for the sort of sunset Monet dreamt about, a swim in that ocean and the obligatory fire show. Thai sunsets are always spectacular; the water here is warm, clean and unusually free of both jellyfish and surfers. The fire shows, usually at weekends, consist of young men twirling fire around on ropes, freely demonstrating why none of them seem to have any body hair. It’s a massive cliché and largely inescapable. An evening meal and cocktails on the beach round out the day nicely. The kitchens and bars close early. Bring repellent, sleeves and trousers for the night. Nocturnal things hunger too.

Of course, awareness of your surroundings is always wise. Thailand is generally very safe, but violence does flare up, usually between locals over alcohol and petty matters. Lone travellers need not be concerned.

If you’ve ever pictured walking out onto a wooden pier overlooking perfectly clear blue seas, under equally blue skies and shaded on all sides by coconut palms, then Koh Kood is for you. It offers Maldives-like experiences at a fraction of the cost, against the background of all of Thailand’s other sites and sights. There are plenty of wannabe desert island getaways around the world, with eco-obsessions and imported sand. Koh Kood is what they all aspire to be: the genuine article.

Hail Caesar!

Starz’s Spartacus: House of Ashur is a triumphant return to writer/showrunner Steven DeKnight’s Roman world of sex, gore and quality storytelling. It proves an entertaining tale of survival in a will-to-power world that owes more to the exploitation movies of Roger Corman than the aristocratic infighting of Game of Thrones.

Spartacus and his army are a memory, and the Roman survivors yearn for fresh entertainment in the arena. Enter the gladiatrix. The show was criticised at the outset as Tenika Davis was cast as the new champion. She’s introduced throwing centurion red shirts around like rag dolls.

Yet she is not the Mary Sue many feared. She’s little more than the b-plot and spends most of the ten episodes getting beaten into the dust. Many feared a watered-down follow-up built on concession to identity politics. Be clear, that fear is misplaced. This new show is brilliantly written and executed in a glorious excess that equals the shows that came before it.

After being resurrected by the gods, former gladiator Ashur inherits the house and gladiator training school of his former master. Rivalries between gladiator houses get deadly. He’s also taken with the widowed daughter of a senator, which complicates matters as Ashur twists and turns his way through life-threatening problems created by the untouchable elite of Roman society. Unlike much of modern writing, consequences flow from action; ego and hubris bring death and ruin to many.

The writers go about this with subversive humour evident in their best creations – the three dwarf gladiators, depicted as freakish amusement to the crowds – until their threat is savagely established. Brilliantly played, the characters are deadly, debaucherous and gloriously foul mouthed.

It’s easy to see why writer/showrunner Steven DeKnight’s Roman world can sustain a story beyond that of Spartacus. This is a well-realised hell-scape, pitiless and hope-free. The new series might lack the anti-slavery message of its predecessor, but it retains its pure wargasm with no attempt at realism whatsoever.

Whilst other shows go for highbrow magical realism, attempted authenticity, and grand ambition, DeKnight’s people are driven by lust, domination and revenge. This is a far more raw and honest view of an unpleasant age.   

The infamous arena battles remain gore-soaked comedy – a live action Itchy and Scratchy. The scenes are well-placed through the plot – entertaining interludes between the dense turns of a complex story. DeKnight has done something unique with this series – he’s brought exploitation cinema back with a colour-saturated bang. Bridgerton this is not. Repressed passions in this world turn into public orgies.

This is a world you aren’t meant to envy – everyone is a beast where survival comes at the expense of others. Even the weakest characters plot. Wives scheme; prostitutes manipulate; slaves flatter.  All the characters are drawn with a boo-hiss villainy, all emotions are theatre and no-one is particularly likeable. The reborn Ashur is only empathetic as the story is told from his perspective.

While many might dismiss this as a return to the exploitative tone of yesteryear, there is an obvious intelligence and satire behind it all. Many shows today are written in a lazy modern vernacular. DeKnight has his actors chew well-crafted faux Roman dialogue as if it were Shakespeare. The show deserves a high grade just for its commitment to being as extreme as it is. It isn’t subtle, but why does it need to be? It is a show built around gladiators murdering each other for public amusement. It isn’t supposed to be easy viewing. Repulsion should be part of an honest reaction.   

The final arena contest itself is no surprise, but that final twist…. Hail Caesar, indeed. Series two, if greenlit and apparently already written, promises to take the story into a new day where Ashur is done fawning around the powerful.

Overall, DeKnight’s revival is a brilliantly realised return to a familiar world – just don’t get too close to the screen. Proximity can be terminal.

4/5 This revival casts aside all concessions to ideological casting and spins a well-crafted story that easily sustains a sequel in a post-Spartacus Roman world.

Starz

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