(SPOILER ALERT: As promised, here's an updated version of my post concerning the Italian space opera, Starcrash. It's less a review and more a play-by-play rehash of the movie itself, only now with more pictures! If you haven't seen it, you may want to before reading this, or read it and I'll be amazed if you still want to see it. Someone, somewhere, if there's justice in the world, will get me a Blu-ray of this for my efforts. Enjoy!)
Often enough, I've warned friends and family of the dangers of returning to the beloved movies of your past. More than once, like a moth to the flames, I have made this error and returned to those movies. More often than not, a beloved former cinema gem in my mind's eye has been dashed to the ground, forever broken and tarnished. On a few occasions, I've been delightfully surprised that the movie managed to still hold some or all of it's magic. But the real fun is finding the rarest of all, and running full tilt head first into the open arms of an old movie's overwhelming badness.
This movie is awful, and I love it almost more than breathing.
Nothing about this poster says you won't love this movie.
Starcrash (1979, d. Luigi Cozzi)
Now, by 1979, we all know that Star Wars had blown away box office records and spawned a following that multiplied faster than Gremlins being sprayed with a firehose. It wasn't, however, until the success was solidified by The Empire Strikes Back, that the drive really geared up to cash in on sci-fi's new success.
80's Sci-Fi or Cruising sequel?
Probably the two most well known cash-in attempts were made by a name that has produced many a groan in many cineastes, Dino De Laurentiis. Now, I own both of these films, (...and how shall I put it in the most diplomatic way between the lovers and the haters of these films...ahem...) and though they are not classics, they still retain a certain joyous charm shown by the lavish work put into them. Those films are Flash Gordon (1980) and Dune (1984). But of course, those weren't the only ones, they were probably just the biggest and the only ones that anyone seems to remember. But in 1978, Producers Nat and Patrick Wachberger, who definitely weren't Dino, must have decided to toss anything and everything into one movie in the hopes of grabbing some franchise-starting glory.
If you've seen Star Wars, I don't need to describe the opening crawling spaceship shot. The major difference here of course is that the Star Destroyer looked like...well, something that could damn well destroy some stars. Our spaceship here looks like you could crush it by accidentally laying a book on top of it...or knocking it off the table. Once we got inside the ship, and I saw all the left over leatherette costumes from Planet of the Vampires (1965...and a much better film), I thought maybe it wouldn't be all bad. That was until I saw one of the most leaden exposition scenes ever interrupted by what appeared to be a super-imposed death dealing force field that looked like the inner workings of a lava lamp. Oh, oh, oh...the guys in the ship are on a mission from the Emperor to find the ultimate weapon created by the evil...are you ready for this...Count Zarth Arn! (Zarth's not only pure evil...he also has one of cinema-dom's most impressive haircuts...The English language lacks the precice vocabulary to accurately describe it.)
Who needs a large black helmet when you've got all these lovely locks?
Ok, moving on. We cut to space smugglers Stella Star (Caroline Munro, former Bond girl, The Spy Who Loved Me) and her buddy Akton (Marjoe Gortner, who grew to fame as the youngest ordained minister..and who later appeared in American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt) who are on the run (for what...I have no idea...they're just...um...smugglers?) from the space cops, Thor and robot Elle (who's actually a guy...and whose voice sounds like Martin Sheen doing a bad Southern accent). Stella and Akton jump into hyperspace (and we're treated to more impressively bad visuals), but are caught after stopping to checkout a derelict space craft. Oh, oh, oh...the derelict craft was one of the launches from the Emperor's scout ship from beginning of the movie...I probably forgot to mention it because even as I was watching it, I didn't think it would be important (...and I've seen Star Wars!)
Weird straps: the stuff of space outfits since long before Leeloo.
So Stella and Akton (I keep thinking of Ohio...or bug spray for some reason) are sentenced to hard labor on two different planets (Oh, I should mention that the judge looks like the head Martian from Invaders from Mars [1953...and also a better movie...even with the goofy effects which are forgiveably 25 years older]). Right....Let's just skip ahead. Stella makes a...uhhh...confusing escape from...ummm...well, I'm not sure what sort of labor...something to do with a furnace. So she escapes, and is picked up by....Thor and Elle, the space cops! Huh? Oh, oh, oh...apparently, Stella is the best pilot in the galaxy, and Akton is the best navigator...so the Emperor wants them to find the rest of the missing ships that escaped from the spy ship. Are you following any of this? Who cares...let's continue.
The first ship is on a planet...well, it's just a planet...it has an ocean, a beach...and a bunch of Amazons...oh, oh, oh, and some woman who we don't know but we do find out that she's loyal to Zarth, and she hates Elle the robot...for some reason that naturally is not explained. So Stella and Elle go down, they get captured, the make another goofy implausible escape, and are then attacked by an enormous stop motion statue. An Aside here: Clash of the Titans (1981) was one of the movies I shouldn't have gone back to, but watching this scene, suddenly and inexplicably, my heart yearned in the hardest way for the majesty that was Harryhausen's Kraken. Oh, and I guess there were no survivors in the ship...no one really says what happened to them, but the Amazon queen does tell Stella and Elle that they are spies, and they'll never find Zarth's ultimate weapon. On to the next planet...
The majesty of a tin foil colossus...in SPACE!!!
For some reason, they stop off on some frozen planet to check out the spy ship that we already saw explode. Now we're told that you'll freeze to death instantly if the sun goes down on this planet. Why are we told this? Well, because someone's got to freeze to death of course. As it turns out, Thor is a traitor. He's working for Zarth and he leaves Stella outside to freeze after he "kills" Akton (remember the old soap opera rule: if you don't see a body...). Somehow, Elle saves Stella from freezing to death...I'd tell you how, but I really don't know...but she is in suspended animation (?). Akton returns from the "dead" with...um...super powers. He kills Thor, and re-animates Stella...who looks like she was covered in a slimy version of that fake snow sh!t you spray on X-mas trees. I think that it's at this point that Stella somehow discovers that Akton can see the future...right-o...if it isn't, I'm sorry...but you should know...Akton can see the future...but apparently, he can only see it after getting whacked on the head by Thor...Moving on...
Thanks internet for doing my work for me.
Now the third and final planet they visit is filled with smoke machines....well, smoke machines and cavemen. Yup. They club Elle to smithereens (he's a robot remember?), and capture Stella...who's then rescued by David Hasselhoff! Part of me wishes that was just a punchline...but seriously, she's rescued by David Hasselhoff, who plays Simon, the Emperor's son. He doesn't tell Stella that at first...because...well, he's not sure what sides she's on...but despite that, he still saves her from the cavemen...sort of. Within four minutes of screen time, they're both captured by the cavemen...until Akton arrives wielding something that's kind of...ummm...light saberish. He whoops some caveman @$$, and then reveals that...dun-Dun-DDUUUUUUUNNNNN...the planet they're on holds Zarth's ultimate weapon! (There actually is some explanation on how he figured that out...but that would involve me rehashing even more nonsensical convoluted plot points.)
Next, they go down into the weapon's...ummm...whatever...um...home. Akton does a lot of explaining, and who should turn up but Zarth Arn and his haircut! Oh yeah, he's also got some men with him who look just like the Emperor's guys from the beginning (the leatherette spacesuits) but with slightly different hats AND two...umm..stop-motion robots with pirate swords. Like any good villain, he then explains that he's going to blow up the ultimate weapon (huh? why?), which will also kill the Emperor when he arrives to save his son. To someone somewhere...this made perfect sense. Nonetheless, Zarth takes off, leaving the robots to watch the prisoners. What he's going to do next, I have no idea...take over the universe, I guess...but without his ultimate weapon. Maybe he just went out for a sandwich and a beer.
I bet you didn't even notice the robots for that majestic hair.
So, Akton cuts loose with somemore Jedi-esque work on the robots...and though he can still see the future, as far as I understand...he's still cut pretty badly by one. At this point, Hasselhoff (I know I said his character was Simon...but I'm just gonna call him Hasselhoff which I think is a cooler more heroic name) leaps into action with the "light saber" and kills the other robot. Akton, in Ben Kenobi fashion, has to die to fulfill...umm...destiny...which may have meant something if we knew what the hell was going on with him to begin with. Oh, when he dies, he disappears in something that sort of looks like what my TV does when I turn it off. Sure enough, right about this time, the Emperor shows up.
Ok, pause in action...The Emperor did appear before now, but I was sort of saving him up. Do we all know who Christopher Plummer is? I have two fond childhood memories of Chris. Every X-mas my sister and I watched The Sound of Music (1965) on TV with my mom, and Christopher Plummer was the gruff but enventually endearing Captain Von Trapp. Later, my dad and I used to watch Pete Sellers act a fool in the Pink Panther movies, and Christopher Plummer took over the role of the dashing Sir Charles Litton (aka. The Phantom) in Return of the Pink Panther (1975). Yet here he is, and you can almost see the dignity washing away with each frame that he's on screen. Something inside me shed a tear...while I laughed my @$$ off as he explained that his space ship could freeze time while they escaped the destruction of the ultimate weapon. It only got worse...
This is the future! Aerodynamics be damned!
With the ultimate weapon of unknown weapon-ness out of the way, they go to attack Zarth Arn's flying fortress....dear God...Must go on...must finish story...flying fortress that is shaped like a giant hand. (I should mention that it was at this point that I mentally confirmed that I had seen this movie as a kid...I had never forgotten the flying space hand.) Now we're treated to the second round of space dog fights in this movie...treated...yes, Mr. Cozzi, our director, probably inadvertently taking a page from the serials of the past that inspired Star Wars, uses the exact same footage of space ships flying around over and over and over and over and over and over and over again...until...we send in the flying coffins!
Yup, the emperor launches two-man flying coffins in through the windows of Zarth's flying hand ship. Amazingly, though a great many of these flying coffins make it in...and ignoring that the vacuum of space isn't pulling them and everything else in the ship out into the vaccum of space...they all magically seems to break through the same windows over and over and over again. I mentioned "two-man flying coffins" because that's what comes out of them: two men. However, I began to wonder if the Emperor was such a good guy because...uh...well...all these guys get slaughtered...and um, all his spaceships get destroyed while he, Stella, and Hasselhoff all stand around watching. Sort of seemed like an intergalactic snuff film there for a few minutes.
NOTE: Not the set of the 1979 Academy Awards
Now, all seems lost. Zarth Arn's going to destroy the Emperor's home planet...in a way that's never explained...and that definitely will NOT involve the ultimate weapon. Suddenly the Emperor is hit with a plan: Starcrash. Nope, it hasn't been mentioned before, not counting the title. It's sort of explained in a way that can't be summarized by a rational human mind...well, there's going to be some sort of time space warp involving the flying hand ship and some flying city we've never seen before, but essentially, Stella and Elle (who's been rebuilt...quelle surprise!) basically fly out to the flying city and ram it into Zarth's ship. They escape. Hasselhoff picks them up. Zarth blows up in a lot more repetitive footage of bad miniatures exploding. And instead of a The End with Hasselhoff and Stella making out, Cozzi instead decides to drive Plummer closer to the brink of madness by making him recite the most bizarre, pointless, and nonsensical soliloquoy ever filmed. THE END.
For a minute, I considered rewinding the movie, and copying the soliloquoy down for you...but no, no, no...you gotta see it for yourself...truly. In fact, looking back, I'm not sure that I've done this movie an iota of justice in merely describing it. If you can, just take an hour and a half of your life and throw it away on this glorious travesty of a movie. If you can't manage that, take like a five dollar bill out of your wallet and burn it...for Plummer...for Hasselhoff...and for the great movie that is...STARCRASH!
Sci-fi sexism was never so sexy...and neither was Hasselhoff.
(I would've done my usual reviewing of the performances, direction, camerawork, music, etc. ...but come on...if you just read all that...do I really need to?)
This weekend led to a strange double header of disturbing psychosis...in other words, I watched a couple of weird movies that were oddly linked.
I had heard for years about Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue (1997), but even after seeing the director's bizarre hallucinogenic assault Paprika (2006), I still hadn't exactly sought it out. I suppose there was something to the idea that a psychological thriller in an animated film that was just over an hour in length that created some form of cognitive distaste in me. Not that I didn't believe that very serious and intense subjects couldn't be carried by animation as I was in my early teens when I first witnessed Akira (1988). At the same time, I think it's that very tie to the spectacle of science fiction, of which Perfect Blue has none, that made other animated films more desirable to me.
Now having seen it, I feel like, in the words of Fred Sanford, a big dummy. Perfect Blue is a wonderfully animated and disturbing ride into loss of identity and psychosis. The story concerns a young pop singer, who decides to ditch her cutesy J-pop world to become a serious actress. The move rankles many of her devoted male fanbase, one of whom maintains a blog where he posts as her. At this point, I'm reluctant to describe anymore of the plot as the movie does a great job of layering hallucination and reality in a way to keep you guessing as to what you're seeing and what's really happening. It's also remarkably prescient about on-line impostors and celebrity stalking, which existed before now but which really came to its own in the past decade.
Many Japanese directors excel at this form of psychological thriller, taking it to deeper and darker places than most anywhere else. This film reminded me of an animated version of one of my favorite Japanese films, Sogo Ishii's Angel Dust (1994). I still remember sitting bolt still in the theater being hammered by this movie when the cutesy couple behind me left because the girlfriend couldn't take it anymore. Of course, this direction of Japanese cinema became more popular during the horror wave that followed, such as The Ring (1998) and The Grudge (2002), and while I found some gems, their sacrifice of well-developed story (or in some cases, a story that made any kind of sense) for unrelenting atmosphere always left me a touch meh. (Another worth seeking out is the Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), which gives the illusion of being another J-horror knock-off when it takes a serious turn for the, to put it delicately, batshit nuts, and becomes a fantastic psychological thriller.)
Oddly enough, the Japanese tend to have the same soft spot for Italian genre cinema that I do. Many of the best widescreen transfers of Spaghetti Westerns (the Japanese call them "Macaroni Westerns") came from Japanese disks. And much like their fellow gonzo Japanese filmmakers, the Italians also knew went to ratchet up the crazy and the killer. Slasher movies around the world owe a debt to the Italian 'Giallo', their 60's-70's (and a few in the 80's) thriller genre with a high and bloody body count. The great difference is that the Giallos tended to have beautiful casts in exotic locations doing fabulous things while getting knocked off, rather than a bunch of stupid teens in some remote cabin in some scary woods.
A very late entry into the genre, Lamberto Bava's Delirium (1987) stars the voluptuous Serena Grandi as a former nude model who now runs a very successful men's magazine when her models start dying at the hands of an obsessed killer who photographs the corpses in front of her old centerfolds. Now, as usual for the genre, the set-up alone is more than enough excuse to have plenty of beautiful people and a multitude of bared breasts (but being European, it always comes off less sleazy than the usual American Bikini Beach III wet T-shirt competition). Add in the operatic craziness of one of the best synth-meets-metal scores since Goblin by Simon Boswell...and you're there!
Like I said, the Giallos had pretty well run their course by the time this one came along, and while it has all of the usual tropes, it still managed to keep me guessing. Part of the fun in most of the best of these is figuring out who the killer is, because nearly every character outside the main character has some sort of sordid or sleazy or shady side that points to them, and there's usually always one moment that frames them in a creepy light. Then there's always the balance of the way too obvious to the way too uninvolved: the voyeuristic disabled kid next door is way too obvious, but the weird photographer hasn't had enough screentime to be a fulfilling killer...see how it works? Once the killer was revealed, I almost slapped myself for not figuring it out based on earlier clues.
Bava, son of the horror maestro Mario Bava, seems to be having fun and the big tie-in to Perfect Blue above, other than the rash of stabbings, was his inventive use of seeing the victims from the killer's POV where they appeared as grotesque monstrosities. I wanted more of it, simply for the sheer creativeness, but the effect waned as the story progressed. Still and all, for a night of silly and tastefully sleazy fun, you could do a whole lot worse. That's what made them a great pair of thrill: take Pefect Blue straight, and Delirium as the lighter chaser.
I've always known that I was never alone in a desire to romanticize the past. Where I always felt that my view of a previous age veered from most was that I knew that this perfect past age filled with heroism and adventure never went any further than the movie I was watching or the book I was reading; whereas, all too often, many people who feel this way think there's some perfect age that they wished they could escape back to. Take a moment to peruse one of those "Life in the Middle Ages" type books, and realize that were you to somehow make it back, you'd probably be dead of cholera, dysentery, and/or plague before the first day was up (perhaps a slight exaggeration on my part...but not entirely off mark).
It's why I've always loved the "Constitutional Peasant" scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) which injected anachronistic political ideals into Arthurian romance just before it shifts to a lengthy derision of those same Arthurian legends (see it HERE ).
In any event, if I were to live in a past age, I'd want it to be the movie version of some past age. Nowadays, however, there seems to be a need to spice up this age that didn't exist. And while I can enjoy some steampunk up to a point, and can thrill to the off-the-wall kung fu Native American capers of Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le pacte des loups, 2001), I've never seen it as necessary to make any age with swordplay more interesting. And now with all the unrelentingly silly retro-tech built into movies like Van Helsing (2004) and Jonah Hex (2010), the slightest hint of it in trailers often makes me queasy, which made today's review quite refreshing...
Apparently aka. Captain Kronos - Ladykiller
Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974) is largely considered one of the last great films from Hammer Film Productions (The Label has seen a revival in recent years with the release of Let Me In (The 2010 remake of 2008's Let the Right One In) and The Woman in Black (2012)). Hammer was probably best known for the long running reinventions of the early Universal Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy) starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee that ran through the 1960's. Kronos, however, was an original story of a former British military man who's teamed up with a hunchbacked doctor in ridding the countryside of vampires. Not the traditional bloodsuckers, these vampires suck the life force from young maidens and cannot be killed with the stake through the heart.
"You're eyeliner is smudged."
Kronos stars the popular German actor Horst Janson in the leading role (who, this time around, reminded me more than a little of a Germanic Michael York from the same time period), English heart throb Caroline Munro (star of the unbelievable Italian bizarrity Star Crash (1979) whose review I might have to repost) as the peasant girl who offers Kronos aid and...ahem...moral support, and a cast of familiar character actors from the era. As I've often espoused with today's comic book movies, the only way to pull off goofy fun like this is to have serious actors. They can't make a swashbuckling vampire movie into Shakespeare, but they can certainly make you invest in it for an hour and half without feeing ridiculous.
Caroline usually received excellent marks on her only jobskill: looking sultry
For the most part, it's a straight forward affair: girls wander off into the forest to have their life force drained by a cloaked figure(s?), Kronos arrives to investigate, the shady family from the distant castle is revealed, the stakes are raised so to speak, and the fun picks up from there. Director Brian Clemens, who created the fantastic BBC adventure series The Avengers, does a fine job of keeping the plot popping along while creating a decently foreboding atmosphere. It's simple. It's direct. It's effective. And perhaps most importantly of all: it lacks that all too common today terrible tone of irony. It's never nodding or winking at you while daring you to call it on its bullshit, nor taking said bullshit to atmospheric heights that can't possibly pay off. In other words, it plays like a lost art.
Now, don't think that means I'm calling it some sort of lost classic, but I am calling it the most enjoyable costume drama with a British officer with a samurai sword fighting soul-sucking vampires in an old castle film I've probably ever seen. I would certainly hope that you would feel the same. But I fear that the old man in me is right when he tells me that a generation brought up on a CGI vampire-fighting Lincoln would merely find it tedious.
Here's another modified post from one I wrote many many moons ago (March 2004) when John Carter was first seriously getting kicked around Hollywood as a movie. Now, in 2012, the movie was finally made a reality...So we'll pick up my thought from then and wed then to the now...no one has to know:
The forefront of Venusian studies in 1935.
Barsoom Lost.
In the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, is definitely the A-List. Carson of Venus is probably C-List. And rightly so, as the title (of the blog this was originally posted to, The B-List Super Hero Roll Call) suggests: John Carter, Warlord of Mars, is my B-List superstar. To be honest, I don't know thing one about Carson Napier of Venus other than that his schtick sounds a lot like my man John Carter. But for those of you living wildly outside of pop culture for the past century, Tarzan was an English Lord who was raised by apes in the jungle. For those of you outside of the hipster geekdom of classic sci-fi or comics, John Carter was the Warlord of Mars.
I'm kidding.
John Carter, a post Civil War Virginian gentlemen and adventurer, travelled out west to strike a fortune in gold. Instead, he found hostile Indians, a mysterious cave, and himself...buck naked on the Martian soil. He rescues a Princess, who turns out to be his true love, from the four-armed clutches of the Green Men of Mars and the party begins. Eventually he teams up with his Green Man buddy, Tars Tarkas, who I must point out has four arms, and they go tear-@$$ing all over the planet fighting the good fight.
I've read A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars, Thuvia Maid of Mars, and The Chessmen of Mars. And that's only half of them. (I do own a complete run of the comics and the annuals. It should be noted that Issue #18 featured the first work of Frank Miller for Marvel; however, if you only know Frank from Sin City and beyond, don't go out of your way to pick this book up.) And yes everything from the titles to nearly everything in the book is 'of Mars'...except John Carter who is of Earth....but becomes Warlord of Mars.
Note the lack of the moniker Classics Illustrated...but plenty of whoop-ass.
Again, the question: Are they GREAT Books? The answer: No, they are by no means great literature. They are however, once again, fun reads for what they are. They're compelling page turners and they tell fun heroic stories. Are these books timeless like Lord of the Rings? While certainly moreso than a lot of the current sci-fi/fantasy crap that's far too closely paired to technology or ideas that are outdated by the time the book hits shelves, Burroughs outclasses them by merely being a progenitof of the genre and the touching kitsch value over any real literary value. Wells and Verne probably have the title locked up for making the jump from genre fare to literature in this category for the earliest phases, Burroughs has become part of the pop culture paradigm ad infinitum with Tarzan alone.
But you know what's best about reading a John Carter book? The Imagination.
It's the charm of most early sci-fi: the total exclusion of most standard scientific knowledge and logic of the world outside the Earth. It doesn't defy it, it just innocently ignores it. It's escapism. Somewhere to go and live someone else's reality, as long as you don't try to make it conform to the laws and logic of the world you see in front of you. We know there are no people on Mars (though this book implies that this was a very ancient civilization that John Carter travelled back in both time and space to), no animals (except maybe....MAYBE...bacteria) and no vegetation (at least not in the trees, bushes, and grass sense so far). John Carter has all of them: men, animals, plants, and many kooky variations thereof. And that's just for starters.
A perfect encapsulation of the adventure and excitement to be had on Mars.
That isn't to say that there aren't writers who create pure escapism toay. Take the genre I harp on harshest, Fantasy. Weird worlds, strange characters and stranger beasts certainly allow the imagination to run wild, but without firm foundation in some kind of reality and a good fleshing out, it gets real hollow, real fast. And it takes a good author to develop thos things without it become a boring hammering out of exposition like the technical specs of some jet in a Tom Clancy book. What bothers me most when trying to read these things is the simple stupid things like the characters' names. Xyanathorqor is not a name, and you line up a 1000 page story with eighty characters with unpronouncable names with more consonants than vowels and it gets to be unreadable. Why is it that all the early fantasy authors wrote short stories and novellas that piped in twice the quality storytelling than these mammoth dead weights do (and with better cover art usually)?
Which brings us to the time period in which John Carter now exists as a movie. Now, I feel the movie got a bad rep before it even hit the shelves. Several articles I've read place the blame squarely on the shoulders of director Andrew Stanton who was given an unprecedented control over the marketing of the movie, but I have a hard time believing that Disney, one of the most controlling studios of its image and properties, would give anyone carte blanche to do what they would with so expensive an endeavor. Regardless, no matter who did what, the first mistake I believe was leaving out any reference to "of Mars" in the title. I did my own market research and found that most people I talked to were much more interested in a movie called John Carter: Warlord of Mars or simply Warlord of Mars than they were in seeing something called merely John Carter. Furthermore, the strangely moody and oblique trailer did not communicate the wild adventure contained within that I knew it would be because I knew the John Carter books.
Now that, I do know was one of Stanton's faults: assuming anyone knew or cared who or what John Carter was. As I joked above, nearly everyone knows Tarzan, but Carter is a far distant second in terms of pop culture consciousness, and nothing in the initial presentation of posters and trailers bridged that gap. Second of all, Carter's been well mined in sci-fi terms (everything from Flash Gordon to Star Wars to Avatar owes it at least a nod for inspiration), so it's gonna be tough to take something of a more simple time fantasy-wise and keep it from being tired to a modern audience....and it sort of managed that...except that by adding the super weapon (not in the original book) and a little too much tech, it made the guys in loincloths fighting with swords come off as more silly than it should have. (I think of it this way, if you can still get people roaring about guys in togas and tunics as in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), or all of Snyder's 300 beefcake, you should be able to pull of John Carter's outfits.)
"I say, is that a raygun? Then I shall keep this sword in its scabbard."
But the biggest problem, and one I feel that most movies seem to miss (especially all these heavy handed gloom and doom comics movies), is the overall tone. As I mentioned above, these aren't great literature, they're fantastic pulp. Trying to make John Carter into A Tale of Two Cities simply isn't going to happen, no matter how much you love it. And it was very obvious that Stanton loved it, but the reverence worked to his disadvantage. (Since I mentioned Zach Snyder, Watchmen (2009) has so strict an adherence to the book for the bulk of the movie that it came off stiff, lifeless, and devoid of much of the humanity the book delivered in non-moving drawings.) In all, I would say that had he treated it like an 80's Spielberg adventure, a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Flash Gordon, and I think it would've been spot on. And while the cast was fine and the CG very well done, it needed that Harrison Ford-type as the leading man, because that is Carter, the guy who doesn't know what he's doing in this situation but with that cocksure "what the hell" attitude that let's him get knocked down for laughs and still be heroic. (This would be the point where normally someone would shop Han Solo's head onto Taylor Kitsch's body surrounded by Green Men, but I'm neither that good, nor that bored.)
As the project had been in development hell for a solid decade, and many writers and directors had come and gone, I had sort of hoped that it would never get made...at least not until I got a stab at it. But it did, and sadly it suffered a fate worse than it deserved. And while, I would hope it would teach a lesson on understanding your source material and your audience...I'm not going to hold my breath.
There's no joking when it comes to the awesomeness that is Frazetta.
I meant this to be a book review, but this one might prove to be something of a quickie, as I was less than rested this weekend.
The thing about living in Los Angeles is that you can get out and about into all sorts of weirdness at all hours that can often span the entire length and width and depth of the town. I've had quiet nights at home where a late phone call or text summons me to some hanging out in one part of town that suddenly ended in the exact opposite part of the town at 4 a.m. with several stops in between. To be honest, I've developed something of a barometer for it that scales the summons, the starting location, as well as the participants to decide just what sort of evening it's going to be. And while, I'm still surprised occasionally, there are many nights when I just know it's going to be a big one...so I tell my bed not to wait up for me.
This whole weekend sort of turned out to be one of those. So it was oddly fated that during the proceeding week I should revisit the crazy evening depicted in John Landis's lesser known work Into the Night (1985).
Starring Jeff Goldblum (fresh off his stint as the cowboy New Jersey in the cult classic Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai...) and Michelle Pfeiffer, Into the Night concerns cubicle drone Ed Okin who attempts to escape his boredom, insomnia, and unfaithful spouse by taking a night drive to LAX, and gets more than he bargained for when a beautiful gem smuggler leaps into the car after being pursued by Persian mercenaries. The film's an 80's cavalcade of Los Angeles locations and a barrage of cameos, many of which only the film connoisseur will ever pick up on (such as director David Cronenberg, Muppeteer Jim Henson, special effects make-up whiz Rick Baker, as well Landis himself to name a few).
The most interesting thing to me about revisiting movies from this time, especially comedies, is how tonally different they are from modern movies. If you go back and revisit Landis's Trading Places (1983), it's still a great movie, and to me has aged well, but most striking is that it doesn't seem compelled to be hurling gags at you every nanosecond. The movie is plenty funny, but isn't bending over backwards to convince you of that fact. And despite everything coming out of the Hollywood studios today being labelled high concept, there have been few that relate a mature and/or well conceived narrative that also happens to have laughs. I can't even conceive of something as neon noir yet funny as Walter Hill's 48 Hours getting made exactly as it was today.
Having said that, I must confess that Into the Night sags a little more than those above in the comedy department. Don't get me wrong, it's an enjoyable ride, but even with that 80's tone, the lack of consistent laughs or heavy suspense leaves it in a nebulous zone between comedy and thriller. Goldblum and Pfeiffer both do fine jobs in their roles, but as they say (do they, really?) the sparks never exactly fly. At nearly two hours, you begin to feel it. From my personal perspective, I feel the drag began when the sun comes up in the movie. In my kookier nights out, when the sun came up, that was usually the sign that the affair had gone on too long, and this one keeps going after that.
In any event, it certainly doesn't diminish my love for Landis's work as many of them occupy my movie shelf, and it was a great revisit to an interesting time period when you could have a level of maturity while still being silly.
And for no other reason than I want to, here's a picture of the Hong Kong Cavaliers. That's Goldblum on the right with the hat.
(From the Archives: This is a revamp of a post I wrote back in 2004, that for some reason is still one of the most popular on-line articles I've ever written.)
I spent entirely too much time reading reviews of Jaws - The Revenge this morning (If you've never read it, Roger Ebert's take brings tears of laughter: http://bit.ly/UojYa ). What made passing the time this way both an enjoyable and sad experience at the same time was that I had seen all four of them multiple times. I must've watched Revenge alone on cable at least four or five times. Jeez. This is not the week for me (Note: I haven't seen it since then).
All New! More Dennis Quaid than previous Jaws movies!
I must admit that the third installment was the one I saw least. That fact was easily explainable by what happened the first time I saw it: The third Jaws film was originally shown in 3-D. Everyone remember the brief return of the 3-D craze in the 80's? If you don't, be glad you've forgotten or missed it. The problem with most early 3-D films is that once you take the 3-D aspect out of them, the interest diminishes exponentially. The primary reason for this is that the story usually ends up more built around the effect so the shot composition throughout the film becomes very bizarrely stilted. Every object and motion starts to be directly and obnoxiously coming out from the movie at the audience. The newest wave of 3-D has the opposite problem: things that weren't meant to be 3-D are suddenly saddled with it unnecessarily.
The only fun in watching the third Jaws is to see just how bad the effects could get without the 3-D. There are several shots where the shark is supposed to be coming at you, but without blue and red glasses it seems to just be hovering in space and looking not at all menacing. The other classic moment is the shot of the scuba diver trying to claw his way out of the shark's mouth. I repeat: SHOT FROM INSIDE THE SHARK'S MOUTH.
The thing that kept circling around my head was: How many movie series that get past a second sequel have any kind of dignity by a fourth (or fifth)? I've noticed that usually by a third most of the magic is gone...the saddest is when they drag everyone out for a fourth way after the fact. (Here's looking at you Lethal Weapon series.)
I just chose this for the Further Adventures moniker. From what I remember, we should all be thankful there were no further Further Adventures.
To start with you have to make an important distinction in sequel movies. There are three categories:
1. Continuity Sequels: These are movies who feature the same characters in a usually epic story going from one film to the next. Star Wars is a good example.
2. Further Adventures of...Sequels: These sequels involve the same character/s from one adventure going on to the next, and does not have to be in order or have any direct story elements from previous films (accept for certain important moments like the death of a spouse). Take James Bond or Indiana Jones for example.
3. Sequels that Center around a Villain: The most common of these are slasher movies like Friday the 13th where there's usually no story or character continuity other than more people lose their lives because of a villain.
4. The Random Sequels: Sequels who share nothing but a name and usually a genre. The best example is Halloween III which had absolutely nothing to do with it's Michael Myers related predecessors. And then there's internet favorite Troll 2. European exploitation is positively riddled with these things (see: Django related movies)
There's more variations of course, and certainly these four categories overlap from time to time.
I know the motivation is money. I know that anyone could give an example of a sequel or two that was successful or almost as good as the first. Mostly, however, you have to wonder, who honestly goes in thinking they're going to beat the odds and make the sequel that pans out. The real oddities are the sequels to movies where you don't know anyone who saw the movie or liked the movie for it to get a sequel. And the worst are usually the straight to video sequels, especially the ones that fall into the fourth category and are just renamed to follow something successful.
The worst case scenario is a movie so beloved you feel compelled to see the sequel...just because it exists. If it's only one sequel, and it's bad or at least not as good as the first, then it just drags down the original. If there are multiples, if you can push the distaste far enough out of your mind, it usually makes the first movie that you loved look even more shiny. I'm not sure how or why it works that way, but it always seems to.
Let's take one of my favorites: The Howling.
Still one of the great horror posters.
The original, made in 1981, was helmed by creature movie auteur Joe Dante, at least half-written by John Sayles based on the novel by Gary Brandner, and had effects by a young Rob Bottin (competing with Rick Baker's American werewolf at the ripe age of 21). So it had quite a good bit going for it. Is it the greatest movie? No, but it's more effective and well-crafted than many horror movies (and certainly better than any of it's sequels). The plot concerns a reporter on the trail of a serial rapist/murderer who after a scare that leads to his capture is sent to a retreat where the inhabitants are a bit more than they seem. Fair enough.
The First Sequel: The Howling II (aka The Howling II: My Sister is a Werewolf) (1985). Now I was young the first time I saw this, but the "my sister as a werewolf" thing should have been warning enough. The fact that the main villainess name is Stirba should've been the final nail in the coffin. This was the first Howling movie Phillipe Mora was responsible for, and about the only smart move he made was capturing a teen boy audience with werewolves and Sybil Danning's oft-bared chest. This was probably one of the worst leaps from movie one to movie two.
The Second Sequel: The Howling III: The Marsupials (1987). Now Brandner wrote four Howling novels (I read two of them), but these sequels don't have...pardon me...a damn thing to do with them. As I said, Philippe Mora did two, and this was his second. There wasn't much in improvement. Now it is better than II...sort of. The concept is interesting in proposing the whole alternate evolutionary line for werewolves. That's where it ends. The rest is just bad. Worst of all, the movie takes a moment for one of the characters to trash Bottin's werewolf effects from the first movie. How this budgetless goof fest got the nerve, I'll never know.
The Third Sequel: The Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988). Ok, for a moment, we almost stepped back up. Director John Hough partially returned to the source material, and started off well enough. Unfortunately, with no budget, the pacing suffers from too much boring story per werewolf scare, and the werewolves end up being pretty weak when they arrive. However, with an obviously sincere desire to steer the series back to its roots, it almost got back a touch of dignity. This lasted a nano-second.
(Anyone appalled I lasted this long?)
The Fourth Sequel: The Howling V: The Rebirth (1989). At this point only an idiot would realize that anything with a werewolf in it was being slapped with a Howling title. You would think that some people would run like hell from being given the name whether it was straight-to-video crap or not. This one is way off the beaten path. A group of strangers gather for a Ten Little Indians style murder mystery whose big twist is that the murderer is a werewolf. I doubt I could sit through this one again, but as a teenager it was actually vaguely entertaining. In the end thought, with it's varied background cast plodding their way through the "plot", it ends up being as Joe Bob Briggs said best, "it's "Gilligan's Island" with a body count."
The Fifth Sequel: The Howling VI: The Freaks (1991). Here's where I gave up. I had trouble convincing myself to watch it at the time. Again, decent premise in one really broad stroke: werewolf vs. vampire. This was long before Underworld, and even longer before Twilight. However, the actual plot: werewolf circus freak vs. vampire is something less than spectacular. This movie also featured quite possibly the crappiest looking werewolf of the whole lot (and that's saying something). The really sad thing is that with millions of dollars and state-of-the-art effects, Underworld didn't manage any better than Baker or Bottin's work from decades before.
"Look upon my crapiness and tremble!"
Ok at this point I did give up, but...
The Sixth Sequel: The Howling VII: New Moon Rising (1995). I don't know if I need to do much research past the first review (on a bad movie site where they love these things) which said, "Worst Werewolf Movie Ever." Considering there aren't many good ones, that had to be a mark of distinction. Not to mention that just beating out The Howling VI for that distinction is quite a landmark.
I could've sworn there was a Seventh, but I can't find a listing for it. You can't tell me that everyone gave up after this treasure trove of masterpieces. (Apparently, in 2011, there was another attempt at reviving the name with an Anchor Bay produced sequel, The Howling: Reborn.)
I've long been a fan of Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). The tragic surreal tale of Thomas Jerome Newton, who could likely have not been played by anyone but David Bowie, who comes to Earth in attempt to secure water for his drought-ridden planet. In several sequences, Bowie absorbs the native culture via a wall of television screens, one of which plays an image that stuck with me: a tall black man in a Nehru jacket/lab coat tussles with a man in a dark room with a wooden floor. Even years later, with the aid of the internet, I was still unable to find the identity of this movie, assuming it to be one of the martial arts mixed blaxploitation movies of the late 70's.
And then I sat down to watch one of the last Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove (1964), Easy Rider (1969)) penned scripts that I hadn't seen, an adaptation of John Barth's The End of the Road, and then there it was in color, sound, and full-blown strangeness.
The Book
I only recently became familiar with Barth's work after The Sot-Weed Factor was recommended to me during a discussion about how much I enjoyed Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. Now, while Sot-Weed wasn't without its charms, I would summarize it as being a colonial America version of Voltaire's Candide, and I probably would've enjoyed it better had it been a little closer to that immortal novel in length (Barth's book runs overlong at somewhere between 700-800 pages). The End of the Road was an earlier work before Barth had hit this more mature stride, and told the story of Jacob Horner, a man who suffers from "cosmopsis" or the inability to make choices from the infinite array of possibilities of any action, who meets a strange doctor who encourages him to take a teaching job at a local school where he becomes embroiled in a relationship with another teacher and his wife. While the book might have been at the cutting edge of modern literature, Barth apparently wasn't prepared for the psychedelic treatment it would receive at the hands of Southern and director Aram Avakian.
The film
I'm not entirely sure what angle to take to relate this film to you. Was it interesting? Sure. Did it have laughs or a message? Both. Had I seen anything like it before? Sort of. End of the Road has the feel of a fair few late 60's anti-establishment films with its surreal elements and avant-garde tone. The characters are less characters and more symbolic archetypes (is that redundant?) who represent any number of aspects of society. The first half of the film where Jacob (Stacey Keach) is treated at the strange asylum of the unnamed black doctor (James Earl Jones) was far more interesting than the maudlin latter half when Jacob becomes entangled in an affair with a fellow teacher's wife. Now, I don't have a problem with a film that's more about ideas than plots or realistic characters, but End of the Road isn't satisfying in that way either, as the style often gets in the way of the substance. Dr. Strangelove, for instance, communicates its ideas far more clearly and with more laughs. Or Robert Downey Sr.'s Putney Swope (1969), which is a super-stylized satirical attack on advertising that again was both more entertaining and far less muddled.
James Earl Jones munches scenery like he's been starved for days.
Oddly enough, from a writing standpoint, it seemed to be a very personal project for Southern who also produced, but was ultimately offensive to Barth, even though it was far from his favorite amongst his own novels. I can't say that I would respond well to any production taking my own work, and introducing a "chicken-rape" scene into it for no apparent reason. (I mean that literally, one of the insane asylum inmates does...well...rape a chicken.) And so, I'm even more confused where to fall on this one: I can't exactly recommend it, certainly not in a broad sense, but nor would I say it was without interest (It should probably be viewed if only for one of the wildest, over-the-top performances by James Earl Jones). So I guess I'll say, save End of the Road until your 60's arthouse film journey is getting close to the end of its road.
I sit around most days and create. I've written 4 books (2 available through my site or Amazon), a small stack of screenplays, and a bunch of ad and web copy. When not using words, I paint and draw quite a fair bit. Occasionally, I'm paid for doing this. I like paper, pens, india ink, celluloid and alcohol. I hope you enjoy a little of what I've made for you, my love...my storm...my anonymous public...
