A 1750s SCOTTISH Karate Kid?

I just watched the original Karate Kid film for Myopia Movies and coincidentally found this Tumblr post that Canadian author Bruno Lombardi, whom I know from the alternate history forum, posted on Facebook.

I thought that would actually be pretty fun to watch and joined in the brainstorming. For the Scottish scenario, I suggested the equivalent to the Japanese Internment would be German bombing of Scottish cities and evacuation of Scots to Canada, with "Mr. MacMiyagi" as the sole survivor of a U-Boat attack on the ship evacuating his clan. Bruno's friend, fellow writer Jonathan Edelstein, suggested instead it could actually take place in the early modern period, with "Mr. MacMiyagi's" personal tragedy being the Highland Clearances.

So here's the scenario we hashed out:

*Daniel is from the yeoman class, while Ali is gentry. There's a clear class difference, but they're both landowners. Mr. and Mrs. Mills aren't going to be exactly impressed, but the class difference isn't such a problem for them that they're going to have Daniel kidnapped and shipped to the Colonies as an indentured servant or quietly murdered. Perhaps Daniel's father was killed in one of Britain's wars during this period rather than dying of cancer and so the Mills, however skeptical they are of this poor(er) man, at least have that respect for Daniel. If he's an officer rather than "the scum of the earth" who formed the enlisted ranks in this period, even better. Edelstein suggested the LaRussos might own enough land to be able to vote, albeit at the lowest possible level (a "forty shilling freehold").

*Our elderly friend "Mr. MacMiyagi" is a Scot who fought for the British government against the 1745 Jacobite insurrection, but was driven off his land during the clearances. During the disaster his wife died in childbirth and his son died with her and with his home gone, he drifted southward and became a groundskeeper or gardener on the Mills' family estate. Traumatized by his various mishaps, he keeps to himself and engages in stereotypically Scottish hobbies like shinty (the Scottish equivalent of Irish hurling) or (if he's literate), writing Scottish poetry?

*The equivalent of Johnny and his Cobra Kai gang are "young gents" who dislike someone they view as little better than a peasant wooing a girl of their class, with Johnny in particular being a spurned suitor of Ali. Given how much more power parents' had over their children's, particularly daughters', romantic choices in this period, perhaps Mr. Mills is somewhat less oblivious than his movie equivalent and recognizes Johnny for the incipient wife-beater he is, or perhaps he also looks down on Johnny on class grounds. After all, Cobra Kai gets more into Johnny's backstory and "the money" he comes from his from his stepfather who barely tolerates him, not his birth family. Perhaps his mother is an actress or from a similarly low-class background who "married up" and the illegitimate Johnny was part of the package? Not only is Johnny a hormonal and jealous a-hole, but he's also classist and nasty toward Daniel because he's overcompensating for his own impoverished background.

*Bobby, one of the Cobra Kais in the original film who tries to restrain Johnny from his grotesque behavior toward Daniel, is an early Wesleyan. In the Cobra Kai series, we later see that he's become a preacher, so he sticks with it.

*"MacKreese" is another veteran of Culloden, only he fought for the Jacobites. He has a beef with "MacMiyagi" for that reason, plus the fact his side lost. He runs his quarterstaff club (I doubt they'd have martial-arts dojos in England at this time) like a particularly abusive military unit, spinning it to his charges' parents that he's teaching them discipline so they don't end up dissolute libertines. Thing is, instead they're a bunch of angry young men abusing peasants (think Chozen from the second film cheating people at the grocery store) or peers they dislike (i.e. Daniel).

So we have something roughly similar to the canonical film in which Johnny and his gang bully Daniel for courting Ali, but an attempt to jump him and murder him is interrupted by "Mr. MacMiyagi" totally wrecking them the way Mr. Miyagi wiped out five Cobra Kai students in seconds in the canonical film. Given the legal hell to pay a poor Scot is going to get for beating up some English gentlemen even in defense of an English yeoman (especially if their parents are important local nobles), perhaps "MacKreese" and "Mr. MacMiyagi" agree to allow Daniel to fight some kind of duel with Johnny rather than getting the law involved? "MacKreese" could spin this as some kind of test for his students (or put on a show of not wanting "Sassenach" laws judging another Scot), but it's really part of some kind of elaborate revenge on "Mr. MacMiyagi" for the Battle of Culloden?

Things start to get a little tricky when we tried to come up with a Scottish equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's traditional Okinawan/Japanese wisdom (be it authentic or something underinformed Americans would *think* was traditional Okinawan/Japanese wisdom). Edelstein said setting it in the 1750s would be too early for Robert Burns, but "MacMiyagi" could tell embellished stories of the founding of various Scottish clans or the great William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. And instead of Daniel's crane kick, there's a finishing move called "the Kelpie."

I personally am rather disinclined to join with woketarians in attacking The Karate Kid (see Ralph Macchio's defense of the original film when it's criticized for being "too white"), but I also recognize the concept of "turnabout is fair play." So if someone actually wanted to make a parody of TKK that riffs on the Magical Asian Mentor and Mighty Whitey tropes, I'd be all for it.

Movie Review: WILLOW (1988)

On the 100th episode of the Blasters and Blades podcast, I briefly discussed the movie Willow with the hosts. I referred to the movie as being "before my time" (it turns out I was actually around four years old, but at that point I was mostly interested in cartoons), much to the slightly-older host's annoyance. At the time I had not seen it, but lo and behold some time later, the film podcast Myopia Movies added it to the Season Nine lineup. So not long after DragonCon 2022, I watched it for the podcast...

Here's the link to the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

In a faraway land, a prophecy predicts that a child will be born who will overthrow the evil Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsha). To that end, Bavmorda, imprisons all late-stage pregnant women and has their child inspected after birth to see if they bear the prophesied mark--and one day the newborn Elora Danan (twins Kate and Ruth Greenfield) does. A sympathetic midwife smuggles the child out and Bavmorda dispatches her grim General Kael (Pat Roach) and warlike daughter Sorsha (Joanne Whalley) to pursue the child.

But the child falls into the hands of the farmer and family man Willow Ulfgood (Warwick Davis), who aspires to do magic. Assigned by the village elders to find a human to look after said child, Willow soon encounters the rogue Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) and the transformed sorceress Fin Raziel (Patricia Hayes). Soon they're all allies on a quest to overthrow Bavmorda, with some surprising twists and turns along the way.

The Good

*For starters, Willow and his kindred are a very specific fantasy race--they're gnomes. This is the first and so far only time I've seen gnomes in an actual film. For the scenes in the gnome village it looks like Lucasfilm hired every dwarf actor in Hollywood--every adult seems to have some form of dwarfism and there are a lot of them who can play musical instruments, fight with weapons, etc. The only ordinary-sized people seem to be the children. This is a good thing on multiple levels--it's more authentic and real-looking and it provides employment for people who often live rather difficult lives. And their characterizations are varied--the gnome village has an obnoxious moneylender who covets Willow's land, there are full-time soldiers (who are actually fairly skilled--on Twitter I called them "the littlest pikemen"), and even a wizard. We even see their form of government--they seem to have a town council and direct democracy on certain major issues. These aren't a bunch of circus performers, but an actual complex society.

*Also, this is a world where there are non-human fantasy races in addition to ordinary people. In a world of only Homo sapiens sapiens who often look different, practice different religions, etc. we're often bigoted enough toward each other. Willow and the other gnomes get repeatedly referred to as "pecks" (a reference to a unit of measurement, approximately 12-14 pounds) even by people who are supposed to be heroic. It's a major sign of a character's moral growth that this person starts referring to them by how they call themselves (Nalwyn) rather than "peck."

*The film also has a good cast. I liked all three of the main trio--Davis, Kilmer, and Whalley.

*The movie is fast-moving and entertaining, albeit a bit on the cheesy side.

The Bad

*Unfortunately, I can kind of tell where the filmmakers are getting a lot of their inspiration from. Willow and his friend Meegosh, after being captured by the brownies, are sent on a quest to protect Elora by some kind of forest sorceress whom I refer to on Twitter as Galadriel's "non-union Mexican equivalent." Apparently the novelization explains more--including her relationship to Fin Raziel and Bavmorda--but I shouldn't have to refer to the novelization, deleted scenes, etc. for a movie to make sense. According to the novelization she was a senior sorceress (and also a forest fairy of some kind) mentoring Raziel and Bavmorda, the latter of whom went bad. In the film it's not even clear if she's human or some kind of elf, fairy, etc. Hence "Galaldriel's non-union Mexican equivalent." Making her human--and perhaps involved in the military resistance against Bavmorda we see elsewhere in the film--would be more original, but again, it's not in the film.

*Per the above, there's a lot of missing material that's included in the novelization, earlier drafts of the script, comic books, etc. that would have helped the movie make a lot more sense. For example, Bavmorda believes that even if she killed baby Elora, she'd be reborn in a new body and the prophecy would kick back in. Hence the elaborate ritual to banish Elora's soul to another dimension and/or destroy it completely so that never happens rather than simply murdering her at first chance. There's also a character's defection that has a lot more back-story in the extended universe, but in the actual movie it seems like they're mostly doing it out of love (or at least lust) for one of the good guys.

(I suggested in the podcast the movie could be a bit longer to fix these issues, but Nic cited the example of his own child getting bored later in the movie to point out this risks losing the attention of the primary audience. The deleted scenes pertaining to the defector character--beware spoilers--don't add many minutes to the film, although the last bit involving a character conscious while imprisoned in a crystal is so ridiculous and cheap-looking. A few bits of dialogue here and there would be fine, but lots and lots of new scenes, not so much. I still think it'd be doable, although we're about 34 years too late. If you want an alternative take that's not overly elaborate, check out this fan-fic here. Spoilers beware.)

The Verdict

Not perfect, but a fun and entertaining fantasy film. Also a means of teaching good values to the target audience (kids) without being preachy and annoying to adults. 8.5 out of 10.

And while you're at it, check out my novella Little People, Big Guns. Although it on the surface it looks rather tacky and exploitative, my intention was to get into the real life issues little people face--people ignoring them because they can't see them, problems functioning in a world designed for people much larger than themselves, health difficulties, bullying by bigger people, and even weird fetishization. Davis actually runs an acting agency that started out representing his coworkers with dwarfism and later included those who were unusually tall.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: THE HOWLING (1981)

Back in the days of Blockbuster Video, I got my own membership later in high school and could rent any movie I wanted. One film I rented was The Howling, a well-regarded werewolf movie from the early 1980s. October 2022 is werewolf month on the film podcast Myopia Movies and this was one of the films I really wanted to do.

Here's the episode. And now for the review...

The Plot

In 1980s Los Angeles, television anchor Karen White (Dee Wallace) has been getting phone calls from serial killer Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo). In order to catch him, she agrees to meet up with him--with the police close by. As one might expect, this turns violent very quickly and the traumatized Karen can't remember precisely what happened. Dr. George Waggner, (Patrick Macnee), a local psychologist, invites her and her husband Bill Neil (Christopher Stone) to a rural commune called "The Colony" so she can rest and undergo group therapy. They arrive and meet various colorful characters living there, including Marcia Quist (Elisabeth Brooks), who is a little too interested in Bill.

And did I mention that Eddie's corpse has disappeared from the morgue? Karen's colleagues Chris Halloran (Dennis Dugan) and Terri Fisher (Belinda Belaski) investigate that as things get progressively weirder and more dangerous at The Colony.

The Good

*There is some good foreshadowing, like a character early on who specifically wants to commit suicide by fire.

*There're some moments of humor, like when a snoopy character is caught going through a filing cabinet.

*There is also some good development for the supporting cast, like how Karen's boss at the station is depicted as a jackass. He signs off on the scheme to bait serial-killer Eddie never mind that it's putting one of his employees at great risk and a good number of people openly object to it, and when she's clearly upset by the experience, says it's just as likely she could be pregnant (sexism) and casually and profanely butchers the name of an Asian anchor the station could use if she can't handle being on-air (racism). The guy is a real tool, and we get that mostly in one scene almost as an aside.

*I can't go into too much detail for reasons of spoilers, but they do develop the villains as people. Some are content with living in isolation and hunting animals and even peacefully coexisting with ordinary people, but others are more overtly predatory and violent and the former have to resort to increasing concessions to the latter in order to (barely) keep them under control. The politics of it could have been developed more, but they are interesting.

*I liked the side story with Chris and Terri investigating the aftermath of Eddie's attack on Karen and how it ultimately links back up with Karen's stay at the Colony.

The Bad

*After the initial confrontation with Eddie, the movie slows down considerably. Not much happens of note until Karen and Bill arrive at the Colony and Karen starts hearing wolves howling outside. This section of the movie functions more like a mystery than a straight-up horror movie in the vein of Silver Bullet or An American Werewolf in London. If that's what you're into that's fine, but be aware.

*Per the above, the internal politics of the Colony could have come up earlier--perhaps when Terri comes to see Karen, the residents could argue among themselves about this new development.

The Verdict

A bit dull if you go in expecting a full-on monster movie, but if you go in expecting a mystery, it's better. 7.5 out of 10.

Films I Bought Because of Myopia Movies

As my readers know, I'm a regular participant in the film podcast Myopia Movies, organized by one of my friends from the Boy Scouts. To that end, I've probably watched dozens if not hundreds of movies I haven't seen in forever (or never saw at all) over the last eight-odd years we've been recording. Some of these I liked so much I actually purchased them on physical media so I'll have them forever and not lose them to the whims of the streaming company or IP holder. Seriously, the streaming services giveth and the streaming services taketh away.  Netflix in particular has shed a lot of films over the years. And per The New York Times, you don't actually own your digital movies.

And so here are the DVDs or Blu-Rays that I've bought...

How The Grinch Stole Christmas-This is the Jim Carrey Nightmare Fuel edition that my colleagues didn't like but I thought was hilarious. Those damn materialistic Whos needed a wakeup call. The movie even opens with a Black Friday commercialistic nightmare. The episode is slated to premiere December 15 to coincide with the Grinch parody film The Mean One, so I'll update this page when it is.

The Abyss-This underwater science fiction extravaganza was something I first saw in elementary school, but didn't see again until we recorded a podcast on it. Here's my review and here is the episode. It's a blast. Also check out my YouTube video.

The Rocketeer-This and Shipwrecked were the first movies I saw with my mother when I first moved from Kennesaw-ish to East Cobb as a child. The episode was originally recorded for the show's defunct Patreon and won't be out until the planned sequel, but re-watching the movie again was a blast. I even got my college-student younger cousin watching it.

Labyrinth-For years I avoided this film due to seeing some creepy-looking production stills, but I'm glad I finally saw it. Here's the episode and here's the review. I also came up with some other posts based on and even created my first meme. I'm going to be on a panel about the film at the Atlanta fantasy festival CONjuration in early November, where some material from "Labyrinth is Hellraiser for Kids" (here in blog form and here on YouTube) will make an appearance.

Howard The Duck-This was a movie I'd wanted to do an episode on for years and it was a blast. Here's my review. I think I'm one of the few people in the world who non-ironically loves this one. Here's to hoping they let the original Beverly Lea Thompson direct an official MCU version, with one of her daughters playing the new Beverly. As of October 2022, Thompson is still campaigning for job.

Gremlins-This one came out the year I was born and I saw it for the first time at The Plaza Theater in Atlanta. Here's the podcast and here's my review. This one is definitely a hoot.

Highlander-I first saw this one as one of Joe Bob Briggs' late-night movie shows and was a big fan of the spinoff TV series that featured a younger relative of Connor MacLeod, with Connor dropping in now and then. Here's my review and here's the episode. The appearance of the villain Grendel from my steampunk series Battle for the Wastelands was inspired by the evil Kurgan's medieval war-gear, especially the helmet.

Willow-This movie came out when I was in pre-school, but I don't remember being interested. Cheesy and fun. The episode won't come out until December 22 to coincide with the Disney+ spinoff series featuring an older Willow training a new generation of heroes. Watching the film inspired me to purchase an ancient copy of the novelization and gave me more fodder for the 1980s fantasy film panel I'll be on at CONjuration.

Secret of NIMH-The movie that scared me to death in kindergarten. Here's the episode and here's the review. It's a beautiful film with excellent voice-work and animation.

Movie Review: SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

Once upon a time, there was a Charlton Heston film called Soylent Green, set in the far-off year of 2022 in which Earth has become massively overpopulated and...desperate measures...are required to keep everybody fed. Since we have finally reached that year and the human population has actually started to decline, the film podcast Myopia Movies is doing a very special episode on the film. Here is the podcast episode. And now for my review...

The Plot

New York City Police Department officer Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) and analyst Sal Roth (Edward G. Robinson) live in an NYC where there are 40 million people, at least half of whom are unemployed. Real food is rare and ludicrously expensive, with most people living on different varieties of "Soylent" made--supposedly--from processed vegetable matter.

When the wealthy William Simonson (Joseph Cotten) is murdered, Thorn investigates and soon finds himself unraveling a conspiracy with the help of Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), Simonson's former concubine (more on that later).

The Good

*The film touches on a lot of issues that are still timely. Although the movie is clearly a product of a time where overpopulation was the major ecological fear, the movie also mentions the greenhouse effect and other types of air, water, and soil pollution. Those are still problems, especially the former. It also touches on wealth inequality--New York City in 2022 has a population of 40M people, at least 20M of whom are unemployed. Thorn and Roth are police officers living in a tiny apartment with unreliable power, while most people live in even more wretched conditions. (I'm assuming) due to the massive unemployment and poverty, many women are willing to serve as concubines so degraded they're referred to as "furniture" and can serve particular individuals or whomever happens to be resident in a particular apartment. That's some Epstein-level stuff there. Homeless people literally fill the streets and fire exits. Food prices are rapidly skyrocketing--at one point Roth mentions $150 for a jar of strawberries, and the rarity of real beef reminds me of the early days of COVID when many meatpacking workers were sick.  Crime is so severe than the superintendents of ordinary apartment complexes carry assault rifles--although urban crime is nowhere near the levels of the late 1960s to early 1990s, it has been rising in recent years. Meanwhile, there is a ludicrously wealthy elite living in extreme luxury and fenced off from everybody else like something in Latin America or Africa.

(Someone on Twitter claimed dystopia is when privileged people are subject to the same horrors as the poor and marginalized--a lot of the stuff I've mentioned exists in real life, but for the most part not in the United States. Yet...the film mentions supply chain problems affecting day-to-day living in New York City, even for the wealthiest people, and even causing the decline of the book-publishing industry. Sound familiar?)

The film even touches on the alienation of people from each other...Simonson, who is wealthy enough to afford personal servants and even a concubine, has no next of kin to receive his death benefits. The "furniture" girls, exploited by their employers and on at least one occasion bullied by senior employees, seem to have only each other to rely on.

*Even though the film was made in 1973, there doesn't seem to be any overt racism. The (I assume) WASP Thorn banters with his black boss and Jewish roommate without any hint of snobbery or friction and he treats Martha (Paula Kelly), not only a black woman but the "furniture" of a suspected criminal, politely rather than lording it over her as a police officer and as a man. Although there are obviously still problems that need fixing, the negative of impact of discrimination has been in decline for some time.

*The acting is good. Heston is good as Thorn and Robinson is good as Roth, while Leonard Stone is appropriately reprehensible as the abusive butler Charlie. 

*Rather than a talkie-talk explanation of how just everything went bad, the dystopian aspects of the world are depicted initially by an opening-credit montage depicting population growth and pollution and then by details on-screen...heaps of homeless people, food lines, old people reminiscing about the days when the planet was more habitable, casual discussion of ludicrously-inflated food prices. No infodumping.

*The more you think about it, the more morally gray the situation becomes. Is the conspiracy investigated in the film the lesser evil, in order to reduce human pressure on the already collapsing environment?

*Finally, although this is pedantic, there's no TVTropes Bottomless Magazines here. In one fight sequence, the fact Thorn has to stop and reload his gun is important.

*When we see the cover's "riot control bulldozers" unleashed, the shots are so well-timed that they're actually a bit intimidating. It reminded me of the scene in The Wolfman where a man beats the wolfman to death with his silver-headed cane, but all the audience sees is the rising and fall of the cane over the fog.

The Bad

*The opening montage could have been tightened up a bit. The point could have been made a lot faster.

*The movie overall is rather slow-moving. There's a lot of "this is what dystopia looks like" where not a lot actually actually happens. Things do pick up later in the film though.

*Given the importance of the Catholic Church to the events in the film, there's a missed opportunity to depict the Catholic hierarchy conniving with the villains. Given how we see ordinary Catholic priests and nuns caring for the poor and providing spiritual solace, it wouldn't make the film anti-Catholic. All you'd really need to make the point is to depict a bishop or archbishop involved, which would make the ending more impactful and less vague.

The Verdict

Worth seeing once, but not the classic I expected. 8.0 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: LADY IN THE WATER (2006)

Hey everybody, it's been awhile since I've actively posted, but I've been working a lot on Serpent Sword, the sequel to my novel Battle for the Wastelands. However, I've still been actively participating in Myopia Movies and we're doing a month on M. Night Shyamalan's films, ranging from his high point (at least among the movies were watched) with Signs to his decline.

So here's my review of Lady in the Water, the first film of his I actually skipped due to negative reviews. Here's the episode. And let my commentary begin:

 The Plot

Long ago, humans were in contact with a civilization of mermaids known as Narfs, who provided spiritual guidance. But man grew greedy and moved inland, multiplying conflicts and wars without the mermaids' advice. As the world grew darker and more dangerous, the mermaids have taken the initiative to contact humans again, but the mermaids have their own supernatural foe, the lupine Scrunts. Into this conflict comes Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), an apartment superintendent with a stutter and a tragic past who encounters a Narf named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the complex pool one night.

But Story, and now him, are being hunted...

The Good

*I liked how Howard played Story...although she's a supernatural being, she is unfamiliar with our world and its social conventions. Hence the brutal honesty, which can be encouraging or discouraging depending on the situation, and misunderstandings like "I need to wear clothes" or "someone who looks and acts like a teen runaway strung out on drugs hanging out half-naked with a middle-aged (apparent) bachelor might give people really wrong ideas." She also helps other characters follow their dreams, but she's by no means anything remotely resembling a typical Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

*I also liked Giamatti's Heep. When we first meet him, he's going out of his way to introduce a newcomer to the complex to the various eccentric characters that populate the place. It would have been nice if someone had done that for me when I moved to various complexes over the years. It's also a good foreshadowing of a later reveal--in order to make that work for a complex as large as the one he manages, Heep would have to have a very good memory. And that ends up playing a major role in the story.

*A young college student Young-Soon Choi (Cindy Cheung) and her mother (June Kyoto Lu) who cannot speak English play a major role in the storyline. I liked their dynamic--a strict Asian-born "tiger mother" and her more free-spirited Americanized daughter--and the fact Young-Soon has to be her mother's translator in her dealings with Heep is pretty funny.

*Sarita Choudhury is having a lot of fun as Anna Ran, part of the brother-sister duo with her writer brother Vick (Shyamalan himself). I liked her performance.

*One of the new residents of the complex is a movie critic who has some very...sharp...comments about the state of storytelling and the film industry. I thought that was pretty funny.

*In an age of remakes, legacy sequels, etc. a film with a completely original plot (it's based on a bedtime story Shyamalan told his children) is pretty refreshing.

*The difficulties the characters have with their roles in the story (not going into any more detail for spoiler reasons) are pretty clever, even if later on they do slow down the film.

The Bad

*One reason I recall for all the negative reviews when the movie came out was the bizarre names for the creatures. Seriously, Narfs and Scrunts? This sounds like Shyamalan was channeling Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter when he was writing this one. One review said it would be much simpler if Story were just a fairy (naiad?) or a mermaid being hunted by a werewolf. I know this whole thing is based on a bedtime story Shyamalan created for his own children, but the ridiculous species names were one of the major negatives from the reviews I can remember when the film came out. Listen to the podcast for all the times we mimicked Pinky, the deranged lab rat from The Animaniacs whose trademark saying is "Narf!"

*In the podcast, Daniel described the movie as "surreal" and it really is. It's just plain weird.

*Someone pointed out on the podcast that given the Narfs' isolation from humans, why does Story know how to speak English? That might merit an explanation--maybe she learned English from watching human fishermen? Then you could have BDH using sailor lingo and that might actually be pretty funny.

*Shyamalan casts himself as a major character in the film rather than his typical cameo. He's fairly flat in contrast to his character's lively sister and he doesn't really stand out like his costars do. This wasn't a problem with his character in Signs, who probably had a lot of guilt and possibly PTSD from falling asleep at the wheel and killing Reverend Hess's wife and whose main interactions are with the man he (unintentionally) widowed, or the non-entity park ranger in The Village who has only two lines. I can see why giving himself such a large part rubbed people the wrong way, especially given some revelations about his character's ultimate fate.

*The narfs and scrunts get introduced pretty early in the story, but there's another supernatural threat dropped in halfway through the film that seems a little abrupt.

*Like The Village but unlike Signs, it starts to drag in the middle.

*There's some additional information revealed about Story toward the end of the film that really needed to be foreshadowed better.

The Verdict

I don't think it really deserves the hate it got (four Razzie nominations?), but it's not a particularly good film, especially the more you think about it. At least it's short. 7.0/10.

LABYRINTH Is HELLRAISER For Kids

The other day I watched Labyrinth on the elliptical at the gym and while ironing some clothes. The thought hit me that it has a lot in common with, surprisingly enough, Hellraiser and its sequel Hellraiser 2: Hellbound. Beware spoilers for all three films.

Firstly, both franchises have significant stepmother-stepdaughter drama. Hellraiser protagonist Kirsty Cotton and her stepmother Julia clearly don't get along at the beginning of the first film and once supernatural forces get involved, it escalates into outright violence. In the second film, once Julia has been thoroughly corrupted, she explicitly refers to herself as the wicked stepmother and the evil queen and mocks Kirsty as "Snow White." Meanwhile, protagonist Sarah Williams is openly disrespectful toward her stepmother Irene in Labyrinth, and Irene clearly does not know what to do with her. Knowing her stepdaughter's interest in fantasy, Irene complains that Sarah treats her as a "wicked stepmother."

Furthermore, at the beginning of the film when we first meet here, I get serious Julia vibes off Irene. They're both dressed formally (albeit for different reasons--Irene and Sarah's father are going on a date and Julia just seems like an ice-queen in general) and their hairstyles are somewhat alike. Although there's more open hostility between the two than between Kirsty Cotton and her stepmother Julia in the first Hellraiser, Sarah is several years younger than Kirsty and significantly less mature. Perhaps Julia and Kirsty were similarly hostile when Kirsty was a young teen, although if that were the case I doubt Kirsty's father Larry would have been so foolish as to assume a now-adult Kirsty would want to live with them in their new town or later ask her to help him figure out why Julia is acting so strangely.

Later, when Sarah becomes frustrated by baby Toby's crying, she wishes the Goblin King would take him "far away from me." The crying abruptly stops and when Sarah goes to investigate, we see goblins in the walls, moving under mattresses, etc. That gave me major Hellraiser vibes, especially given how Kirsty's sinister uncle Frank Cotton's personal hell in the second film involved sensual women under sheets (who disappeared when he removed them), how doorways to Hell formed in the walls, etc. You can see some of that in the clips below.

Also, Kirsty in the first Hellraiser solved the puzzle box and summoned the Cenobites completely ignorant of what the box actually did. She was curious about this device that her undead uncle was so protective of, started fiddling with it, and then this happened. 

Like Kirsty, Sarah had no idea that her frustrated wish to be rid of her baby half-brother would actually summon a supernatural being. And although Jareth and his goblin cronies are significantly less rough than Pinhead and his crew are, there are definitely similarities. Here are two YouTube clips depicting Sarah summoning him and his arrival:

The Goblin King is nowhere near as dangerous as Pinhead--the latter is a Dracula-like sadist who attempts to welch on his bargains, while Jareth is more whimsical and kid-friendly--but both are dangerous and sexual creatures with an unhealthy interest in the young, brunette female protagonist.

Oh, and there's that. Pinhead describes himself as his crew as "explorers of the furthest reaches of experience, demons to some and angels to others" and they subjected Frank to "pain and pleasure indivisible" when he was under their control. The almighty TVTropes describes the Cenobites as "the priests of an S&M religion." In the climax of Hellraiser, Pinhead attempts to abduct Kirsty, telling her that, "We have such sights to show you," while the in second film, he confidently allows Kirsty to freely wander his realm, informing her that, "We have eternity to know your flesh." 

The sexuality in Labyrinth is a bit more subtle given how this is a children's movie, but Jareth's infamous bulging crotch has been discussed at length online, we see David Bowie as Sarah's mother's new boyfriend in a newspaper (a romantic rivalry with one's own mother?), and Jareth gets very testy at the notion of Sarah kissing Hoggle, a dwarfish creature whom she befriends in the Labyrinth. This culminates in Sarah essentially getting roofied and dancing with Jareth at a ball, a scene that is downright rapey. And Jareth later straight-up propositions Sarah, telling her, "I ask for so little. Just let me rule you, and you can have everything that you want. Just fear me, love me. Do as I say and I will be your slave."

Finally, both franchises have elaborate mazes. Sarah must solve the titular Labyrinth in thirteen hours to rescue her brother from Jareth, while Kirsty briefly ventures into the Cenobites' realm when she solves the box in the first Hellraiser film. The second film features a more extensive exploration of the Cenobites' maze-like realm.

So although rarely does one associate a children's fantasy film (albeit one with some significant adult subtext) like Labyrinth with the sexual horror of Hellraiser, there are an interesting number of similarities.

Movie Review: THE BLOB (1988)

Once upon a time in elementary school, I was a regular reader of the Crestwood Monsters series, a series of children's books in which the tales of the classical movie monsters (Dracula, the Wolfman, etc.) were retold using black-and-white film stills as illustrations. One such book was centered around the 1950s horror film The Blob. I was aware there was a remake in the 1980s, but never got around to seeing it until Myopia Movies did an episode on it. I wasn't able to participate, but I saw it later when the episode came out.

The Plot

In a ski town in what's probably Colorado, a meteor lands, bringing with it a very hungry life-form that gets bigger the more it eats. A bunch of small-town types like earnest high school football player Paul (Donovan Leitch), cheerleader Meg (Shawnee Smith, who later went on to play Amanda in the Saw films), and biker delinquent Brian (Kevin Dillon) now have much bigger problems than who's going out with whom and who needs tools to work on their motorcycle.

The Good

*In a lot of horror movies, the characters make bad decisions in order to move the plot along. In this film, most of the characters make good decisions and the bad decisions make sense in context (i.e. Brian storms off because he has a big chip on his shoulder and feels disrespected). This makes the titular Blob especially dangerous--in order to deal with people who are mostly not complete fools, it has to be pretty cunning itself.

*Some characters who could be clichés have surprising depths and twists.

*The movie seriously goes for Anyone Can Die. Not going to go into detail for reasons of spoilers, but they definitely avoid the horror-movie problem of the audience pretty much knowing who's going to die from early in the film.

*They use late 1980s practical effects and minimal if any CGI. It looks good. And definitely gross--they were going for ghastly here and it works.

*There are some laugh-out-loud moments, such as one of the football players figuring out who his date's father is.

The Bad

*There's a prolonged opening featuring shots of the town and then we cut to the high-school football game. There are two actual meet-cutes. There's no hint we're dealing with a threat from beyond until at least fifteen minutes in. Some of the stuff is necessary because it introduces the characters but it could stand to be tightened up, like the shots of the empty streets. If that was intended as some kind of fake-out to make the audience think the Blob had already eaten the town, it didn't work.

*There's a subplot involving the town's Catholic priest (at least I think he's supposed to be Catholic based on how he's dressed) that doesn't make a lot of sense and eats up too much screen time. Not going to go into detail for possible spoiler reasons, but his Biblical interpretations and later actions sound more like an End Times enthusiast Protestant, not a Catholic.

The Verdict

Well-made and definitely worth a watch. 8.5 out of 10.

Movie Review: HOWARD THE DUCK (1986)

Once upon a time as a child, I wanted to work in movie special effects and at some point read about the special effects for Howard the Duck. I definitely remember a picture of one of the evil aliens, although I don't recall how exactly it was made. Although I have listened to a podcast about the film (possibly the How Did This Get Made episode), I never actually got around to seeing it.

Well, thanks to Myopia Movies, I finally did. Here's the episode. And now for the review...

The Plot

Howard (Ed Gale in the suit, Chip Zien as the voice) is an anthropomorphic duck hailing from Duckworld, a planet where creatures like him are the dominant species rather than humans. After a long day at work, Howard comes home to smoke cigars, watch TV, and read Playduck (yes, really), only to be transported to Earth by scientific accident. He soon rescues small-time rocker Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson) from punks and she introduces him to her annoying scientist friend Phil Blumburtt (Tim Robbins), who tries to figure out what Howard is and where he came from. Howard tries to make his way in this strange new world, including getting a job, but the experiment overseen by Dr. Walter Jennings (Jeffrey Jones) that brought Howard to Earth soon brings something else as well...

The Good

*The movie is really funny. Not only is there a lot of goofy and slapstick humor, but there're also some more thoughtful jokes, including a sequence where Howard attempts to find a job at the local unemployment office. I laughed out loud several times--I'm really glad I didn't get this movie off Amazon for the Kindle to watch at the gym. Might disturb the others.

(Even though Howard is now a Disney property, you can watch it for free on NBC's Peacock TV streaming service. For now.)

*Gene Siskel's negative review from when the film was released said that Howard wasn't a likeable character, but in-universe it does make sense. He's the only one of his species on Earth, he's a prey animal on top of that (apparently he arrived in Cleveland right before duck-hunting season), people treat him like a pet, a child, and in one memorable scene, a meal, and he's worried he'll never make it home. He's frustrated and lashes out at people, including those who are trying to help him. And that's on top of some of his personal drama from back in Duckworld--he wanted to be a musician but chose to enter medical school to please his parents, only to fail out. The opening also hints at romantic troubles as well.

*The acting is generally good. I particularly found Thompson amusing as Beverly and Robbins amusing, albeit less so, as Phil. Jones, meanwhile, spends much of the movie possessed by an evil alien. If that's really him speaking with the Evil Voice (Brian Steele is listed as the uncredited voice of "The Dark Overlords of The Universe" so it's possible they dubbed him in), props to him for his vocals.

*I did like the soundtrack as well. Also, Thompson did sing as well as act, which is another point to her.

The Bad

*The movie could stand to be tightened up a bit. There's a chase scene that takes way too long even if it does provide some of the aforementioned laugh-out-loud moments.

*Was this movie marketed toward kids or adults? If it was marketed toward kids, no wonder it bombed at the box office. This movie is not for children, at all. That's not a bad thing (nobody thinks Saving Private Ryan is intended for children), but it is something to keep in mind.

*Per my above comment, although Howard being cranky and obnoxious makes sense for the character, he is kind of a jackass early on.

*Although you do eventually get used to it, upon first seeing Howard he's rather off-putting. I wouldn't go so far as to call it Uncanny Valley, but he does look quite weird. Per Wikipedia the original plan was to make him computer-animated but the technology at the time wasn't up to it. Hopefully if they ever remake it, we're looking at something more akin to Avatar.

*There's this elaborate voice-over that starts the film that claims what's real in one world is fantasy in another. So basically Howard is real on his planet, but he's a comic-book character in ours. That's kind of lame. It's also never followed up on--what if Howard were accosted by a crazed fan who knows he's not a man in a costume? You could get really meta.

*Some of the duck puns are really bad--not funny-bad, but just stupid. And if I think a pun isn't funny, you know it's bad.

*The villainous aliens from the climax have not aged well in terms of effects quality.

The Verdict

Worth seeing at least once. I might actually buy it. 8.0 out of 10. Generally speaking remakes should be reserved for good concepts that were executed poorly (or at least not as well as they could have been), so Disney should definitely come up with an MCU version. Thompson has already volunteered to direct, so maybe they should give her a shot. Like the article suggested, her daughter Zoey Deutch could play Beverly in this version too. That'd be hilarious, since they have worked together before and especially considering Thompson said her daughters refused to finish the movie after a...romantic interlude...involving their mother and an alien duck.

Plot Threads If They'd Continued X-MEN: THE LAST STAND

A recent episode of Myopia Movies is about the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand. It's the third and last present-day X-Men movie of the early 2000s before the franchise was rebooted with the 1960s-set X-Men: First Class and its historical-fiction sequels. 

I was not a participant in the podcast but I did listen. Here are my thoughts:

*Much of the film revolves around how a "cure" for mutation was discovered. Rogue (Anna Paquin), whose life-draining mutant abilities have essentially ruined her life, ends up taking it in order to interact physically with her boyfriend Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore) without risking hurting or killing him. However, the ending strongly hints the cure may only be temporary, with a theoretically de-powered Magneto shown able to slightly move a chess-piece. Nic seemed to think this made the whole film pointless, but this has some interesting implications.  

If a mutant who wishes to be "normal" has to undergo the procedure repeatedly, this means they're basically living with a chronic illness in terms of expenses. Who paid for Rogue to be "cured" the first time and who will be paying for it if she has to undergo the procedure every few weeks like, say, chemotherapy? Owing to Rogue's age, she was either in high school when her powers kicked in and she ran away from home (high school dropout) or had recently finished (that trip she and her boyfriend were planning in the first film could have been a graduation trip). With that level of education she's going to have a hard time finding a job that could pay for continuous treatment, and that could make her vulnerable to bribery.

(In the comics, Rogue was a originally a villain aligned with Mystique, so her doing increasingly desperate things for money--possibly including betraying the X-Men--because she is absolutely terrified of losing her normal life would make sense. And if she does something so bad Bobby breaks up with her, that emphasizes the tragedy of her situation.)

Also, nobody knows the cure isn't permanent. Imagine her life-draining powers coming back at the absolute worst possible time--say she's making out with or having sex with Bobby and he ends up in a coma like her boyfriend from the first film. Assuming he wakes up, her guilty feelings might lead her to push him away, he might break up with her out of fear, or she might refuse to leave his bedside until he revives and that takes her out of the game when she might well be needed.

*Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) transferred his consciousness into the body of a brain-dead man, who awakens at the end of the film. Xavier is in a new body, which potentially means a new actor who'll need to mimic Patrick Stewart's mannerisms and might "speak" telepathically with Stewart's voice, and for the first time in decades is able to walk. This is going to be a very big deal. Also complications--with Xavier legally dead, how is he going to get his money and the school back? There's no real legal precedent for "my body was destroyed but my consciousness is in a new body," so Xavier's enemies in the political realm could take advantage.

*Per politics, the film establishes there's a Department of Mutant Affairs, headed by Beast (Kelsey Grammar). Per one of the Wikis, apparently it is the successor to the villainous William Stryker's anti-mutant paramilitary force. Placing a mutant in charge of a government agency assigned to deal with mutant-related issues reminded me of how the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, previously corrupt as hell and prone to mistreating Native Americans, eventually became largely staffed by Indians.

*With Xavier apparently dead, Storm (Halle Berry) is now in charge of his school and presumably of the X-Men. How will she handle the new responsibilities? And she does have a bit of an attitude problem--something that annoyed me is how she lectured Rogue about how she doesn't need a cure. Storm is so powerful her people back in Africa worshipped her as a weather-controlling goddess (and if you count Age of Apocalypse as something that happened in the past, Apocalypse made her one of his Four Horsemen back in the 1980s), but Rogue literally cannot touch people without hurting or killing them. Storm is blessed beyond imagining, but Rogue's life sucks. Although Beast does tell her how flat-out stupid her attitude is, one wonders if the lesson will stick.

*Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), who was forced to kill love interest Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) after she was totally possessed by an alternate personality called "Phoenix," is going to be a complete mess emotionally. If you've read the X-Men Origins: Wolverine comic, this is not the first time a pretty redhead he's in love with has died because of him. Combine this with my earlier Bobby/Rogue scenario and that's three X-Men who are "out of the game" so to speak.

*Mystique (Rebecca Romjin) had lost her powers and after being callously abandoned by Magneto (Ian McKellen), went over to the government and spilled everything she knew about the Brotherhood. Any members at large after their defeat at Alcatraz, assuming they figure this out, are going to want to KILL her. And without her shape-shifting abilities, she's more vulnerable. Assuming the cure is temporary she might well regain her powers, but until then the Brotherhood might think her an easy target. Key phrase--might think. After all, she's still a skilled martial artist, and I can imagine the overconfident Brotherhood finding that out the hard way. Unless she's in the best witness protection program possible, she might well be safer in prison.

(TVTropes claimed that Mystique was originally supposed to be with Magneto at the end, implying that his "abandonment" of her and her defection to the government were all an elaborate charade. But with the Brotherhood scattered, Magneto's devotees might not get the memo.)

*Magneto has been de-powered, but might be regaining his abilities. He's vulnerable now, and a hunted man. Mystique may well be coming after him--and if her powers return she's once again the perfect spy and assassin--so I can imagine him becoming super-paranoid. And Pyro (Aaron Stanford), if he escaped Alcatraz as well, might challenge the weakened Magneto for leadership of the Brotherhood much like Fabian Cortez attempted to overthrow Magneto in the comics.

*The mutant cure has been weaponized, much like Magneto feared. Having some kind of strike team with plastic guns carrying cure-darts makes sense for dealing with dangerous mutants, which in turn means there's less need for the X-Men. Per my above comment about Xavier and politics, the government might decide now is the time to deal with how he's basically got a private paramilitary force he staffs with the teachers and even students. And an anti-mutant military unit could be misused--"cure" mutants and then kill them.

*If the mutant cure is temporary, captured Brotherhood members jailed in ordinary prisons might suddenly start breaking out. Given how Pyro is the most developed of the villains, that might be a chance for him to return.

Seriously, there are a lot of threads that could have been followed in this one. Rather than the usual Status Quo is God, the filmmakers went total base-breaking with killing off Jean, Cyclops, and (temporarily) Xavier, de-powering (at least temporarily) Rogue, Mystique, and Magneto, making Beast a Cabinet official, and creating something alternatively a miracle or a dangerous anti-mutant weapon. A pity the movie didn't do as well as the others.

Bad Movie Review: Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991)

Once upon a time, Myopia Movies did an episode on the Christopher Lambert classic Highlander. Some years later, we decided on an episode on Highlander 2: The Quickening, the 1991 sequel. AKA "the one where they're aliens." The version I ended up watching was the "renegade cut" from 1995 that removed all the nonsense about the immortals being aliens from the planet Zeist, although it still has its problems. The episode is exclusively for our Patreon subscribers; sign up here.

And now for the review. Calling it a "Bad Movie Review" this time, since I didn't see it years before like many Myopia films and, well, it's BAD.

The Plot

After the events of the first film, the thinning of the ozone layer necessitated the creation of an artificial replacement sponsored by none other than the now-mortal Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert). This new atmosphere, though it protects mankind, denies humanity the stars, ordinary views of the sky, and seems to have a generally negative effect on the climate. Connor has grown old and is despised by many of the people he had tried to protect.

However, the villainous General Katana (Michael Ironside), ruler of a lost civilization from the distant past (in the theatrical version an alien civilization) that had exiled the immortals to (their) distant future, worries that Connor might choose to return to his own time and once more challenge him. So he sends goons to kill him, inadvertently reactivating his immortality and de-aging him 30 years. Connor joins forces with ecoterrorist Louise Marcus (Virginia Madsen) to fight against Katana's henchmen and ultimately Katana himself, who allies with the sinister megacorporation controlling the planetary shield.

And what role does Ramirez (Sean Connery), Connor's long-dead immortal mentor, play in this whole situation?

The Good

*Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, and Michael Ironside are having lots of fun playing their characters. Ironside in particular is absolutely over the top, playing the character as Jack Nicholson's Joker wearing Conan the Barbarian villain Thulsa Doom's wig and costume. Ironside is really entertaining to watch. He later said that he, Connery, and Lambert all recognized they were dealing with a crappy script and he decided he was going to have as much fun as possible. Ironside makes for a much more entertaining villain than the Kurgan--sorry Clancy Brown and your awesome medieval outfit that inspired the villain Grendel from my novel Battle for the Wastelands.

*They clearly had more money for action sequences and special effects for this one than they had for the original.

*Katana's duels with Connor are pretty impressive. It's my understanding that Lambert has really bad vision and thus couldn't fight effectively in the first movie, but in this one everything's much more fluid and they're a lot more likely to punch and kick each other. After all, this is a battle to the death, so why bother with any rules about technique and what-not?

*It's fast-moving and other than one scene, never dull.

*There are some genuinely funny bits, many of which revolve about Ramirez's difficulties with the modern world and his propensity to flirt with every woman he meets.

*I liked the callbacks to "Who Wants To Live Forever," probably one of the most legitimately poignant sequences in any movie I've seen in recent years.

The Bad

Where to start? Even with all the alien nonsense removed, there's so much in here that doesn't make any sense or is just plain ridiculous.

*The whole ozone-layer plot is ridiculous and really dated. The thinning of the ozone layer would cause increased likelihood of skin cancer and other problems, but it wouldn't cause masses of people to burn to death. And an artificial ozone layer wouldn't affect the climate like it does. And it shouldn't be that hard to determine if the ozone layer has recovered enough that the hugely expensive shield would not be required. And how was Connor in the position to sponsor a massive feat of geoengineering? He was "New York City antique dealer rich," not "Elon Musk rich." And not only did he help create this world-saving megaproject, but then he essentially abandons it and allows some generic 1980s/1990s corporate baddie to usurp it?

It would have been better to have the dying mortal Connor living in some kind of generic Bad Future where his attempts to use the psychic abilities gained from his defeat of the Kurgan and winning "The Prize" to improve the world ended up either being totally useless or backfiring and causing the whole situation. Suddenly his youth (or at least his immortality) return and he loses his psychic abilities because new immortals have been activated (i.e. they suffer their first death and resurrection). Now he essentially plays Ramirez to new heroes and fights a new villain. If his immortality is restored but he's still in his 60s or 70s he might not be a frontline fighter like he used to be, although given how bad Old Man Connor is, having him stay in his old-man persona the entire film would be really lame.

(If Connor has to be a mentor to a new generation of immortals you could have flashbacks to his mentoring by Ramirez, allowing Sean Connery to make a return appearance without the completely absurd magical explanation. According to some Highlander fans, Ramirez was training Connor for a year, so there could be plenty of interesting things not depicted in the original film.)

*Instead of being aliens, the "renegade cut" makes the immortals rebels from a long-forgotten ancient civilization who were punished for rebellion by exile into the distant future. They had to kill each other until there was only one left, and that lone survivor could choose to return. Whatever happened to Ramirez asking "why does the sun shine" when Connor asked why immortals existed? Better no explanation at all than the absurdity we got.

(Also, the flashback sequences to the distant-distant past looked like B-Roll footage from the 1980s adaptation of Dune.)

At one point Connor is explaining to Louise how the whole situation works and she seems to think it makes absolutely no sense. He decides at this point to end the conversation by saying "it's a kind of magic," a call-back to the original film where he explains his immortality to his adopted daughter Rachel. I think they were deliberately mocking their own premise at this point. 

*General Katana is such a stupid name, especially since Connor's main fighting sword is a katana. No wonder Michael Ironside thought the script had been written by a 13-year-old boy.

*Connor as an old man sounds like he's trying to continuously do "I could've been a contender" from On The Waterfront. It's ridiculous-sounding. TVTropes said he sounded like a six-year-old trying to mimic his elderly grandfather.

*Louise is much less effective a character than Brenda, Connor's love interest from the original film. Brenda managed to figure out Connor was immortal from handwriting samples and studying his confiscated sword, got taken hostage by the Kurgan to bait Connor into the final battle, and then helped Connor defeat him. Louise clues Connor into realizing something is wrong at the megacorporation running the planetary shield and later helps them infiltrate the company's HQ, but her role is much less impactful.

The Verdict

This isn't as sucky as Battlefield Earth or Spawn, but it's still not worth the bother. You want to see what happened to MacLeod after the events of the first film, go watch Highlander III, the TV show (where his character dropped in occasionally), or Highlander Endgame. I'm pretty sure this movie isn't even canon anymore. 5.5 out of 10.

(If you want to hear us absolutely wreck this film, including an amusing sequence where Daniel and I take turns impersonating Connery and Lambert while singing that song about milkshakes bringing the boys to the yard, sign up for the Patreon here.)

Blast From The Past Movie Review: THE ABYSS (1989)

Once upon a time in elementary school, I spent a weekend or two with my friend Robert at some lakeside property his family owned. And one thing we did a couple of the times we were there is watch the 1989 underwater science fiction film The Abyss. I hadn't seen the movie since then ("then" being in the 1995-1996 range), but it definitely fits the Myopia Movies timeframe--more than 10 years old and you hadn't seen it in five years, with the fact I saw it when I was 10-11 years old even more useful. So I suggested it for the podcast and we did it for this most wonderful season eight.

Here's the podcast episode. And now the review.

The Plot

It's the near-future year of 1994 and an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine the U.S.S. Montana wrecks in the Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico not far from Cuba. As Soviet and Cuban naval vessels gather, the United States Navy hires a group of deep-sea oil drillers led by Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Ed Harris) to use their underwater drilling platform to send in a SEAL team to rescue survivors. Coming along to make sure everything goes according to plan is Dr. Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), designer of the platform and Bud's estranged wife.

However, the mysterious forces of the deep ocean that caused the wreck of the Montana are still there and interested in these surface-world visitors...

The Good

*The acting is very good. I particularly liked Mastrantonio as Dr. Brigman. She does well as an engineer who's better with machines than people and can really sell grief and panic in a more subtle way than Ed Harris. Michael Biehn does a good job as the psychologically-deteriorating SEAL Lieutenant Hiram Coffey. I got some serious Caine Mutiny vibes off him, especially later in the film. And Todd Graff is fun as "Hippy," a conspiracy theorist who's quite attached to his pet rat.

*The script is well put together. The climactic events of the film are well-foreshadowed (I make a lot of "Chekhov's _________" comments in the Twitter-stream). Although an aggressive military man as opposed to a more peacenik kind-of scientist is the main conflict in the film, it's subverted rather than stereotypical--Coffey is suffering from a legitimate mental illness, the rest of his team seem like decent enough people even if (at first) they follow the orders of a man having a break with reality, and the anti-military clichés (soldiers are unthinking order-following robots, they can only see enemies) are criticisms coming from flawed characters rather than being treated as the actual truth by the narrative.

*For a movie made in 1989, the special effects for the most part hold up really well. The underwater aliens (at this point we all know what's really going on) are very well-done, as is the famous "water tentacle." Only at the end do they falter even a little, and even then it's not bad.

*Even though I'd seen the movie before and generally knew what would happen--and spent much of the film live-tweeting it--there are sequences of legitimate suspense. Had I never seen the movie before or been more focused, this would be even more well-done.

*With the exception of some of the nuclear stuff, the science works. Per the almighty Wikipedia, director James Cameron got the idea for the film in high school while seeing a presentation on liquid breathing and that plays a key role in the climax. Another major plot point revolves around deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, which is also a real thing.

*The entire cast had to become certified SCUBA divers for the film and lot of the underwater stuff rings true (I got my PADI open-water diving license in middle school). Overhead situations (i.e. wrecks and caves), diving so deep you need to use special mixes of oxygen and other gases rather than compressed air, panicking underwater, and the need to avoid decompression sickness are all portrayed as the tricky and dangerous situations they'd be.

*There are some fun action sequences once Coffey starts to go totally insane, including what's essentially submarine demolition derby.

The Bad

*When Ed Harris is supposed to display deep emotion--worry, grief, etc.--he overacts big time. Although given the circumstances it's pretty obvious he'd be upset, he kind of overdoes it.

*A lot of the lesser characters aren't given that much to do. Several characters die in early on when part of the underwater rig is flooded and if they'd been better-developed, their deaths would have hurt more.

*The theatrical release was rather long and the director's cut (which I didn't watch) was nearly three hours. This is definitely a time investment and although it starts out great, it does drag a bit later. The director's cut might have some improvements--I think it elaborates on why the Brigmans are heading for divorce and how the wreck of the Montana is becoming an international crisis--but the length sounds pretty intimidating.

The Verdict

9.0 out of 10. This is definitely worth seeing again. I ended up ordering the DVD off eBay, since I would have otherwise had to get a full-on Amazon Prime subscription to watch it. Thanks Videodrome, the last video rental shop in Atlanta!

Blast from the Past Movie Review: BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000)

The Myopia Movies pain train rolls on with this Scientological "classic" Battlefield Earth, in which longtime Scientology devotee John Travolta finally gets to adapt Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction novel (well, the first half of of it), to rather lackluster results. Per Box Office Mojo, it grossed $39M against a $73M budget and is considered one of the worst movies ever made.

(A pity, since the book was all right, or at least had some interesting concepts. Then again, if the movie did well, that's more money for Scientology. As you can no doubt tell, I have an extraordinarily low opinion of the organization.)

I don't remember seeing it in theaters, but I did read the book around the time the film came out and I'm pretty sure I saw at least a large chunk of it on television somewhat later. Here's the Myopia episode, which is probably one of the most hilarious and over the top episodes we've ever done. And now for the review...

The Plot

It's the year 3000 AD and Earth is under alien occupation. The greedy Psychlos are strip-mining the planet for minerals and the dwindling human populations are reduced to essentially cavemen. In this bleak environment, Psychlo Terl (John Travolta) enslaves Johnny Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) as part of an off-the-books scheme to make himself rich mining gold in areas too dangerous for the aliens to visit. Trained by Terl to operate Psychlo technology, Tyler ends up leading the remnants of the dying human race in one last battle for freedom...

The Good

*It's not boring, most of the time. A lot of the unintentional hilarity means it'd work as a comedy. Maybe Mystery Science Theater 3000, Rifftrax, or Cineprov can get their hands on this.

*Travolta's campy performance as Terl is pretty funny. Listen to the podcast episode, especially the parts where Daniel is talking, to get a hint of just how horridly glorious (gloriously horrid?) it is. Imagine John Travolta with dreadlocks and costumed to make himself look nine feet tall angrily lisping about "man-animals" and calling people "rat-brain."

*They wisely kept out the whole "psychiatrists made the Psychlos evil" plot from the book, although given how that doesn't show up until the second half (which was supposed to be a sequel film) maybe it wasn't wisdom on the producers' part.

The Bad

*Pretty much everybody in the movie is an idiot. And that's to put it mildly. Terl knows that Johnny is rebellious and has attacked him and other Psychlos several times, but still chooses to entrust him with his off-the-books gold-mining scheme. There are many situations where he should at least be suspicious about what Johnny and/or other humans are up to, but he just goes along with it. His greed and arrogance blind him to an absolutely ridiculous degree. Terl and the various Psychlos keep screwing with each other in order to always have "leverage," to the point TVTropes called it the film's "arc word." One wonders how their society can even function when pretty much everybody has Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. Meanwhile, Johnny is openly discussing his plans in front of Terl, betting on Terl being so arrogant that he never learned to speak English.

*There is some really bad acting on the parts of people who've performed better in other films. That's one cause for the unintentional hilarity.

*The humans, at least in Colorado, have totally forgotten their history and anything above essentially a Neolithic level. When Rome fell, even though most people couldn't read and write, there was still enough of a literate class to preserve quite a bit of knowledge about what came before. If the modern US were destroyed by aliens, the survivors would be almost entirely literate and I imagine they'd at least make some effort to teach their children, and their children's children, etc. Instead all Johnny's tribe seems to know is that in the distant past "demons" came from the sky and punished mankind and they currently live in fear of a dragon outside their village that it turns out is a mini-golf statue. In the book the descendants of Scottish survivors, though they've regressed to a largely medieval state, still know the true story of the alien invasion and how their ancestors managed to protect their homeland. More on that later...

*There's only one major Psychlo base? In the book there were 15, scattered all over the world. That makes a lot more sense. Given the crap that's just lying around (more on that next), this could've been handwaved if Johnny and friends have reactivated some long-dormant intercontinental ballistic missiles and blew them all to hell offscreen. We could have had a nice orbital shot of alien bases getting nuked like the end of Terminator 3 as Johnny and his allies descend on the panicking Psychlo main base in Denver.

*The back-story for the Psychlo conquest of Earth makes little sense. Terl claims the aliens had wiped out all of humanity's military forces in nine minutes, but even 1,000 years later there is an absolute crap-ton of hardware lying around that is still usable, including nuclear weapons. The book's depiction of the conquest of Earth--the Psychlos used a nuke-proof gas drone to wipe out human population centers, then sent in ordinary military forces to mop up any survivors--makes more sense. And given Psychlo vulnerability to uranium--it ignites the gas they breathe--there were surviving human populations in areas where nuclear weapons were used against the aliens or where there were natural concentrations of it.

(In Scotland, for example, a British military force lured Psychlo tanks into a nuclear minefield and the whole region became contaminated with uranium dust, allowing for a medieval-ish Scottish civilization to survive in the Highlands. Our hero's hometown is in a valley where there were either natural uranium deposits or a nuclear cache that's been leaking, which explains the population decline due to sterility and cancer as well as why the Psychlos never bothered them.) 

Given how the final confrontation with the Psychlos goes down, it should have been at least implied Terl was lying about how easily they'd conquered Earth. I hesitate to do a "how I would have done it" for Battlefield Earth lest I give Scientology more time and attention than it deserves, but I would have had a prologue depicting the original Psychlo attack. We'd see the book's last stand of the U.S. Air Force Academy cadets in chemical-weapons gear against massive high-tech Psychlo tanks, since geographically that's nearest to where our hero and friends live. Maybe they're buying time for some civilian refugees (implied to be Johnny's tribe's ancestors) to escape into the mountains. During the last battle, there could be conversations among the soldiers and/or communications from outside, revealing what's happening--some kind of Independence Day-sized craft that can shrug off nuclear hits appeared over Britain and traveled around the world gassing population centers, followed by mysterious detachments of tanks and super-advanced planes teleporting in and hitting surviving cities and military bases. Rumors about nuclear counterattacks in Britain (our friend the Scots) and that the invaders aren't even human. The cadets eventually go down (perhaps killing Psychlo infantrymen or destroying a tank, revealing that the invaders are in fact nine-foot aliens), but they're able to blow up vital bridges or something so the civilians can escape. Then jump to the "present" day of 3000 AD.

The Verdict

If you want alien-invasion movies with varying degrees of cheese, check out Skyline and its two sequels, Battle Los Angeles, Battleship, or Signs instead. If you want alien-invasion books, check out Footfall, which is the most realistic alien-invasion scenario where humans actually win, or my own The Thing in the Woods and its sequel The Atlanta Incursion.

4.0 out of 10. Better  than Spawn, but that's not saying much.