Book Review: WILLOW Novelization (1988)

Since Disney+ is putting out a next-generation sequel to the 1988 fantasy classic Willow, the film podcast Myopia Movies recorded an episode that came out alongside it. I enjoyed the movie, but there were a number of flaws, most notably the lack of explanation and worldbuilding. Given how the movie was intended for children and as-is the host's kindergartner was losing interest toward the end, I figured the novelization would be a big improvement. Fortunately it is available for purchase on Amazon, so I decided to give it a spin.

The Plot

In a faraway land, a prophecy predicts that a child will be born who will overthrow the evil Queen Bavmorda. 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 does. A sympathetic midwife smuggles the child out and Bavmorda dispatches her grim General Kael and warlike daughter Sorsha to pursue the child.

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

(The novelization appears to be based on an earlier draft of the screenplay and includes content cut from the actual film.)

The Good

*The novel beefs up the characterization of Willow himself and emphasizes the danger his quest to protect baby Elora puts him in besides the obvious problem of Bavmorda's murderous soldiers. Basically he's been pursuing his dreams of becoming a wizard to the detriment of working on his farm and owes the bullying village prefect Burglekutt money. Friendly neighbors have had to give him seed for this year's crop and he's apparently one payment away from foreclosure. Although the situation is largely his own fault, if his children had never found the baby he could have easily turned his situation around--he gets a lot of plowing done in a single day.

*Bavmorda, Fin Raziel, and their Fae mentor Charlindea get a lot more back-story and characterization than in the film. In the movie, Bavmorda is basically a live-action version of Snow White's Evil Queen, Fin is a rival she's transformed, and it's not even clear what exactly Charlindea even *is*--on the podcast, I refer to her at one point as the "non-union Mexican equivalent" of Galadriel.

*A monster cut from the film and a monster that appears later in the film have reasons for being there that further build Bavmorda's character. Not only is she a powerful sorceress, but she's also a planner who has fail-safes for her various schemes.

*Burglekutt isn't just an obnoxious small-town moneylender...he's also a prefect in the local government and owns the town's sole seed shop. Willow is not the only person he antagonizes either. If it weren't for his physical cowardice and being completely out of shape physically, he could have been a PG version of small-town gangster Wesley from the Patrick Swayze movie Road House.

*The novel explains some stuff that, in the film alone, don't make a whole lot of sense. For example, the midwife escapes the sinister Nockmaar Castle with the infant Elora by hiding out in some secret passages she knew about (and apparently the guards didn't) until Bavmorda's pursuers are far away before setting off into the wilderness. And once away, she's assisted by people opposed to Bavmorda's regime and even friendly animals. This explains why Elora is a newborn at the beginning of the film but looks significantly older by the time the midwife sets her adrift on the river to save her from the Death Dogs...they've actually been on the run for months. A character who gets captured by the heroes in the film because they insist on being the first one to search a room displays a bit more common sense and sends minions in first.

*The war depicted in the film is also explained in more detail. Bavmorda, having usurped her late husband, rules all the territories he did, and has been making war on the nearby kingdom of Galladoorn. The various rebels, armies, etc. we see in the film are survivors of Galladoorn's army, people within Nockmaar opposed to Bavmorda's rule, etc. The film doesn't really explain the politics of the situation very much or very well.

*There's a scene where we see Nockmaar's army in battle in large numbers (as opposed to Kael and Sorsha's death squad that numbers about fifty people at most) that's pretty cool.

The Bad

*The prose is not very descriptive and doesn't move very quickly until about halfway through the book. There's a lot of telling rather than showing.

*Some of the worldbuilding and back-story is rather silly. Before Bavmorda, apparently all living things in the world lived in harmony and several times characters are assisted by friendly animals. Yes, I know this is a novelization of a children's film and friendly animals are a fairy-tale staple, but still. Although I criticized the movie for oversimplifying matters, the more complex attempts at worldbuilding and back-story raise more questions than they answer. The Willow Blu-Ray has an interview with Ron Howard in which he explains how a whole subplot involving Sorsha's father--the previous king at Tir Asleen and Bavmorda's husband--was ordered cut by the studio and frankly the movie version is better than what's in the novelization. 

(This fan-fic keeps Sorsha's dad dead like the movie at least strongly implies and explains the whole situation better than either the novelization or the film, but beware spoilers.)

Elora's role in the novel is also needlessly complex--some commenter on TVTropes states that she causes Bavmorda's downfall in the film, not by anything she does, but the actions she inspires others to undertake. There's also a lot of Chekov's Guns that aren't fired--worldbuilding that doesn't really tie in with the immediate plot but mostly serves to add pages.

*The way Bavmorda's and Madmartigan's back-stories are explained feature gigantic info-dumps that are basically characters telling stories around the campfire. This is especially the case with Madmartigan. Yes, the back-stories are interesting, but they go on for far too long and are kind of clunky.

*Some stuff from the movie gets left out, like scenes in Nockmaar Castle where Bavmorda interacts with Sorsha and Kael. This would explain the unhealthy family dynamic between Sorsha and her belittling, affection-withholding mother (and why a character's romantic speech, drug-induced though it may be, has such an effect on her) and show the evil kingdom's political dysfunction. Sorsha's first film meeting with the heroes that sets up a lot of stuff that happens later is also left out. Although Willow and Madmartigan benefit from the expanded characterization in the novel, Sorsha (to a point) and especially Kael lose out.

The Verdict

A library read, unless you can get it super-cheap somewhere. Only worth reading once. 6.0 out of 10.

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.

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.

Movie Review: The Northman (2022)

Thanks to an online group I'm in getting perks, I was able to score early passes to see The Northman, much like I did Dune. And just like I did with Dune, you're getting an early film review out of it. :)

The Plot

In ancient Norse Ireland, King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returns from raiding and slaving to his queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman) and young son Amleth (Oscar Novak). Treachery arrives with his brother Fjolnir (Claes Bang), leaving his son to flee and vow revenge. Years later Amleth (now played by Alexander Skarsgård) is a Viking raider pillaging in modern Russia, but a religion vision reminds him of his vow of revenge. Allying with the Slavic sorceress Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), he sets off for the end of the world -- Iceland -- and a final confrontation with his uncle.

The Good

*The cinematography in this movie is simply beautiful. Even though the film is rather ponderous (more on that later), the film simply looks so good that it doesn't matter.

*The soundtrack is also marvelous. I don't claim to be a great expert on authentically Norse music, but it stylistically sounds a lot like the Scandinavian-themed and actually Scandinavian music I've found on YouTube, like the Norwegian band Wardruna.

*The film does an excellent job captured just how alien the pagan Norse are to modern Westerners. Lots of strange (and often bloody) rituals, hallucinogenic sequences, unrepentant violence, and eschewing common sense in favor of belief in Fate. From what I know about Norse history and culture, they get it all correct. The fact that it was co-written by the Icelandic poet Sjón no doubt helps quite a bit.

*The acting is generally good, particularly Bang's Fjolnir.

*There are some unexpected and creative plot twists.

The Bad

*The movie is rather slow-moving at times. It's even divided up into sequences with title cards, something I found objectionable in The Free State of Jones.

*Per the above, Skarsgård stares at the camera a lot. Although he's by no means a bad actor, he's one of the least interesting performers in the bunch.

The Verdict

Definitely worth seeing once. 8.0 out of 10.

Book Review: SWORD AND PLANET (2021)

"Sword and Planet" is a sub-genre mixing science fiction and fantasy tropes that, although one of the oldest in modern SF (think the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories featuring heroic Earthman John Carter on a habitable Mars) doesn't get the attention it merits. Fortunately Baen put out Sword and Planet, a collection of several such stories, which I got the pleasure of reviewing. Here goes...

The collection starts out with a bang with Tim Akers' "A Murder of Knights." Basically a member of a high-tech knightly order has to investigate some sinister doings and finds himself facing off against something abominable, with a very bloody deadline. It seems like an origin story for a particular character and according to a conversation I had with the author, there's more content out there set in this universe. The fact my first reaction to the story was to see if there was more of it reflects very well on this collection.

Another story I enjoyed was R.R. Virdi's "A Knight Luminary" in which a trainee knight in a future war with a machine intelligence *still* hasn't manifested the psychic powers he needs. He and his fellows investigation an outpost that's gone silent and, as can be expected, things go very, very wrong.

"Bleeding From Cold Sleep" by longtime Warhammer 40K author Peter Fehervari features a fugitive member of what are essentially humanity's Cossacks (the vanguard of human expansion against a myriad of alien races, the first of which are based in a more pulp-fiction version of our own solar system) and just why he's a fugitive. It turns out there's a threat much, much closer to home.

In T. C. McCarthy's "The Test," a world that has regressed into a medieval state features a king, his son who reminds me a lot of Prince Hal from Shakespeare's HENRY IV, and another son who'd like to usurp him. And did I mention there are monsters and priests using advanced technology? This was fun too.

Rounding out my favorite stories is the novella "Queen Amid Ashes," set in author Christopher Ruocchio's SUN EATER universe (which begins with the novel Empire of Silence, the first of several). Our hero Imperial noble Hadrian Marlowe and his companion, the foreign cyborg doctor Valka, and their Imperial troops must liberate a world under attack by the predatory alien Cielcin, but there's much more going on than an alien invasion. There are some very vivid descriptions here.

Unfortunately, not every story in the collection is so grand. I loved the Deathstalker novels when I was in middle school, but Simon R. Green's "Saving The Emperor," which describes the origin of the titular Deathstalker noble family, was disappointing. I had a hard time following Susan R. Matthews' "Operatix Triumphans."

Still, no collection is perfect and I would definitely recommend this one. 8.0 out of 10.

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: DUNE (2021)

Thanks to an online group I'm in, I managed to get into an early screening of the 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert's science fiction classic Dune. I'd seen the 1980s film (and even participated in a podcast about it) and the early 2000s miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel, so I was definitely looking forward to it getting the Lord of the Rings treatment.

(Seriously, owing to COVID concerns I said I'd see the movie in a spacesuit if I needed to.)

So how was it when I finally got to see it nearly a year after the original release date? Here we go...

The Plot

In a space empire thousands of years in the future, the noble House Atreides headed by Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) is granted the planet Arrakis as a fief by the Emperor Shaddam IV, taking it away from rival House Harkonnen headed by the nefarious Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). Arrakis is the sole source of the spice melange, which makes interstellar travel possible, and it is extraordinarily valuable. However, it's a trap--the jealous emperor seeks to destroy Duke Leto, whom he views as a rival.

Into this comes Leto's son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) by his Bene Gesserit (a sort of order of space witches) concubine Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). Trained by his mother in Bene Gesserit techniques like the commanding Voice, he's been having visions of the future, including the young woman Chani (Zendaya), a warrior from Arrakis's native Fremen people. 

When the emperor's nefarious plot goes into motion, will he be able to draw on the "desert power" envisioned by his father?

The Good

*The cinematography of this movie is quite simply awesome. It is absolutely a magnificently beautiful film, and I cannot say this enough. Caladan, the Atreides homeworld, is a beautiful place of magnificent coasts and oceans, while the Harkonnens rule over a polluted urban hellscape. Salusa Secundus, where the emperor draws his elite Sardaukar armies, is the unholy admixture of the two. They manage to make the Sardaukar disturbing, and that's good.

*One of the great flaws of the 1984 adaptation was how clumsily it handled the exposition needed for this gigantic science fiction universe, and that's not the case here. The filmmakers manage to convey so much with shots or small sequences. For example, rather than explaining the whole back-story about how too-advanced computers are illegal and how specially-trained humans known as Mentats have replaced them, we just see Atreides Mentat Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson) do this peculiar thing with his eyes a couple times, the same with the Harkonnen Mentat Piter de Vries (David Dastmalchian). That the Atreides are benign to their subjects and the Harkonnens harsh and cruel is also show rather than told--Duke Leto is free and easy with visitors on his island paradise and on Arrakis, while people cringe before the Baron and his beastly nephew Glossu "Beast" Rabban (Dave Bautista). And the issues between Jessica and the rest of the Bene Gesserit are handled in glances and a short conversation rather than blah-blah-blah.

*There are some subtle touches of characterization as well, like how in a father-son talk Leto tells Paul that he didn't want to be duke he wanted to be a pilot...and his own father was cool with this, knowing how this would ultimately bring him around to his responsibilities "another way." That skill with piloting comes in handy for several sequences in the film, for both the father and the son. And Leto's father was killed fighting bulls for the entertainment of his subjects--the displayed head of said bull keeps popping up in ominous ways I thought were clever.

*I saw this in IMAX and that's definitely where to see it. Not only will you get the full scope of the visuals, but you'll also get the full force of the soundtrack. Ye gods, the soundtrack. It will crush the life out of you, in a good way.

*The acting of the main characters is impressive. Chalamet does a good job of portraying the teen Paul, portraying his rebelliousness, emotional sensitivity, and giftedness, as well as the steel within that will propel him to his destiny. Isaac is appropriately noble as Duke Leto, while Ferguson is well-cast as Jessica. And although I was skeptical of gender-flipping the Imperial scientist Liet Kynes (the filmmakers came up with this ridiculous reasoning about how women are naturally peacemakers between cultures), I liked Sharon Duncan-Brewster's portrayal, especially later in the film. Josh Brolin does a good job conveying the intensity of Atreides weapons-master and musician Gurney Halleck, while Jason Momoa definitely impresses as the jocular warrior Duncan Idaho.

*The battle sequences are also quite impressive. In the Dune world, personal shielding has reduced firearms to a secondary role at best and much fighting is done with swords. The way the battles take this into account and the way the fight scenes are choreographed is pretty cool.

The Bad 

*Even though they're adapting only the first part of the book, the movie is still very, very long at just over two and a half hours. It starts to drag a couple hours in. That was the single biggest flaw, and kind of a substantial one.

*And even though this is the first half of the book, they still have to leave stuff out. One character who has a lot of internal turmoil is reduced to a non-entity despite their major role in events, as is another character whose actions tie in. Vague to avoid spoilers. :) And I'm wondering if they're consolidating the Harkonnen nephews--we meet Rabban but not Feyd-Rautha, the smarter and more dangerous of the two. Feyd-Rautha isn't to my recollection even mentioned.

*Some of the characters' speech comes off as a bit too present-day for thousands of years in the future.

The Verdict

8.0 out of 10. See it. Go see it. Help it make enough money that we can see the rest of the story on-screen to this degree of glory. Given how the second third to half of the story focuses on the war against the Harkonnens and the Empire, it will almost certainly avoid this film's problem of being too slow-moving.

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.

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!

Bad Movie Review: Nightbeast (1982)

Courtesy of Atlanta's Videodrome, I had the...pleasure...of watching another 1980s low-budget horror film, Nightbeast. There also used to be a lot more regional indie films shown in drive-ins and locally-distributed VHS rentals, and I thought this might be one given how the back of the box emphasized its Maryland roots. And some of the back copy hinted it might be so bad it's good, so I figured that might be worth a shot.

Probably not the best idea, although it certainly compared better to the other film I rented that afternoon, The Deadly Spawn. Here's my review...

The Plot

An alien spacecraft collides with a meteor and crash-lands in rural Maryland. Can Sheriff Jack Cinder (Tom Griffith) and his deputies, including Lisa Kent (Karin Kardian), and various armed townsfolk stop its murderous occupant before it before it kills everybody? And will the ambitious Mayor Burt Wicker (Richard Dyszel) glad-handing with the governor get in the way?

The Good

*I liked the concept. How often do aliens invade rural Maryland of all places?

*They do develop the characters a bit, although they definitely could have gone farther.

*The sheriff, his deputies, and the townsfolk they collect to help fight the titular monster do display some degree of competence like ability to maneuver under gunfire. Given the time the movie was made and the local culture, odds are good these are people who are regular users of guns (hunting, for example) and many likely served in the military, possibly in Vietnam.

*In one scene there's a creative anti-monster technique involving the use of laundry equipment that I liked.

*J.J. Abrams played a role in the film's production as a teenager. Given how something like that would have been my high-school dream, good for him. Great things often grow from humble beginnings.

The Bad

*The actors' delivery is generally abysmal. They sound very passionless and monotone, even with discussing things like an alien who is rampaging in the town or a local thug who abuses his girlfriend (more on that later). The students acting in my high school student films put more passion into their roles. Most of the time it's just plain stupid, although there're a couple parts where it's so bad I actually started laughing. 

*What exactly is the monster's goal? Was it hungry and hunting people to survive? Trying to find a way to phone home so to speak? They could have designed its attacks based on that. Instead it just mindlessly rampaged around.

*The filmmakers copy a subplot from Jaws (the sheriff who wants to protect people vs. the self-interested mayor), but they don't follow that film's principle of not showing the monster to make it scarier. The monster isn't as bad as modern hokey CGI, but it's too shiny and stiff to be really scary. The same with the dead bodies resulting in its rampage. Remember, what people imagine is often scarier or more disgusting than what they actually see.

*The cannon fodder's occasional competence makes their inability to hit the titular monster even once during multiple encounters even more blatantly. Later in the film Jack claims bullets can't hurt it, but we don't see any bullets bouncing off or anything that would show that. Heck, in a couple of scenes they have the alien on the run and don't bother pursuing. There are several instances where the cast displays very little sense of urgency, despite having a C-grade Predator rampaging around. They don't even call the state (let alone the feds) until relatively late in the film even though they're dealing with an alien invasion. If this is a creature the department's small arms can't handle, how about bringing in the National Guard? After all, the state governor was in the area during the creature's rampage. Maybe the state people will just laugh them off, but at least it'd show they tried.

*Per my comment about lacking a sense of urgency, the film contains an absolutely pointless sex scene, a scene even the back of the movie box describes as "awkward."

*Also, there are some extraordinarily poorly-done brawls, either human vs. human or man vs. monster. If this is the late 1970s or early 1980s in a small Southern-ish town, I imagine people would have more experience with fighting.

*The soundtrack is absolutely terrible. It doesn't serve to build suspense or atmosphere and doesn't make the mood of the scene at all.

*The alien's gun turning its victims into body-shaped burn marks on the ground is unintentionally hilarious.

*There's this whole subplot involving local bully Drago (Don Leifert) who's abusing his girlfriend that comes out of nowhere. If they even bothered to include it, it should have been before the alien's arrival as part of the problems within the town. The conflict between Jack and Burt was handled much better in Jaws.

*The movie starts to drag toward the end as the confrontation builds between the sheriff's department and the alien.

The Verdict

This movie comes off like a mediocre mix of Predator, Laserblast, and Boggy Creek II: And The Legend Continues and you're better off watching those. This isn't even so bad it's good, despite a couple moments. Maybe one can get some amusement value watching with friends to make fun of it. 4.5 out of 10.

Bad Movie Review: THE DEADLY SPAWN (1983)

I was returning Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets to Videodrome the other day and there were a couple films I saw in horror section that caught my attention. One was The Deadly Spawn, which I remembered coming across uploaded to YouTube earlier. As an ethical matter I want to pay creators for their work and I was already there, so I rented it.

Now to review it...

The Plot

A meteor crashes to Earth, bringing with it a predatory alien (according to a prequel comic in the DVD extras it's a bioweapon) that chows down on some campers and then hides away in a basement. It proceeds to snack on anybody who comes down while spawning (hence the title) lots and lots of little monsters. The family living in the house above goes about their day, but it becomes increasingly obvious there's a problem.

The Good

*The concept of a family going about their day (a visiting uncle is preparing for a psychology conference; the older brother is having friends over to study) while being completely unaware there's an alien monster lurking in their basement is clever. I also liked the atypical protagonists--a bunch of college science students and retirees rather than typical dumb teens just waiting for Jason to kill them.

*The filmmakers, especially early in the film, are pretty clearly following the Jaws principle of never showing their monster. There are shadows, silhouettes, and partial glimpses, as well as blood spattering from kills, but it's not until around a third in that we see the big kahuna. Given how cheap the creature ends up looking, that's wise.

*Although they didn't have the resources to make a decent-looking monster, the creature design and concept is pretty cool.

*There are some interesting character dynamics, like two characters who are conspiracy theorists and another who's a skeptic--and did I mention there's an incipient love triangle? They play well off each other.

*Not going to go into more detail for reasons of spoilers, but it does have an epilogue showing just what happens after the events of the film that's slightly amusing.

The Bad

*The acting simply isn't very good. In the opening sequence where a couple campers get mauled, they don't seem to be putting much effort into emoting or delivery. The main cast is better, but not by much, and lesser characters who appear later in the film (an old ladies' luncheon from hell) are about as bad as the campers from the beginning. It's not impressive at all. Taking a look at IMDB, most of the people didn't seem to have been in anything else, or only in a small number of films. It would have been a lot better if they'd just consolidated the cast.

*The main characters aren't really built up well, so I didn't really care much about whether or not they ended up monster chow or not. Note that I don't use any of their names in the review--there's a reason for that. :(

*The movie takes too long to get anywhere, despite its relatively short runtime of 78 minutes. There are many overlong shots that are increasingly-obvious padding, especially toward the end.

*The monster-puppet is cheap-looking and not very good.

*The lighting isn't very good. Half the time one can't see anything at all, especially at night or in a darkened basement. Done well, shadows can be spooky, but this just looks cheap and poorly made. There are several occasions where the film is straight-up blurry, which doesn't help.

*There's a major moment relatively early in the film where a character would be literally dead meat if the monster acted like it did earlier, but it was uncharacteristically unaggressive. This is intended to reveal the creature is blind and hunts by sound, but I didn't get that at the time. And what seems like a prolonged standoff lasts so long that one wonders why nobody noticed the character is missing.

*There's some really weird camerawork and editing.

*The monster is pretty big, but not only can it move very quickly, but also very quietly as the plot demands.

The Verdict

Some good ideas, but very poorly executed. Don't bother unless you really like cheap 1980s horror films. If you really want a good creature feature from that era, watch the original Gremlins or Slugs instead. 3.5 out of 10.

Movie Review: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017)

While I was at Videodrome renting a copy of The Abyss for a future Myopia Movies podcast episode, I saw a copy of the film Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets, which I thought about seeing in theaters back in 2017, dawdled, and ended up missing. Like my father says, if you wait long enough, "I don't know," becomes "no." I eventually got around to renting the film, and now it's time to review it.

The Plot

In the distant future, humanity is one of a vast number alien species coexisting throughout the galaxy and what was once the International Space Station has grown into a galaxy-traveling city of millions. It's also the base of operations for an interstellar police force, two agents of which are Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and his partner Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne). Although they both clearly have romantic feelings for each other, she isn't content to be one of his many sexual conquests and he's commitment-phobic.

Into this drops a mission to retrieve a rare "Mul Converter" from a gang of black marketeers. The two officers stumble into a conspiracy involving a planet officially erased from the records and a high-level military cover-up.

The Good

*The acting and characterization are very good. I really liked DeHaan and Delevingne playing their characters as essentially Harry Potter's Ron and Hermione, if Ron were James Bond in terms of martial capability and libido and Hermione were much more sarcastic and rebellious and had a shorter temper and more explicitly traditional views about sex and family. The two have really good chemistry and are fun to watch.

*Writer and director Luc Besson, the mastermind behind The Fifth Element, is clearly having a blast adapting one of his favorite comics to the screen. It's clearly a labor of love and very well-done. This shows in the casting--Besson put in the effort to cast well-known performers like Clive Owen and Rihanna and the costuming, art, etc. are all awesome. Owing to the obscurity of its source material, it's a hell of a lot more interesting than the endless remakes and sequels of more well-known films that dominate today's market.

*The overall plot is a lot more thoughtful than a lot of sci-fi films.

*There are some good uses of "show, don't tell," like a scene early on when Laureline uses the ship's computers to make a point about Valerian's love life.

*There are a lot of fun action sequences.

*The opening montage in which the International Space Station grows to include more and more Earth nations as well as increasing numbers of alien species to the point it becomes a city in space is very well-done, and even includes some cool science bits like how artificial gravity is introduced.

*Although this is hundreds of years in the future, religion--touched on however briefly when Valerian and Laureline are about to go on a mission and during a conspiracy flashback--is something that still exists and is respected, even by a lothario like Valerian. Valerian's offer to find a priest specifically is also a nice tie-in with Laureline from the comics--she was a medieval French peasant who was brought into the future and thus likely to be an actual Catholic.

The Bad

*The movie is about thirty minutes too long. This wouldn't be a problem if an entire subplot involving Laureline getting kidnapped--something that shouldn't be possible if her armor and martial skill are half that of Valerian's--got cut down or excised completely. Seriously, it basically came off as an excuse to have a Rihanna dance number, plus it also relies on a section of the titular space station essentially being off-limits to federal law enforcement agents. That makes no sense.

*There's a sequence at the end where a character introduces some elements that would make the overall situation much more morally gray, but it isn't handled well. And Valerian and Laureline make some ludicrous deductive leaps to figure out parts of it. More details about the war we see before we meet Valerian and Laureline would have been nice, as it would explain a villain's actions.

*There are some Chekov's guns that are put on the mantle but not fired. Valerian's promiscuity could have caused problems during the main plot--perhaps he's betrayed by a bitter ex-lover--but it doesn't really come up.

*There's also a major suspension-of-disbelief problem with a group of aliens who play a key role in the climax of the film.

*Early on some people our heroes are supposed to be close to get killed, but they don't seem to care.

The Verdict

It's definitely good and I hope that Besson eventually gets his way and produces a sequel, but it's got some flaws. Worth a rental, or buying cheap. 7.5 out of 10.