REVIEW: Fantastic Four (2005)

I spend a lot of time defending movies that I know other people don't (or won't like). We're talking lots of time, here, quality time, time that I could be spending doing charity work for orphans or trying to take the staples out of Miss September's chest. With great sadness and confusion, it appears that that time is once again at hand, because I really enjoyed Tim Story's movie version of Fantastic Four.

I was never a fan of the FF (that's what the cool kids call them), despite being a life-long comics reader. I bought exactly one issue of their book, because it had a cool embossed cover and it only featured the Human Torch and Spider-Man, so it was more like an issue of Spider-Man featuring a man on fire (and tell me that doesn't sound like good reading). I'm explaining this because I want you all to know that I didn't enjoy the movie for purely geeky reasons. I didn't groan at the casting because I didn't care, I didn't watch and rewatch the trailers, and I never even considered paying out ten bucks to see it in a theater -- and then the reviews seemed to range from mediocre to terrible, and I usually agree with Ebert (who one-starred it). It was pretty much a moment of "well, I have a space in my Netflix queue" that made me rent it.

Here's the digest version of the plot: Reed Richards, Sue and Johnny Storm, Ben Grimm, and Victor von Doom blast off into space in order to study a looming "cosmic storm." Reed is the brainy scientist, Ben is the lovable but gruff co-pilot, Sue looks like Jessica Alba, her brother Johnny is an immature hotshot, and Doom is the asshole scientist and leader of some kind of corporation. Also, Sue looks like Jessica Alba. She and Reed used to date, but now Doom and Sue are dating. (Or not. I couldn't tell if it was just weird innuendo or an actual relationship.) There's a sudden change in the storm, and they get zapped.

Once on earth, each of them starts to manifest strange powers: Reed can stretch and contort his body in ways that are usually reserved for top-shelf porn, and Sue can turn invisible (Good going, movie. Make the hot actress invisible.); Johnny can shoot fire and fly, and Ben finds his skin covered in an ugly, hard, rock-like shell that apparently gives him super-strength. Doom has some kind of vague set of powers that I don't recognize from the comics, where he's part metal and can shoot lightning bolts.

Then, they fight. The end -- OR IS IT???

There are subplots about Reed and Sue's relationship, and of course Ben's adjustments to his new appearance and his later romance with a blind artist. Johnny gets his own little set of sequences where he acts like a jerk. Doom gets plenty of screentime which he uses pretty much none of to explain his motivations, so the audience is apt to think he's just a major asshole that talks a lot about nothing while he stares off into the distance.

It's a really simple flick, and that's kind of what I like about it. For a huge-budget action picture, it was surprisingly small-scale and... well, I'd hate to use the word "intimate," but I don't have my thesaurus handy. Think "intimate" without "depth". It's what most people would consider to be a true "comic book movie," a superficial bit of entertainment that succeeds because it occasionally rises above the material, and doesn't sink too far below to discredit the whole thing. It certainly lacks the heart of the Spider-Man series, and the intensity and scope of some of the Batman flicks, but I'd still call it above-average fluff. I laughed most of the times that I was supposed to laugh, and with a little bit of imagination I could buy into most of the relationships and performances.

I say most, because for the life of me I can't figure out what the actual plot was doing. Doom is an asshole that's jealous of Reed's returning relationship with Sue, and on top of that he gets fired by his corporation because of the bad publicity the space accident caused. Why creating four celebrity superheroes is bad publicity for a corporation is beyond my comprehension, though. Doom is angry at his company, okay. Doom is angry at Reed, fine. Doom wants Sue, perfectly believable. These things make sense individually, but do not sufficiently explain Doom's crazy destructive behavior later, nor why he feels the need to destroy all four of them (Sue included?) and then take out chunks of Manhattan. Maybe he's just a really big asshole. I know other New Yorkers like that.

The acting, too, was about par for the genre. Ioan Gruffudd was decent as the awkward Mr. Fantastic, and despite what I'd heard Jessica Alba didn't embarass herself as the Invisible Girl. Michael Chiklis didn't quite live up to the hype that I'd heard about him in the Thing suit, but Chris Evans certainly did. Johnny's antics were a big part of what made the movie work for me, and even though he got the best lines there was some good comic acting to boot. Julian McMahon was the low point of the ensemble, because there was never anything believable about the character to begin with, and he didn't add anything to make up for the shoddy script. Bad dialogue and one-dimensional acting do not a good villain make.

I'm pretty lenient on the plot side, since watching the movie is more or less about getting from special effects sequence to funny part to special effects sequence. I probably would've enjoyed it just as much if the Fantastic Four stumbled upon Doom robbing a 7-11, and then Johnny said something funny, and then back to Doom breaking the burrito microwave. As I've said, it's a pretty superficial movie, but if the fluff parts are done well enough, the failed deeper bits matter less. It's not high art and it's far from fantastic, but I appreciated the parts that worked and ignored the parts that didn't. I'm not entirely ashamed to say that I'm looking forward to a (hopefully improved) sequel -- there just aren't enough drive-in kinda flicks these days.

I think that the Lady Retropolitan summed it up best during the climax: "I'm enthralled despite myself." I don't think I can make a more clearly-stated review than that one.




And yes, I know that the last photo is from a different movie.

REVIEW: War of the Worlds TV Pilot (1988)

Like some kind of entertainment world version of puberty, it seems like every movie that's ever released in Hollywood will eventually start the process of turning into a television series. After a few years, if it's marketable, the movie will start to grow producers and slide into development again, and experience countless awkward moments in front of beautiful actresses. Then it'll go deep into debt, get shoved into a weeknight timeslot with some other show, and eventually produce spin-offs. It's a good morning for sloppy metaphors, isn't it?

Following right on the heels of George Pal's 1953 film version of the HG Wells' classic (at least in dog years) 1988 saw the release of television's "War of the Worlds" weekly series, initially produced by the Strangis Brothers. It's been thirty odd years since the Martian fleet attacked with their tripods and nearly decimated the population of the Earth, only to be felled by common earth bacteria contracted during a weekend tryst with the Hilton sisters. According to the television script, the government packed up all those alien bodies and machines and stowed them away in the mysterious Hangar 15, never to be seen again...

...until a group of terrorists take over said hangar in an attempt to commandeer a US broadcasting satellite so they can announce their demands to the world. I'm not exactly certain what their demands really are, other than the immediate resignation of the US President, and maybe to constructively suggest that the military post more than two (2) guards at the "abandoned alien technology" hangar. In the ensuing firefight with the guards, one of the errant bullets hits the alien carcass barrels, which leak a suspicious goo. Then again, isn't all goo suspicious in some way?

The goo starts to melt nearby canisters, and some spindly three-fingered hands emerge. Slowly, perhaps too slowly, each of the terrorists gets their body taken over by an alien being, which (at least as far as my recollection of the 1953 movie is concerned) is a brand-new alien ability. It seems that Hangar 15 is located right around some kind old nuclear test site, and the ambient radiation killed off the bacteria that downed the aliens in the first place. They weren't dead, as the world thought, they were just comatose for thirty years. Luckily, they missed the 1970s.

Cut to: zany academic scientist Harrison Blackwood, played with zany academic spunk by Jared Martin. Blackwood is apparently in charge of all kinds of New Age-y scientific experiments at some non-descript university, and I'll cut through thirty or so minutes of dull exposition by saying that he's "zany" and "unorthodox," he's romantically interested in his new single-mom research assistant Suzanne, and he's got a wheelchair-bound techno whiz buddy named Norton Drake that's analyzing radio signals from outer space. If you've rented the disc, you can just skip to chapter sixteen now. Drake has found some very interesting signals coming from space -- but they appear to be responses to signals coming from Earth.

Meanwhile, the no-nonsense hard-as-nails Lt. Col. Ironhorse is in charge of the investigation of the actual terrorist attack, which of course smashes his plotline against Blackwood's -- but can they work together to prevent the aliens from retrieving their spaceships and early-1950s ray-gun sound effect reels? With a little help from some of the more secret branches of Uncle Sam's family, you can bet that they're gonna try -- for at least two seasons.

I was pretty excited about this hitting DVD, since it's one of those "wish I'd paid more attention" shows from my childhood, just like the entire WPIX lineup. I remember bits and pieces from the original run and syndication, and I figured that I'd give it a try and see exactly how forgiving nostalgia really is -- turns out, nostalgia is really forgiving, because this show really sucks. Actually, to be fair, the pilot really sucks, so I doubt that I'll ever have the heart to sit through too many of the actual episodes.

I've read in articles and reviews about how this show helped jump-start various trends in modern television science fiction, and I can definitely see similar themes: mainly, vast government conspiracies and the paranoia of not really knowing who's on your side. On occasion, it's got that gritty, "X-Files" sort of feeling; other times, it's more of a high school video project. I'm not sure what budgets were like back in 1988, but the pilot episode -- usually the one to get money thrown at it -- looks like a particularly low-budget episode of "MacGyver". It's all close-ups, never more than five people on screen at any time, and even the alien ray-gun blasts at the finale look like they might have been blue-screened directly out of 1953; they're laughably bad effects that might've worked if the show wasn't trying so hard to be dark and gloomy. The "V" series also had pretty ugly bluescreen work, but it was such a goofy show that it didn't really matter.

Most of all, the pilot lacks a decent script. I've given passes to many a show and film that looked shitty, just because the script had something working in it. This time, the script sinks. Plummets, really, down the vast abyss of implausibility and "what the fu--?". Starting with the curiously under-guarded Hangar 15, and culminating with the realization that the show has no idea whether or not anyone remembers the giant alien invasion from 1953. I've seen plot holes before, but this hole has flashing lights and ConEd guys and lava shooting out of it, so it's pretty hard to miss. It would be better if the script didn't remind the audience that it didn't make sense every ten minutes, but it almost always goes out of its way to bring up the invasion, and then have every character act as if they've never heard of it. And then they bring in other characters who reference it. And then deny it. It's frustrating, because it's so, so stupid.

Here's the breakdown of the problem: the invasion happened (which explains the aliens being here). There are flashbacks to the invasion, the main character's family was killed by the aliens, and he was raised by a professor that devoted his life to studying the alien artifacts left behind. When Blackwood brings up his evidence that there are aliens communicating between space and Earth, no one believes him. In fact, most of the cast seems to think that the idea of alien beings is bizarre and implausible, which is why Blackwood is seen as so kooky. Hell, even Blackwood -- the one man who you'd think would be a little bit more realistic about alien life, since his family was melted by them and all -- has a SETI-like academic project where he's trying to imagine what a plausible alien life form would be like. I felt like I spent ninety minutes with those people who walk around with their glasses on looking for their glasses.

Just when you thought that the show couldn't get any better, there's the acting. Jared Martin, the thespian behind Harrison Blackwood, is actually fairly good; he does kooky as the script requires, and he's got one of those voices that almost sounds like it was made for early-40s radio drama. The part as written is more or less unforgivable, but Martin does well enough to make him interesting. That's the good stuff. The bad is everyone else, particularly Richard Chaves as Lt. Col. Ironhorse, and Philip Akin as Norton Drake. Chaves -- who should know how to deal with malevolent aliens after co-starring in Predator -- shouts and growls his lines like a fifteen-year-old pretending to be a drill sergeant. Akin, on the other hand, has perhaps the most distracting non-accent I've ever heard. I was going to say that it was a crummy fake Jamaican accent, but a little research reveals that Akin is actually Jamaican, so I guess it's a crummy American accent. Regardless of which dialect we're talking about, it's distracting and makes him sound like he's either trying to disguise it or bring it out. You'll probably have to listen to it to understand how annoying it gets.

I haven't seen the Spielberg/Cruise version of the story, but I'm a fan of the Orson Welles portrayal and I'd really love to see the story carried on -- even with the same basic premise as this series. I'd just need it to be a little higher quality, and maybe have it arbitrarily make some kind of logical sense. You know, the kind of things that prevent me from trying to shake sense into my TV's cathode tube. Until this hypothetical revival happens, I'm going to have to put this set next to "Werewolf" on the shelf of TV shows that sucked, but could have been great.




Okay, there's one good line. Blackwood is a pacifist, and when he and Ironhorse go to infiltrate Hangar 15, he turns down the opportunity to carry a sidearm. "I don't believe in guns," he says, to which Ironhorse replies: "I'm sure the aliens will respect that."

REVIEW: The Monster Squad (1987)

One hundred years before this story begins...
It was a time of darkness in Transylvania...

A time when Dr. Abraham Van Helsing...
And a small band of freedom fighters..
Conspired to rid the world of vampires and monsters...
And to save mankind from the forces of eternal evil...


They blew it.

That title scroll kicks off one of the most beloved films of my childhood, Fred Dekker and Shane Black's The Monster Squad. I still remember the day that I saw it in the theater with my parents and my brother -- there wasn't anyone else in the theater, which might be a clue to the kind of box-office this picture did. After getting my hands on a new copy of the film, I found other reasons why this movie under-performed. Before I mislead you any further, let me be up front about it: I love this movie, and watching it again brought back all the warm fuzzies that I had when I saw it for the 99th time as a child.

After the scroll fades away, the first scene opens on a stone statue of the Grim Reaper, sitting on a broken pedestal in the middle of an overgrown cemetery. The camera pans across the headstones as lightning flashes overhead, illuminating the graves, and then we come to a clearing of the trees and stop -- right on a dark, scary CASTLE! We cut inside to a torch-lit crypt, coffins lining the floor; one of the lids moves to the side a few inches, and out comes a parade of giant spiders, followed by the spidery fingers of a stone-white hand. The camera follows the dirt and moss on the ceiling, leading up to a giant, grotesque, writhing bat -- it twists, and screeches, the body transforming slowly into a man, and then with a sudden jump it flops to the floor, a full-grown, fully-dressed Count Dracula!

We jump to Van Helsing and the aforementioned band of freedom fighters charging the castle's gates, blowing them to bits with some dynamite. They run inside, and slay one of Dracula's white-gowned brides with a bolt through the heart. Van Helsing pulls out a glowing amulet, and commands a young woman to read some German mumbo-jumbo off of a scroll, as the castle shudders and skeletal zombies claw their way out from the floor! The girl finishes the spell, the amulet glows, and then a giant whirlwind forms and sucks everyone inside!

I'm not sure if I wrote a review of it or not, but Monster Squad's opening scene is everything that Stephen Sommers' recent Van Helsing failed to be. Squad is a movie about kids, starring a cast of kids, and it has exactly the kind of gung-ho 1980s mentality that appeals to children who more or less need a story with clearly-defined good guys and bad guys. I have the feeling that Sommers and Dekker wanted to make the same kind of movie. The difference ended up being in execution; Sommers' film was a plodding, dull, ugly mess that sucked out the inherent thrills! and chills! out of the characters, but Dekker's film seemed like it was directed with a "Gee whiz!" excitement and exclamation points on all the performances. It's incredibly fun, and that's why it made me so happy to go back to it.

After Van Helsing and his pals screw up the incantation, the story jumps one-hundred years forward to a 1987 middle (?) school, where Shaun and Patrick are getting sent to the principal's office again for drawing pictures of monsters during class. They've got this monster club with a couple of their pals, and their clubhouse (a really nifty treehouse fort) has walls plastered with their drawings and horror movie posters. Also in the club are Fat Kid, little Eugene, and their new recruit Rudy. Rudy seems to be much older than the other kids, but gets invited in on account of his preventing Fat Kid's ass-whooping at the hands of a bully. Rudy's obviously the "cool kid," since he is always -- ALWAYS -- wearing a black motorcycle jacket, and he smokes and wears sunglasses. (And he's got a kickass BMX bike.) As I mentioned, Rudy gets invited because of his heroics, but he stays because the treehouse is right across from Patrick's hot sister's bedroom window. There's also an adorable kid sister, Phoebe, who isn't welcomed into the club on account of the "No Girls Allowed" sign.

As it turns out, the amulet that Van Helsing was playing with is an object of "pure good," capable of destroying all monsters forever, provided that someone reads a certain incantation at midnight exactly during a celestial alignment that only occurs every one-hundred years. On the other hand, the amulet can be destroyed during that time, and so Dracula has come out of hiding to make sure he and his ghouls will live forever.

In the interim century, Van Helsing's disciples have hidden the amulet in the dark, creepy house located at 666 Shadowbrook Road, right on the outskirts of Shaun's town, and the Count brings his pals Wolf-Man, Gill-Man, Mummy, and Frankenstein's Monster to make a grab for it. Actually, he really just brings the Monster, and the other guys seem to have been fortuitously hanging around the town. That's the midwest for you, I guess. With the aid of the Scary German Guy and Shaun's cop father, the kids grab the amulet and save the day. I'm sure they all learned important life lessons somewhere in there too. They were probably in one of the montage scenes.

After seeing it again, I realize exactly why this I saw this in an empty theater with my parents: this is probably one of the last movies I would actually want to show children. The heroes of the movie are kids, to be sure, but they take on all the standard adult roles from the horror genre: they cuss, they smoke, and they save the day at the end by picking up shotguns and bows and violently killing the monsters themselves. It's like a little boy's nihilistic, violent fantasy, where he gets to play-act like the action heroes in the movies. This movie could never, never, never be made today, because the MPAA wouldn't just slap an NC-17 on it, they'd probably burn the negatives. I have absolutely no idea how Dekker got this made AND released.

I said that it was a kids' movie, but in hindsight, it's something different: it's a kids' movie made for adults. It's the kind of movie that you're supposed to view as a kids movie, from the vantage point of adulthood. It's something akin to pre-packaged nostalgia, a reproduction of the feelings and fantasies we had as youngsters. It's much more than just a fond nod to the creature features of Universal Pictures, though; it's a full-on tribute to the feelings and dreams that those movies inspired in little kids, and also a surprisingly honest one. It's not only about the sense of excitement, it's also about the very real and very dark undertones of revenge and violence that kids have when they watch adults in the movies, bravely killing their monsters. I doubt that it's a coincidence that Fat Kid redeems his courage in front of his bullies by picking up a shotgun and blowing a bloody hole in the Gill-Man's chest -- he wanted to show them that he could be as violent and dangerous (or rather, more violent and more dangerous) than they could be, and Gill-Man almost happened to be a scapegoat in the wrong place at the wrong time. Poor Gill-Man, never getting any respect.

I read a recent interview with Fred Dekker, and he mentioned that he and Black didn't consider this movie to be a kids' picture at the time. When I first read that, I figured he was off his rocker, but I think I understand now. This isn't a kids' movie at all, at least not in the sense that we want it to be. Sure, it works as a great pulp adventure (violence and cussing aside), but I think it's much more sophisticated than that. If you're not into, you know, levels of text, then you can certainly have a ball just going along with it, because it's great fun anyway.

The fun part comes largely from Dekker and Black's script, which has a ton of fun with genre conventions without trying to actually rebuke them. It's pretty clear that the two of them understood exactly what was so incredibly thrilling about the old horror films. There's a sense of danger, of course, but it's kept broad enough that it's outweighed -- ever so slightly -- by the idea that the scariness will be entertaining to overcome. Like the old Universal films, Squad's masterstroke is getting the audience to enjoy playing along with the idea of fear, much more than actually inspiring fright of any kind; it's the way that a kid's mind works. For something similar, you can check out Fred Dekker's other great film, Night of the Creeps.

I'm going to make a presumption that Black was responsible for the movie's many great lines of dialogue, since he's becoming known for his especially witty genre-bending scripts (including The Long Kiss Goodnight and the just-released Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). The performances by the kids range from really good to passable, but even the worst of the deliveries is defeated by the dialogue itself; when they nail the lines, they really soar. The adults, too, are all played by actors that seem like they're having a great time, and their performances really shine. I give extra credit to Stan Shaw as Detective Sapir, because he had my favorite line in the movie while he was interrogating the night watchmen about the missing mummy exhibit.

I don't want to sell this movie too hard, but I'm still reeling a little bit from being reminded exactly how much I love it. It's entertaining and satisfying in a way that's becoming more and more rare for me these days, and underneath that I believe it might actually be saying something about the genres it's playing with. It's fast-paced, it's funny, and it's absolutely worth seeing if you missed it on its initial release eighteen years ago. I think it's probably even more worth seeing if you did manage a viewing or two as a child. (Although that makes me wonder what kind of adult supervision you had.) Go dig into your local VHS bins, or hop onto eBay and get yourself a copy.


*quietly singing*Rock until you drop, dance until your feet fall off...

REVIEW: The Night Strangler (1973)

Only a year after dealing with a vicious vampire in 1972's The Night Stalker, Carl Kolchak has yet another run-in with supernatural evil in the sequel, The Night Strangler. I guess that's a major conceit of all recurring characters in supernatural-related series: they come across incredibly rare unnatural events as though they happened every day. It's a conceit that most audiences are willing to forgive, because overall it's better to have unlikely things happen than to be bored to tears while we wait for something else interesting to occur. I'd hate to think of the realistic version of Kolchak, where he murdered the vampire in part one and then we spent twenty TV seasons watching him languish in jail.

Thankfully, we're treated with a little suspension of reality, and Kolchak -- now trying to peddle his vampire story to papers in Seattle -- runs into his old curmudgeonly boss, Tony Vincenzo. It seems that the vampire debacle also got Vincenzo tossed out of his job as editor, and he's taken up residence in the northwest, again behind the desk of another popular newpaper. Feeling bad for Kolchak's downtrodden state, he gives him a job, and all the old trouble (and fun) begins again.

Another series of murders has begun in Seattle, with each of the lady victims murdered at night, with some blood loss. Kolchak immediately questions whether this might be another vampire on the prowl, but the county coroner confirms that they've only lost about 5ccs of blood, which is a little light for a bloodsucker. Also: small needle marks instead of bite wounds, and the women all actually succumbed to intense strangling and crushed throats. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this was the inspiration for the title.

No, this is no vampire (although he might still be considered a stalker, technically. He stalks, after all. This is the same manner in which I consider myself a writer.) It seems that similar murders occurred twenty-one years prior in Seattle, all happening with young women in the same neighborhood, all killed in the same manner and in the same number of days. Even more mysteriously, the same circumstances apply twenty-one years prior to that, and twenty-one years before those, as far back as 1868. Sounds fishy!

After much digging and some playing around in a big underground city, Kolchak uses his reporter ways to find the truth: a civil war doctor has almost found the secret of immortality. He's created a potion that will give him youth for twenty-one years, and as it begins to wear off he takes on a corpse-like visage, causing him to come back out into the night to steal blood to make a new batch. Sounds like a good deal to me, although I can't quite figure out why he didn't just steal blood from a blood bank or something; even the Night Stalker thought of that. Since the puncture marks were at the base of the women's necks, maybe it had something to do with spinal fluid or something. I guess it's not really important.

What is important is that Darren McGavin rules the world once again as Carl Kolchak, and this TV-movie is filled out with another talented cast, including the eponymous John Carradine. (Carradine was in two-hundred fifty-one movies in fifty-seven years, and had at least appearances in one-hundred and four TV shows. That's a lot of not taking any vacations.) Simon Oakland also returns as Vincenzo, and Richard Anderson plays the Strangler -- I spent the end of the movie wondering where I'd seen Anderson before, and the IMDB tells me that I'm recognizing him from playing Oscar Goldman on the "Bionic Man" series. And he was in "Knight Rider," so I'm probably having nostalgia fits in my cerebral cortex just from checking his resume.

I'll have to be honest: this movie was fun, but it's not as good as The Night Stalker. Stalker was interesting because I really didn't know if the villain was going to turn out to be an actual vampire -- the show was very procedural, and it had me guessing as to whether they'd find out the vampire was real or just a crazy guy who thought he was undead. Going into the second movie, I now know that the supernatural does exist in Kolchak's world, so that some of the underlying mystery is gone; this time it was replaced with the mystery of simply finding out what kind of ghoul he was, and where to find him. It's slightly less engaging, since the endless fights with the editor and police seem like they're more or less retreads of the first movie. After a while, I was getting bored -- the police are confronted with evidence, they want to cover it up, Kolchak saves the day, story gets covered up, everyone gets fired. I saw forty minutes of the exact same thing two days ago, and I would've liked to have seen a new spin on it this time.

Still, McGavin and Oakland really played their roles to the hilt, and once again the screen crackled with energy. There were several scenes of their arguing that had both me and the Lady Retropolitan laughing out loud. ("Where are you going?") I was really impressed by the smallest nuances of McGavin's performance: the tilt of the hat, the foot stomping, and even the way that he stretched himself out on Vincenzo's couch. I think that it was their contributions to the movie that really stood out and made it worth watching, as well as Wally Cox's turn as Mr. Berry, the awkward police researcher that helps Kolchak find the Strangler.

Overall, The Night Strangler is a fun hour and a half, although I'd be lying if I said it was a really solid piece of entertainment. I got bored at more than one point, despite my high praise for the cast. The plot just wasn't very compelling, and the script unveiled the mystery in spurts; there were some loooong trips between plot points, and the majority of it is revealed close to the end. The performances kept me occupied for most of the in-between parts, but it wasn't really enough to keep me focused. In the end, I still recommend it, but with some reservations -- don't expect to be enthralled by the story. Just sit back and enjoy the bickering.

REVIEW: Sleepaway Camp (1973)

Sleepaway Camp sitting on my shelf for about a year now, ever since I picked it up during my crusade to form the world's largest collection of the world's shittiest slasher films. While a noble venture, it ended rather abruptly when I realized that a lot of the world's shittiest slasher films are actually shitty, as opposed to the fun kind of shitty. So, my collection went unheralded, unfinished, and unloved, up until last night when I decided to blow the dust off of my DVD booklet and give this classic a try.

In a bizarre departure from the genre (kind of), Sleepaway Camp does not feature gratuitous female nudity from dozens of nubile 19-year-old camp counselors. Sure, there are counselors around, but the focus of the movie is actually on the summer camp attendees this time, which makes the overt themes of sexuality simultaneously off-putting and revolting. Sure, it has a context and a definite thematic value, but after being weened on films that taught me that all camp-based slasher films must have incredibly hot nude women, it's a little troubling when all the women in this one are thirteen.

Welcome to 1974, when a little boy and a little girl are happily sitting on a tiny boat with their father in the middle of a lake. It's summertime, and the beaches are full with teens, and a lifeguard is taking a girl out for a ride with some water skis. The little boy and girl decide to pull off the prank of pushing their dad into the water, which (of course) capsizes the boat, but all is well. Their dad's friend shouts at them from the beach...but they still don't see that the water-skiing boat is headed directly for them! Before anyone can say "1970s fashion sucks!" the boat slides right through the family, and moments later we see the father's corpse doing a really good version of the dead man's float.

"8 Years Later"

The following is either a great scene or a horrible scene, depending on what you think is "good" versus what you think is "funny." A crazy woman is packing up her two youngins, Ricky and Angela, for a summer at Camp Arawak. Angela isn't actually the woman's daughter; she's (presumably) one of the kids from the opening scene, and the woman is her aunt. Her crazy, crazy aunt. She dresses like she's on her way to Oz, and she speaks like a community theater understudy. I'm not entirely sure what kind of actors the director had to work with, but I can't quite tell if she's supposed to be speaking like a bad actress, or she's just a really bad actress. I guess it depends on the circumstances, but this scene is either deplorable or in some manner sophisticated. I love that kind of apologetic ambiguity in my horror films.

So, off the kids go to Camp Annawanna. (Arawak. Whatever.) It starts off well enough, and Ricky is happy since he's spent other summers there, but Angela is a little different. She's not the bustiest or prettiest of the preteens, although that doesn't stop the pedophiliac chef from bringing her back to the storeroom to show her "something." Luckily, the deviant is interrupted, and hours later gets a vat of boiling water tossed on him. Coincidence? Not in this genre!

Angela, being a little quiet, gets picked on by the other kids, especially Judy the camp slut. In fact, pretty much the only people that don't pick on her are Ricky and his friend Paul, who starts a little camp crush "steady" thing with her. Things are going well, until one of the other campers turns up just shy of alive. After what feels like forever, his death is followed by some of the other nastier campers, and for good measure some campers that seemingly had nothing to do with Angela. Up until this point, we're still not really certain who the killer is; signs point to Angela, but Ricky seems to take the insults to his cousin awfully personally, and he's conveniently never around when the murders take place. I give the movie a measure of credit for not explicitly spelling it out until the very end, because most other movies that play the "Was it them or THEM?" game give it up much earlier. Despite our guesses, we don't really know until the last five minutes or so. And what a last five minutes they are.

This movie, despite being one of the films that really kicked the entire slasher genre into high gear, is incredibly slow. Incredibly incredibly slow. The body count is really low, and they space the suckers out, too. My girlfriend had a ten-minute rule that she instituted about forty-five minutes into the movie, where if someone didn't die at least every ten minutes, she got to turn off the movie -- it's slow enough so that my girlfriend was giving me ultimatums. Luckily, her rule came after the interminably dull and useless baseball scene, which thrilled us with the athletic skills of characters we don't know doing things we don't care about for ten or eleven minutes of screen time. (Although it features the fantastic line: "Eat shit and live, Bill.")

The movie is nothing special, except for the very last scene. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the movie isn't worth watching except for the very last scene. I'm not sure if it actually redeems the movie, but it helps. Spoilers will abound in the next paragraphs, so you can just skip them if you want.


I'll just come right out and say it: Angela isn't the little girl from the opening scene; she's the little boy. He was the only survivor of the accident that killed his father and his sister, and he went to live with the crazy aunt. I'm not sure why she was so messed up, but flashbacks tell us that she didn't want to be raising a second boy along with Ricky, so she somehow warped the fragile, accident-shattered mind of the boy into accepting the new fact that he was a girl. Even worse, there are more flashbacks: we learn that Angela and his sister had caught their father in bed with another man -- the guy that was waiting for them on the beach during the accident. I guess the implication was that this messed up his perception of his own sexuality.

This whole story is so messed up that I can't tell if it's offensive or not. Initially, my first reaction was that the movie was saying that having gay parents will turn children into cross-dressing murderers. Then, I figured that it was really more about the aunt's wackiness that screwed up Angela, and being forced to become a woman. I mean, the movie shows the two men in bed together during the late-game flashback, and it's genuinely portrayed as though it's a really loving relationship; it doesn't show it as something that's negative or naughty or anything. I lean towards thinking that it was just a way to show why Angela might have been attracted to men (although she really didn't seem to be all that attracted to men), since just making her a gay character would have been kind of hard to explain in the context of the story -- easier to have a "well, maybe because of her dad" explanation than also explaining that she just happened to be gay. If she was gay at all, anyway. I mean "he." Maybe the movie was saying that you can make someone trans-gendered by putting them in dresses, which might get back to offensive. Maybe they're saying that kids should get summer jobs instead of wasting their summers at camp.

(Although for twenty bucks you can schedule a live phone call with Felissa Rose, the actress behind Angela, at this here website. Maybe we should call her and ask her what her real motivation was.)

I give up on thinking about this movie.

I'll say one last thing for those of you who don't care about my grad thesis on gender roles in horror films: the last shot in the movie is vastly creepy. That should be enough for those viewers that prefer shallow bloody entertainment.

REVIEW: Mad Monster Party (1967)

Out of all the movies that I knew I was going to be reviewing this holiday season, the one that I was the most excited about was Mad Monster Party. The other Rankin-Bass stop-motion cartoons that everyone knows -- "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Frosty the Snowman," "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" -- were absolute staples of my childhood; I can't remember a year when I didn't watch those. If my family happened to be sitting together in the same room during the holidays, it was probably because one of those was on. You can probably imagine my excitement when I found out that not only did the Rankin-Bass team do a HALLOWEEN MONSTER stop-motion cartoon, they did a FEATURE-LENGTH one!

Sweet Jesus Christ on crutches, this was the longest, hardest ninety minutes I've sat through in a long, long time. I can barely describe the suckitude of this picture in words; I might have to do a finger-painting with my own blood. The only way I can accurately portray the agony of sitting through this is to actually make you sit through it, but I think we'd all be better off pretending that this doesn't exist at all.

This odious piece of entertainment takes mostly takes place on Monster Island, a mysterious Caribbean Island that's ruled by Dr. Frankenstein, played by the venerable Boris Karloff. In the opening, the good doctor discovers a potion that causes things to explode, and declares that he can retire now that he's discovered the secrets of the creation and destruction of life. I guess he never heard of TNT, or chainsaws, or guns, or nuclear bombs, or heroin, or falling from great heights, or blood loss, or the bubonic plague, or watching Mad Monster Party more than once. I thought the destruction of life was the easy part, but I guess things work differently in the animation world.

Since Dr. Frankenstein feels like retiring and living the slothful life, he decides to pass on this great secret formula to his only true heir: Felix Flanken, his nebbishy nephew (shades of the elf that wanted to be a dentist in the "Rudolph" special). Being a smart guy, Dr. Frank comes up with the idea to call together a meeting of the world's greatest monsters to announce his departure from running their coalition. Invited are: Count Dracula, the Werewolf, Dr. Jekyll, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein's own Monster, and his Bride; also attending are Frankenstein's assistant Francesca, his lead butler Yetch, and his crew of skeleton and zombie waiters. So far so good! It sounds like a great time!

Unfortunately, almost the entire thing is flat. Dead flat. Unforgivingly flat. Maybe it's because this was one of the first of the animation specials that they made, but the timing is off, and the writing is deader than a corpse. (Believe me, the jokes in MMP are worse than my "deader than a corpse" gag.) The jokes are not funny, and when they happen to have a little spark it's ruined by horrible, horrible pauses and stutters where the animation has to catch up to the punchline. In the beginning, Doc Frankenstein mentions that he's not inviting the "It" monster to his party, because...something about being a "wild bore" which pun-ified into carrying "wild boars." The joke was so shitty that even I didn't understand it, and I have a Master's Degree in bad jokes from Mad Libs University. (Which is a fully accredited four-year NOUN, by the way.)

If nothing else, the character designs were pretty neat. Doc Frankenstein looked a lot like Karloff himself, and the other creatures looked like suitably stylized versions of their movie counterparts. The one exception is the Monster's Bride (called the Mate in this for some bizarre reason), which is designed to look like Phyllis Diller (who lends her voice to the role). Diller, actually, is probably the one high point in the movie. She acts exactly like the Phyllis Diller that we're used to, except that this time her weird post-joke laugh comes off as an act of defiance against the horrible jokes that the writers gave her. Normally, I'm not one of her biggest fans, but she did make me laugh in this. Once. The only other time I laughed is when Dr. Jekyll first turns into Mr. Hyde, and immeeeeediately smashes a window that he happens to be standing next to -- as if he was somehow instinctively drawn to smashing that specific window.

Aside from those two bits in this sea of drivel, every second of the film dragged on like fingernails across my eyeballs. I gave this movie its entire running length to engage me in a manner other than hatred, and it let me down. This is a boring, stupid, sloppy movie, filled with stupid, unconnected musical sequences, poor animation, and jokes that would make the Cryptkeeper ashamed.

You can avoid this one next October.

REVIEW: The Night Stalker (1972)

It's a shame they brought back "The Night Stalker" as a television series (and not a very good one, I hear) because I really can't imagine Kolchak not being played by Darren McGavin. In preparation of the new release of the old series on DVD, I went into my vast and disorganized video vault and came back out with my copies of the McGavin TV-movies: 1972's The Night Stalker and 1973's The Night Strangler. I've seen both of these movies before, although I was barely paying attention to Strangler -- I think I was busy sending money to charity or adopting homeless kittens or something. Perhaps there was a video game in there. Regardless of my charitable attention-sapping antics, I decided to pop the first of the two back into the ol' DVD spinner and see if it could bring back the Halloween spirit.

The time: 1972. The place: Las Vegas, Nevada. The man: Carl Kolchak, reporter for the Las Vegas Daily News. Kolchak is what one might consider a "loose cannon" type of reporter: always out to get the truth, by any means necessary, and always (or almost always) at odds with the authorities and his very own editor Tony Vincenzo. He's one step above the con men of the world, and you get the feeling that if he weren't working for the Daily News, he'd just be another name in their police blotter column.

Kolchak begins with the perfect "X-Files" hook; he's sitting in a hotel room with a few day's worth of stubble, dictating the story into his always-present tape recorder, and concludes his opening with "Any attempt to verify these events will be unsuccessful." (Or something to that effect.) It might seem old hat nowadays with all the conspiracy types of TV dramas, but it still works; it's a script from Richard Matheson, the man behind I Am Legend and countless other famous stories and scripts.

The story itself begins like any other police procedural: a woman's body was found, in a trash bin, with date and time dictated in Kolchak's narration. Turns out that the body was empty of blood, none of which was found at the scene. Kolchack uses his wits, charms, and favors to get more information out of the police, and more and more bodies begin to turn up with the same problem: no blood. Some of them also have other mysteries around them; one woman's body was found in a sand pit, with no footprints leading to or away from it.

A few more bodies turn up, and as Kolchak's story unfolds he meets with increased resistance from his editor and the police, who want to keep the story of the "vampiric night stalker" under wraps in order to avoid alarming the populace. Kolchak, of course, doesn't believe in vampires; but that starts to end once he and the police actually encounter Janos Skorzeny, the Night Stalker, and realize that he's much more than a man.

Eventually, Kolchak and his FBI friend Bernie (I think he was in the FBI) track the vampire down to his lair, and attempt to do what's necessary. There's a nice semi-twist ending (not in a supernatural way) that surprised me by being, you know, intelligent. I think it's what would have actually happened had the events in the movie occurred, and it was a nice twist that most other movies never even go into.

When I started writing this, I had assumed that there was actually more to the story, but in hindsight it's a pretty simple tale. The vampire kills, and Kolchak and the police try to track him down and stop him, often arguing along the way. Despite its simplicity, the premise really works because of the procedural elements; it's a lot like "Dragnet" was, and to an extent the "Law and Order" franchise. It's very by-the-book and matter-of-fact, and that's incredibly refreshing when compared to the stupidly credulous horror films I normally watch, in which the first reaction to most murders is "OMG WTF it must have been a ghost!!!!!!" I like when characters display a degree of doubt and skepticism that's at least half-realistic.

The other half of the film's success is from Darren McGavin. Most people remember him best as the father from A Christmas Story, but from now on I think he'll be Kolchak in my mind -- horror always trumps comedy in my brain. He's absolutely electric in this movie; every line rolls off his tongue with character and nuance. McGavin portrays Kolchak as a man with different sides -- he can be charming, sneaky, intelligent, smarmy, angry; the character is completely believable, thanks to the fantastic work being done. It almost makes me want to get a cheap hat and a tape recorder.

I also give honorable mentions to the rest of the cast, which is primarily made up of other journeymen actors. Notable (for me) is Ralph Meeker as Kolchak's pal Bernie, since Meeker played Mike Hammer back in the awesome Kiss Me Deadly of 1955. It's almost strange to see a movie like this: slow, methodical, with a cast of middle-aged or older men. These are pretty rare in this world of 20-year-old sexpot victim slasher films, and it's great to see one for a change of pace. Not that I don't like lots of mindless scary slashing and 20-year-old sexpots, but every once in a while it's nice to know that some actors can actually still act with talents other than their breasts.

Just a few more notes: The Night Stalker was apparently the prime inspiration for the "X-Files" series, which featured its own investigative approach to the supernatural. Frank Spotnitz, a producer on "X-Files," just launched the new "Stalker" TV show with the bland, lifeless Stuart Townsend in McGavin's role. The vampire's real name is Janos Skorzeny, which was also the villain's name in "Werewolf"; at one point the vampire uses the alias Bela Blasko (if I'm remembering correctly), which is Bela Lugosi's birth name. Finally, The Night Stalker was produced by Dan Curtis, the man responsible for that vampiric daytime soap, "Dark Shadows." So many connections!

I recommend this movie, once again going against my passionate hatred of the 1970s. It's a great little flick to watch late at night, just to get yourself in a spooky mood. It's a little dated, and not really scary, but I think in the context of investigation and procedure it doesn't really matter that it's not frightening. It's a neat, small, and entertaining story, and it's worth every Netflix penny.

Go rent and enjoy.

REVIEW: Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)

Remember A Christmas Story? You know, the one with little Ralphie and Red Ryder, "You'll shoot your eye out"?

As it happens, the man behind the camera for that beloved Christmas tale also made a zombie movie early in his career. (He also made Porky's, but that's a review waiting for next Boobtober.) Right now, we'll have to turn our attention to Bob Clark's one and to date only zombie feature, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. (In hindsight, he also made one other movie that might be construed as a zombie film. If we really want to define, I'll say no flesh or brains eaten = no zombie film. His movie Dead of Night might be called a ghoul film, instead, because while the guy came back from the dead, he was still pretty normal except for the sucking the life out of people. I know some people that are like that in real life.)

First off, I love the title of this movie. It's not only catchy and easy to remember, but it doubles as practical lifestyle advice: children really should not play with dead things. I remember walking into Movie World's Castle of Horror when I was a kid, and spying this awful, ugly video box. I thought to myself, "You know, they're right. I shouldn't play with dead stuff." Then I went and rented Children Should Be Familiar With The Constitution's Establishment Clause, and my fate was sealed.

What we have here in terms of plot are zombies, which are the titular dead things, and a troupe of actors, none of which are children but they're actors so they all have the mentality of nine-year-olds. Leader Alan (played by writer Alan Ormsby) takes his cast of players on a mysterious trip to an island cemetery (?), in order to prance around like idiots and test out a book of satanic spells on the dead. Their plan is to find a suitable corpse and revive him -- that's that's the entire plan, which, in terms of a zombie movie, is pretty short-sighted. I don't know what they'd planned on doing with their zombie pet afterwards, but I guess Alan and Co. really just want to see if the whole thing worked at all and then they'd figure something out. It's just like actors to come up with retarded and impractical plans like this.


So, off on the fog-enshrouded island, Alan, Val, Anya, Paul, Terry, Roy, Jeff, and Emerson go ahead and dig up the grave of Orville Dunworth. Alan is almost the embodiment of everything I hate about every actor I've ever met, and what mind-crushingly unbearable traits that his character doesn't cover, the rest of the cast makes up for. Alan is completely over-the-top flamboyant, and I'm as surprised as anyone that he doesn't constantly leap gracefully around the set singing "I'm a great artist! I'm a great artist!" There are many subtle allusions to his sexuality (including his marriage to Orville's body), but the horrendous gay jokes are mainly covered by Terry and Emerson, the fabulous duo who argue about cemetery life: "I can't imagine why you'd want to bury yourself in a filthy little hole." Get it?

Eventually, they manage to drag Orville's corpse out of the grave, and invoke the powers of Satan in order to coax him back to life. There's a halfway decent scene after Alan reads his spells and nothing happens, so Val bitches him out for (I guess) not invoking Satan flamboyantly enough; the number of alternative names for "Satan" she comes up with is impressive. Too bad for the running time, this still doesn't make people come back to life. The kids "walk" Orville over to a half-boarded up cabin, where Alan continues his asshole diatribe about how useless everyone else is, how easily he can replace them in his troupe, and how they're all like slabs of meat hanging in the corner to him, and probably some more stuff but I couldn't quite make it out due to the incredibly loud sound of my fist pummeling the TV screen trying to murder everyone in the movie.

Then....fiiiiinally, just before my knuckles crack the screen, the spell kicks in. Either there was a time delay, or the spell didn't actually work at all and Satan just decided to raise the dead because he getting too goddamned annoyed with these people. I thank Satan for this either way.

What follows is the good stuff: the zombies lurching about, hungering for human flesh. It's the one actually effective part in the movie, mostly on account of the creepy music. They use a kind of long, wavering electronic droning noise -- bordering on outright dischordant -- and I think that it really works in context. (I hear it's a Moog device, but that's not confirmed.) I've seen this movie more than once, and it's solely for this music; it elevates the scene -- not quite to "scary," but at least up to "uncomfortable in an vague, unarticulated way."

Once the troupe realizes that the dead are coming back to life, they quickly board up the house and come up with a plan: they need to send someone for help, so they'll try to distract the zombies in front while a few kids run out the back. The plan works flawlessly until the kids in back run directly into a horde of backyard-grazing zombies. Then it all kind of falls apart, as the undead chew excitedly on the actors as if they somehow realize that they're doing the world a great service.

Alan, being the fearless leader of the gang, realizes that if his spellbook can bring the dead back to life, it might be able to put them back down. He flips through the grimoire looking for the antidote spell, and finds that there is one -- but it requires getting the original corpse (Orville) back into his own grave, which is deep in the undead-filled graveyard. I think I heard even the zombies snicker at this plan. Before Alan and Anya (who I think are the only two remaining actors at this point) can figure out plan B, the corpses come crashing in. Anya does her weirdo hippie thing and basically gives herself to the zombies, while Alan does the cowardly actor thing and exits, stage left. Stage upstairs, to be more precise, right to...yep, right to the room where he was canoodling with Orville only forty minutes ago.

Orville is now awake, and he wants revenge. Not so much for the off-screen hinted-at violations, but for Alan just being Alan, I think. I think his personality is more offensive than anything he could do to my body, so I'm right there with Orville on this one. In fact, I'm still punching Alan's flickering TV-image, in case he gets the upper hand on our dead protagonist.


And then...roll credits. I think the movie sets itself up for a sequel, as what appears to be a group of zombies boards a boat, presumably heading towards the mainland USA in search of other theater groups to eat. I wholeheartedly wish them the best on this quest.

You can pretty much avoid this picture, unless you're really keen on Moog synthesizer music. I'd include the chance that you might really enjoy watching bad actors get devoured mouthful by mouthful, but that also entails sitting through the first hour for your Hate-O-Meter to rise enough to make the end worth it. You'll also have to contend with some of the ugliest fashion and hairstyles that 1972 could provide, as well generally shoddy make-up and special effects.

I keep thinking about this movie, trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the acting. Was Alan (playing Alan) trying to do an impersonation of a crappy, pretentious actor, or was that just how he was? The script pretty clearly treats the actors as complete boobs, so does that make the zombies the protagonists, and the actors the villains of the movie since they were the ones defiling the dead? Are they all bad guys? WHY ISN'T THERE ONE LIKABLE CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE?

I hate when movies get all meta.

Stick with Bob Clark's two or three better pictures, despite their lack of zombies.




Oooh, I hate Alan. But I'll forgive him because he also wrote this book, which I had as a kid:


But then I'll un-forgive him because according to this interview with Orville I found over at Badmovies.org, his performance was really him playing himself. Just take a look at him, and you'll understand:



Ugh.