Review – Eye of the Needle

The set-up in this spy thriller is actually quite good. A Nazi secret agent (Donald Sutherland) discovers that an “army” under Patton’s command is actually an elaborate ruse intended to draw German forces away from the real location of the impending D-Day invasion. For awhile the story stays interesting as the anti-hero evades capture and tries to sneak photos of the fake invasion force out of England. But eventually he ends up hiding out in the isolated home of a disabled RAF veteran (Christopher Cazenove) and his lonely wife (Kate Nelligan). Creepy love triangle gives way to a relentless game of cat and mouse, an unfortunate, non-thrilling end to a picture that was reasonably entertaining up until then. Mildly amusing

The eight biggest media moments of 2010

This has been a crazy year. Truth be told, I’ve been so caught up with non-media stuff that a lot of the things I’d normally focus on got ignored. Still, it was an eventful year. Here are the highlights.

Show death – Several of the shows we regularly watched ran their final episodes this year. Oddly, none of them got the rug yanked out from under them. So at least they got the chance to wrap things up in tidy, story-arc-friendly ways. Lost was the most notable casualty, Abrams and company running out of weirdness and calling it quits even though they probably could have kept drawing audiences for another season or two. Likewise The Tudors concluded with Henry VIII’s death, a natural enough place to stop even though they could have continued to follow the Tudor monarchies with additional episodes if they’d been inclined.

More show death – On the other hand, 24 met a more traditional slipping-ratings death. In its heyday it drew a ton of attention and more than a little controversy, but by the end it passed on not with a bang but a whimper. They could have killed it more dramatically, but honestly it wouldn’t have mattered. Too bad, too. When it was going strong it was actually fairly entertaining.

The Lawrence Welk Easter show – Easter weekend was a strange time for me. That Saturday the strangeness was compounded when I found myself in a waiting room while a nearby television screened KCPT’s broadcast of an old Lawrence Welk Easter show. His cadre of abnormally cheerful regulars all dressed as giant, brightly-colored, fuzzy bunnies, ducklings and chicks singing about Peter Cottontail and Abbot the Rabbit … well, it was all just a little much.

My semi-triumphant return to the movie theater – For the past few years I’ve been avoiding movie theaters. Though this change in my media habits was completely justified, I admit I did miss the big screen experience a bit. So with the assistance of some fellow filmgoers I managed to make it to a few more theater-screened movies this year. Though it wasn’t exactly a “thank goodness I decided to come back” experience, it was at least a little nice to be back.

The death of the printed version of the Advocate – I’m a big fan of dead tree newspapers. Thus it was with great pain that I helped the staff of the student newspaper I advise to make the transition from print to web-only. Though it saddened me greatly to make the change, the time for change had come.

The Tea Party on the dance show – For some reason Sarah Palin’s daughter’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars seemed to cause quite a stir. Sure, she was talentless. Yes, the Tea Partiers out there kept calling in and voting for her. That’s America. If nothing else, it should serve as a sobering reminder that “Palin should run in 2012 because Obama will beat her easily” could be famous last words.

Midterm elections nonsense – And speaking of elections, we sat through another one. They just seem to get more and more vicious each time. It makes me shudder to think about what we’ll be “treated” to the next time around.

The phone, the phone – For the longest time the Lens household resisted any kind of Internet presence in the house. It just seemed too much like work creeping into our personal lives. But in June the time came to replace our old cell phones, and we made the jump to smart phones. That got the ball rolling, and by the end of the year we had a WiFi hub in the house. Time and tide.

Review – Stepping Out

Though this might have been good fodder for a not-especially-talented high school theatre class, it worked neither on Broadway (73 performances) nor as a movie. Liza Minnelli plays an aging never-was teaching an ensemble of talentless tap students. When the class is offered the chance to perform in a charity benefit, the teacher struggles to whip them into shape. A series of contrived plot twists and cliché character developments ensues. The cast features several familiar faces – not to mention Richard Harris writing the screenplay based on his own original theatre piece – but overall the cake gets left out in the rain. Mildly amusing [note: upon further investigation, it turns out that the Richard Harris who wrote this is a different guy from the Richard Harris who sang “MacArthur Park.” Still, the line is good enough to leave it in.]

Review – Ice Quake

If I’m going to watch a SyFy movie, I want one of two things: apocalyptic destruction or entertainingly dreadful CGI monsters. This production delivers neither. Instead we get an underground river of liquid methane that’s expanding, causing earthquakes and other disturbances. To be sure, this would suck if it was really happening. But it’s nowhere near dramatic enough to make an amusingly bad movie. See if desperate

Review – Tell Tale

The title may be Poe, but the plot is an awkward graft of Body Parts and Coma. A heart transplant recipient (Josh Lucas) discovers that he recognizes people he’s never met and remembers things that never happened to him. With the help of a homicide detective (Brian Cox), he slowly – ever so slowly – uncovers the connection between his donor and a criminal conspiracy as ludicrous as it is boring. The production values are reasonably good, so it’s a shame they weren’t put to use making a picture a little truer to the alleged source story. See if desperate

Review – Philosophy of a Knife

I rented this (or streamed it from Netflix to be more precise) based on the mistaken assumption that it was a documentary about Unit 731, the infamous facility in Manchuria where the Japanese military performed horrible medical experiments on prisoners during World War Two. So imagine my considerable annoyance when it turned out to be an extended exercise in industrial noise video and torture porn. The picture revels in graphic recreations of torment – particularly sexual abuse – with almost no historical context or other redeeming quality. Indeed, the old Russian guy they interview no doubt to lend some sense of legitimacy to the visceral “thrills” appears to have little or no firsthand knowledge about 731’s activities. The result is an ugly, nasty mess intended solely to entertain audiences with sexual proclivities that require the intervention of mental health professionals. In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge that this is actually a review of only the first half of the video. After two hours of filth and degradation, I wasn’t prepared to prolong my misery. Avoid at all costs

Review – Salem Witch Trials

The subject of religious persecution and the presence of Kirstie Alley in the lead had my Scientology detector turned up to 11. However, this seemed to be a fairly straightforward telling of the title tale. The trials are portrayed as motivated by religious fanaticism in the service of land-grabbing greed, particularly on the parts of Rev. Parris and Thomas Putnam (Henry Czerny and Jay O. Sanders respectively, who are hard to tell apart in their Puritan outfits). At least it wasn’t quite as arty-stuffy as Arthur Miller’s version. Mildly amusing

Review – The Duellists

So is there a law or regulation somewhere that requires all movies about the Napoleonic era to be deadly dull? Director Ridley Scott starts with a source story by Joseph Conrad, but everything in the movie except the duels themselves are as boring as Kubrick’s adaptation of Thackery. Two French officers (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) get crossways of one another and duel on several occasions as Napoleon seizes and then loses Europe in the background. Like Kubrick’s failure, this too is a visually stunning but otherwise unrewarding production. Mildly amusing

Review – Twins of Evil

I wonder exactly when the good-twin-evil-twin thing first became a cliché. Given that Alexandre Dumas was using it in the late 1840s, it’s fair to assume that by the time Hammer brings it to bear in 1971 that it was already trite beyond all excuse. And in fact this isn’t the studio’s finest hour. At least they got actual twins (Madeleine and Mary Collinson) rather than forcing us to endure an endless parade of stupid split-screen setups. They also got Peter Cushing, though they don’t give him much to work with by casting him as a misogynistic witch hunter ill-equipped to deal with the local vampire infestation. The use of nudity is strange as well, absent where one might expect a great deal but then cropping up unexpectedly toward the end of the movie. Overall this isn’t the worst work Hammer ever did, but it’s a far cry from the best. Mildly amusing

Review – Wolf Moon

Title and cover art notwithstanding, for the first half hour I wasn't even sure I was watching a werewolf movie. Instead it appeared to be some kind of desert Southwestern drama about rednecks tippy-toeing up to the verge of sexual assault. Though I recognize the shape-shifting sub-genre's potential for sexual savagery, this is less The Howling and more beer-swilling assholes on any given Saturday night. Even when the fangs and fur do finally emerge, they're a bit on the lame side. The result doesn't come anywhere near justifying the two hour running time. See if desperate

Review – Alone in the Dark 2

At least it isn't quite as terrible as the first one. That's due in part to the absence of Uwe Boll in the director's chair (though he's a producer). But more than that, it's easier to swallow because it doesn't take itself so seriously. This is a crappy cheese fest and it knows it. The plot has something to do with a magic knife and the vengeful spirit of an evil witch, but as usual the plot really isn't the point. Though if your next question is "Okay, what is the point?" well, um ... see if desperate

Review – Circle of Eight

A new woman moves into an apartment building that appears to be a blend of movie set and insane asylum. All her fellow tenants seem to have three things in common: they're all at least a little off somehow, they've all mastered the inappropriate share, and they're all creepily obsessed with the protagonist. Is she nuts? Is she the sane victim of a complicated plot to drive her insane? Could the truth be something even less interesting? Only 90 minutes' worth of patience with some highly mediocre filmmaking will uncover the answer. See if desperate

Review - The Final Countdown

The title of this production is a puzzlement, as the picture lacks a countdown of any kind, final or otherwise. So really the only purpose the title serves is to dig up an earwig from Europe. The story, on the other hand, is an odd little tale about an 80s era aircraft carrier sucked through an unexplained time warp and deposited between Pearl Harbor and the Japanese fleet on December 7, 1941. Should they let history run its course, or should they use their vastly superior firepower to intervene and stop the attack? From the summary alone you can already tell that this plays out like a Twilight Zone episode that goes on five times longer than it needs to. Mildly amusing

Review – Shatter Dead

So the Zombie Apocalypse is going to suck even if the walking dead aren't actively trying to eat us. Unfortunately the threat of being eaten isn't replaced by anything more interesting than a lot of nonsensical plot twists and some of the most dreadful dialogue ever written delivered by some of the most wooden actors this side of a marionette show. No wonder few of the folks listed in the credits appear to be going by their actual names. Seems like there was some serious indie hype surrounding this when it first came out, though now it just looks like every other low-budget zombie crapfest. See if desperate

Review – The Illustrated Man

This is nowhere near as good as the source collection of stories. Of course when they start with stories by Ray Bradbury, it's only natural to fall a bit short. But whatever chance they might have had is swiftly squandered on a lot of wasted screen time. For example, it takes nearly half an hour just to get past the opening bracket and on to the first actual story. The production also suffers from 70s era fuzzy visuals and laconic pacing. What a shame. Mildly amusing

Review – Tales that Witness Madness

Reviewers that witness bad movies. Donald Pleasance plays a psychiatrist who brackets the stories of four mental patients with eerie back-stories. Or perhaps it would be better to say “eerily familiar.” The first bears a strong resemblance to John Collier’s “Thus I Refute Beelzy” only with an imaginary-or-is-it tiger rather than a demon. The next has a distinct under-taste of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner.” The other two aren’t quite as closely tied to anything specific (at least nothing I recognized), but they’re nonetheless born clichés with completely predictable outcomes. I was in the mood for a murky British horror anthology piece when I watched this, so I may have liked it a bit better than I should have. Mildly amusing

Review – In Search of Lovecraft

Well, at least this features some vague references to actual Lovecraftiana. It's still icing on a standard horror cake, but at least it's spread on fairly thick. An aspiring newscaster gets saddled with a Halloween puff piece about the influence of H.P. Lovecraft on modern horror. So of course she accidentally uncovers a sinister cult trying to conjure up an unspeakable eldritch thing. However, lacking the budget for an unspeakable eldritch thing, the filmmakers instead ask us to settle for some run of the mill pseudo-Wiccan skullduggery. What a shame. The set-up had some potential. Mildly amusing

Review – Impact (2008)

Okay, let me see if I have this straight. A meteor slams into the Moon, which causes its mass to double. This starts causing gravitational anomalies on Earth, which turns out to be the least of our problems when the Moon’s orbit starts to decay. Nuclear missiles fail to fix the problem, so a squad of scientists have to go on a suicide mission to somehow dislodge the meteor and set things right again. And somehow this nonsense got stretched out into a four-hour miniseries on SyFy? Well, I guess that last point isn’t that hard to believe. Needless to say, this was better as background noise than it was as actual video entertainment. See if desperate

Review – A Christmas Carol (2009)

I liked this better than I thought I would, due in no small part to a surprisingly close correlation between the script and Dickens’s classic tale. Indeed, the only serious departure from the original text is an interminable hearse chase that serves no function other than prolonging the fourth chapter. Doing the whole production as a high-dollar computer animation also allowed the production to more faithfully recreate Dickens’s vision, particularly for the amorphous Spirit of Christmas Past. On the minus side, there’s the voice work for Scrooge (Jim Carrey) and the Spirits of Christmas Past (Jim Carrey) and Present (Jim Carrey). Overall I still like the Sim version better, but this has some good things going for it as well. Mildly amusing

Eight reasons why books are hard to review

Even a quick scan of this blog’s contents cloud shows one thing clearly: I have a lot more movie reviews than anything else. That’s in part because my book reviews are on Goodreads rather than here. But it’s also partially because I don’t read as many books as I’d like.

Oh, and books are harder to review. Much harder. Here are eight reasons why:

Educated people are taught to respect books – For the vast majority of the thousands of years of recorded human history, books – in one form or another – have stored our knowledge for us. Keeping this tradition alive requires what all living traditions need: a certain measure of reverence. Parents pass this sense of respect to their children, and teachers pass it to their students.

One of the few lectures I still remember from high school all these decades after graduation is the lesson one history teacher taught us about the crime of book burning. “Never burn a book,” he admonished. “Even if you don’t like it, that book might have something important to say to someone else.” To this day I have trouble throwing away even outdated phone books.

I notice this bias creeping into my reviews as well. While a talentless filmmaker can expect to get kicked rapidly to the curb, a similarly incompetent author is far more likely to get an “at least they tried” response.

They require undivided attention – A good movie commands complete attention while it’s on. But the vast majority of movies out there don’t merit such an intense time commitment. Instead, one can easily attend to something else (such as writing a top eight list) while keeping an eye on a movie playing in the background just to make sure that nothing especially good or bad gets missed. Books can’t be handled that way. You’re either reading it or you aren’t.

They take longer to finish – In addition to their resistance to “multitasking,” books are simply slower going. I know some folks can speed read (and others think they can), but I’m not among them. At full steam I can finish a book a week, though life’s little distractions often keep me at a slower pace. In that amount of time I’ll typically watch and review seven to ten movies.

They’re more emotionally involving – Because books require such a high commitment of time and mental energy, the reader often ends up in a “mini relationship” with them. “Books are our friends” sounds like it should be followed by “but they won’t pick you up at the airport.” But in a way we do make friends with the books we read. To be sure, some of them are friends we dislike for one reason or another. I admit that as I type this several weak books stare down at me from my shelves. They’re there because I had the experience of reading them, so now for better or worse they’re part of my life.

Even the bad ones can be good – Bad books have something to teach us. For example, I admit to being defeated by Henry James. I simply cannot bring myself to attempt any more of his stories. However, James teaches us by counter-example the importance of paragraph structure, narrative flow, and the wisdom of the old adage “brevity is the soul of wit.” Bad movies often cause the audience to merely lose interest, especially at home where distractions abound. Writing – from the best to the worst – is harder to ignore.

Sometimes the good ones are actually bad – By its nature the written word stimulates critical thinking. It makes our neurons fire in ways that most other media simply don’t. When watching an uninspiring movie that critics adore, it’s easy to keep one’s opinions to one’s self. Nod and smile and pretend you saw the Emperor’s fine new suit that everyone else seems to think is so grand. Books demand more from us. At the end of a “classic” that left you flat, you should be able to find specific fault with what you read, not merely shrug it off with a diffident teenager’s “that was boring.” Like a long distance run, the experience may not have been the most fun in the world, but at least it was good for you.

I find it easier to empathize with writers – When I was a lad I imagined that someday I would be a big-time movie director. The writing I’ve done for the last four and a half decades – combined with the extensive catalog of movies I never made – leads me to conclude that I may be a writer rather than a filmmaker. I’ve found this “defeat” easy to live with. I like words. I like sentences and paragraphs and stories and essays and novels and articles and you name it I probably like it. Even poetry, which I find hard to wrap my brain around, holds its charms. Thus I sympathize with the plight of anyone who struggles to bend words to her or his will. And I enjoy being in the company of the fruits of their labor.

Books need all the love they can get – Nobody reads books anymore, right? Wrong. The book publishing industry is thriving. Unfortunately, currently it thrives on garbage. Witless screed from pundits of all stripes. Celebrities who assure us we too can be fabulously famous if – like some wooden puppet in a Disney movie – we just believe with all our hearts. And any number of other similarly unworthy tomes biding their times on bookstore shelves and remainder bins. In this landfill of the mind, finding a book that genuinely calls to you is a moment to be treasured, and parting with a book – even a bad one – at the conclusion of the final page is a bittersweet moment.

Review – Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

I think I’m turning into a history nerd. This movie started off on my bad side by leading with a map of the Achaemenid Persian empire, but it swiftly became clear that the movie’s reality (to the extent it had one at all) was in fact several hundred years later. Of course picking at historical details in a brain-dead effects fest makes no more sense than reading the nutritional information on the back of a candy bar. The title character (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovers that the title substance allows him to back up a few seconds in the time continuum, something that occasionally comes in handy during a fight, though it gets used up too quickly to be a serious tactical advantage. In other words, conceptually this might work okay as a video game, but as a movie it’s a little like watching someone else play a video game. Mildly amusing

Review – The Inglorious Bastards (1978)

So there are these guys who are like prisoners or something kind of like that Dirty Dozen movie only they break away from the MPs and form their own band and at first they’re just trying to escape and they encounter a bunch of naked chicks in a river only the chicks turn out to be Germans and when they find out the guys are American they start shooting machine guns at them and then later the guys are led by a commando officer and they have to bust a couple of their dudes out of a castle and then they dress up like Nazis and sneak aboard a train that has secret Nazi A-bombs on it and they have to blow it up but then ... hey, if you’re going to watch a movie written for (and most likely by) 12-year-old boys, you might as well get a review written with the target audience in mind. This relic is so terrible it’s actually funny. Mildly amusing

Abandoned – The Uninvited

Approximately 20 minutes in I determined two unwelcome facts: first, this was a really boring indie movie about a woman who suffers from a really boring mental disorder, and second, IFC is now showing ads during movies. Boo to both.

Review – Porco Rosso

Though this isn’t my favorite Miyazaki movie, it’s still an entertaining piece of work. The setting – an alternate 1930s world where airplanes are the primary mode of transportation and air pirates threaten the skies over the Mediterranean – is a big part of the draw. Fortunately truth and justice are championed by the title character, an ace cursed to have the face of a pig. As usual, the animation is terrific. However, the story has a few slow spots. And it ends abruptly, almost as though the picture was supposed to be longer but they ran out of money. Worth seeing

Review – Iron Man 2

I must have been drunk when I saw the first one. No, I remember what it was. I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull  that same afternoon, and by comparison Iron Man was a work of staggering genius. Sadly, this one is baked from a virtually identical recipe, and without an inept fiasco alongside it to make it look good, the flaws stand out all too sharply. Once again Tony Stark (once again Robert Downey) battles bad guys and inner demons of assholism. On the plus side, Scarlett Johansson was a nice addition. Replacing Terence Howard with Don Cheadle was a push. But Mickey Rourke just gets more talentless and harder to look at with every new movie he makes. Further, Jon Favreau needs to stick to directing dumb Christmas movies. I suspect comic book fans will get a kick out of this, or at least I hope so because it doesn’t appear to have been made for much of anyone else. See if desperate

Making the holidays special (encore)

A couple of years ago, before I got distracted by imminent icy death, I was musing about Christmas specials. Though I managed to exhaust the list of stuff I loved, I still had a little farther to go. So if it ain’t out of keeping with the situation, here’s a list of eight I’d frankly prefer not to see again.

Special episodes – I suppose this is a natural enough inclination for writers (especially the folks working on sitcoms) every December: devote an episode to something with a Christmas theme. Odd that it works as seldom as it does. The Invader Zim Christmas special is an exception, but only because the fanatical little alien’s constant attempts to take over the planet are a good counterpoint to the usual holiday treacle. For a quick example, sample the lyrics to the show’s only musical number: “Bow down, bow down, before the power of Santa, or be crushed, be crushed, by his jolly boots of doom.”

Far more typical, however, is the dull flatness of the Christmas episode of WKRP in Cincinnati. Station owner Arthur Carlson is in a particularly stingy mood, but then he falls asleep and dreams that he’s visited by three successive cast members who show him how miserable the place would be without the show’s warm, family-like ensemble atmosphere. And as long as we’re on the subject of cheap Dickens reheats …

Any funky adaptation of A Christmas Carol – Producing a straight adaptation of this Christmas classic is an iffy proposition. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But nothing dooms a retelling of the tale faster than trying to jazz it up. I don’t want to see Scrooge recast as Mr. Magoo or Fonzie or the diva of the week. Bob Cratchet doesn’t need to be played by Micky Mouse or Kermit the Frog. As noted in the list of my eight favorite Christmas movies, I’ll carve a small exception for Scrooged. But everyone else needs to either do Dickens the way he wrote it or don’t bother doing it at all.

PBS Christmas concerts – Anyone who’s watched public television for more than a few minutes already knows that the sudden appearance of interesting shows on the PBS schedule is a sure-fire sign that they’re in the middle of a pledge drive. I guess I don’t blame them for pulling this stunt when people are naturally in a giving mood. On the other hand, it takes some impressive performances and transforms them into a balloon animal a bum brandishes at your kids in order to weasel you out of a little cash.

Sequels and match-ups – This is simply an extension of a society-wide weariness with such obvious, pandering attempts to make money. In this season of kindness and charity, who wants to be reminded that TV producers regard us all as sheep with credit cards?

Frosty the Snowman – There’s just something about Frosty that pisses me off. It might be the awful quality of the Rankin/Bass cell animation, which thoroughly lacks the charm of their model work. But I think the title character himself is more likely to blame. I can’t stand the Magical Dumbass character in any of its many guises. Innocent simplicity is praiseworthy. Willful stupidity, on the other hand, accounts for a lot of what’s wrong with the world. So conflating the two is unacceptable. Still, there’s one glimmer of hope here. The media typically force Black people into the Magical Dumbass role. Frosty’s about as non-black as you can get.

Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey – If you’ve never seen this particular “treat,” simply imagine the most miserable elements of Bambi (dead mother) and Dumbo (physical deformity as source of humiliation) combined into a single special. And what’s Nestor’s reward for enduring all the misery in his life? He gets to lug a pregnant woman around. I guess if she’s the Virgin Mary the hefty burden is a little easier to bear. But still.

The Little Drummer Boy – Somehow this song managed to escape mention in the list of Christmas carols I don’t like, a grave injustice considering just how bad this one is. Something about the minor key, the relentless, monotonous rhythm, or perhaps an ineffable awfulness. In any event, spinning it into a Christmas special just makes it worse. A grim little orphan with no talent other than beating a drum learns the true meaning of Christmas when he’s called upon to annoy the Christ Child. Only Jesus himself could find warmth or entertainment in the worst act of percussion since the “Drummer Boy” number from The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band.

Any Charlie Brown holiday special other than the original Christmas show – Like a particularly good firework, this was impressive the first time around, but after that it was just burned out. The Great Pumpkin mess is instructive. Linus’s constant harping about “the most sincere pumpkin patch” is cloying and dumb, almost as though they’re making fun of (or more likely trying ineffectively to exploit) the simple sentiment that made the Christmas special such a success.

But Halloween is a birthday present compared to Thanksgiving. I don’t know whom I want to punch more: Peppermint Patty for inviting herself and her friends over for a Thanksgiving meal or Charlie Brown for passive-aggressively allowing his dog to serve toast, popcorn and jelly beans for dinner. And did anyone else notice that Franklin has to sit Judas-like by himself on the side of the table opposite everyone else? The final icing on the cake is the lame speech Linus delivers about the first Thanksgiving. Luke Chapter Two it ain’t.

To make matters worse, in order to stretch the holiday merriment out to a full hour they’ve added a Peanuts recreation of the Pilgrims’ voyage to America and hardships upon arrival. The animation back in the 60s and 70s wasn’t great, but it was high-quality anime compared to the cheap-ass art in the sequel. Further, the story comes across visually and structurally as a Thanksgiving edition of the “Elbow Room” Schoolhouse Rocks.

I think they did something similar to extend the original Christmas special, but I’ve never been able to bear the thought of watching it.

Review – Rain of Fire

Y’know, if I want to watch The Omen, I’m pretty sure I have a copy of it lying around here somewhere. Further, I don’t remember it including quite as many shots of Kirk Douglas’s butt (or any shots of Kirk Douglas’s butt, for that matter). A wealthy industrialist irks environmentalists by setting up a nuclear power plant. Too late he discovers that the thing is some kind of key to the Apocalypse, paving the way for the Antichrist in his family. Some of the juxtapositions of the plant’s towers with the multiple heads of The Beast are fun in a cheap effects sort of way. Otherwise this is Cheez Whiz to the fine brie of Damien Thorne. Also released as Holocaust 2000. See if desperate

Review – Arctic Predator

As the title implies, this is a SyFy dumb blend of themes “borrowed” from The Thing and Predator. An arctic squad of researchers and military support staff unearth an invisible alien monster. The picture is completely devoid of clever twists, interesting characters or anything else that might have redeemed it. See if desperate

Review – Mirrormask

If you’re really into Neil Gaiman’s words and pictures, you should get a real kick out of this movie. Personally, I thought it was an over-arty rehash of themes familiar from The Wizard of Oz and a handful of other movies. The blend of live actors, computer animation and Henson costumes works reasonably well. If only the story had been a little more engaging. Mildly amusing

Review – In the Loop

I should have hated this movie. I’m no fan of actor improv, and the British angle usually wouldn’t have helped matters. But this worked for me in a really big way. Peter Capaldi and James Gandolfini are the most recognizable faces in the ensemble cast playing diplomatic factotums to a T. The picture is loosely based on director Armando Iannucci’s TV series “The Thick of It,” though you don’t have to be familiar with the show to get a kick out of the movie (which is a good thing, as the show isn’t currently available on this side of the Atlantic). Overall the movie is as plotless and meandering as anything Altman ever did. But the small details, the funny situations or clever bits of dialogue supply more than enough entertainment to keep things interesting. Buy the disc

Review – Ride with the Devil

Needed way more devil. Despite the horror movie title, this is a tedious drama about the rough lives of Confederate bushwhackers. Though not quite as badly bewildered as Josey Wales about the overall morality of the War Between the States, it still liberally indulges in the Union-bad-slave-states-good ethos. Every once in awhile the production conjures something of historical interest, such as the reenactment of Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence. For the most part, however, it’s a slick but tedious parade of the-war-that-pitted-brother-against-brother clichés. See if desperate

My eight favorite robots

One of the most startling discoveries I made as a kid was that robots weren’t a 20th century invention. I’d assumed that the concept of a mechanical person would depend so heavily on electronics and other modern marvels that previous ages wouldn’t even have dreamed of such a thing.

But when I started reading Greek mythology, I found this wasn’t so. Thousands of years before such a thing would have been practically possible, spinners of myth were pondering the idea of building people out of metal.

Of course this discussion could rapidly devolve into hair-splitting about what can and can’t be considered a robot. Indeed, the term itself comes from a play about artificially created but non-mechanical workers, creatures that wouldn’t fit the image that the word now brings most readily to mind. Though the “replicants” of Blade Runner almost made the list, the robots here are all of the more standard mechanical ilk.

 

Robby – If you could have only one robot, Robby would be the guy. Living on a planet – even a forbidden one – with a deadly supernatural force is a small price to pay for owning a mechanical servant who can do most anything from cooking dinner to manufacturing diamonds in his spare time. Sure, his tone is a little smart-alecky at times. But that just gives him personality. He also deserves to top the list because he was the first big robot success story, a character that paved the way for cinema automatons everywhere.

C3PO – Sure, R2D2 is more popular. I can see why. Even a three-legged trashcan that can’t speak in anything but squeaks and beeps is still more likely to win the hearts and minds of moviegoers than a prissy android perpetually locked in fret mode. But hey, when Star Wars first hit theaters I was 11 and tended to fret too much myself. So it seemed to me like “goldenrod” was making good points about not getting into trouble. Besides, he looked more interesting than any of the other robots in the movie.

Huey, Dewey and Louie – This trio of walking boxes helped Bruce Dern tend to the last remaining fragments of wildlife in Silent Running. The movie overall is depressing and dumb (hence no review), but the robots in it are an odd combination of utilitarian and cute. It takes a little doing to give individual personalities to cubes with legs, but they manage to make it work.

The Terminator – I think we all knew Arnold Schwarzenegger would look like this if he ever peeled off his rubbery hide. And that’s when the Terminator gets really impressive. He’s okay when he can still pass for human, but when he gets stripped down to that shiny chrome skeleton, now that’s a scary robot. The scene in number one when the monster is chasing our heroes down a long, dark hallway is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Gort – On the surface, Klaatu’s sidekick from The Day the Earth Stood Still doesn’t seem to have much to him. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t water flowers or fix dinner. But for silent menace he can’t be beat. His design is particularly brilliant, his smooth, deco surfaces emphasizing just how attack-proof he is. I’d still rather have Robby in the kitchen, but Gort would be my choice for sentry to stand next to my cars while I’m asleep.

The Runaway spiders – I’m a big fan of the BEAM approach to robotics. The idea here is that it makes more sense to create lots of little, cheap robots for specific tasks than it does to make big, expensive, multi-purpose androids. Needless to say, such personality-free gizmos aren’t common in movies, where the need is greater for robots that can be characters that are voiced by actors. But in Runaway, the bad guy uses some BEAM-ish spiders to do his evil bidding. The plot even points out the big advantage to the BEAM scheme: a ton of tiny terrors is harder to evade than a single, human-sized opponent.

The Minoton – I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) that Ray Harryhausen never did more with robots. His Dynamation effects techniques were particularly well suited to mechanical creatures. But though he did some robot-like creatures from time to time – Talos in Jason and the Argonauts and the Kali statue in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad – the only real robot he ever did was the Minoton from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. It’s sadly under-utilized; a mechanical minotaur could have been a kick-ass bad guy rather than an elaborate outboard motor. But the design is still hard to beat. And true geek confession: I have models of all three of these aforementioned creatures sitting on a shelf above my desk.

Evil Maria – The robot in Metropolis is the ultimate in cinema injustice. She’s one of the first mechanical people ever to grace the silver screen, and her design set the bar impossibly high for every movie robot that followed. Further, the scene in which she’s transformed into a doppelganger of the heroine still impresses even in an age of computer effects a million times more sophisticated than what Fritz Lang had at his disposal in the 1920s. The rest of the movie is great as well, but I could sit through nothing but the robot sequences and still come away happy in the end.

Review – The Boston Strangler

Two things stand out about this telling of the tale of Albert DeSalvo, accused of raping and strangling 13 women in the Boston area in the early 1960s. On the positive side, director Richard Fleischer’s use of split screen editing – while visually jarring – works better than such gimmicks usually do. On the other hand, the production doesn’t stick as closely to the truth as most true crime stories at least attempt to. I don’t necessarily need a thorough examination of every aspect of the investigation, though at least a mention of the questions about DeSalvo’s guilt might have been nice. But the storytellers here make some details up out of whole cloth, such as the notion that the killer suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder. Tony Curtis as the strangler and Henry Fonda as the chief of the task force convened to catch him both bring plenty of talent to the table. But the section that should have been tailor-made for them to shine – an extended dialogue between the two that takes up most of act three – instead falls victim to lackluster writing. Mildly amusing

Abandoned – How the Grinch Stole Christmas

After only eight minutes I was ready to punch everyone involved.

Abandoned – Quintet

Any soft-focus, post-apocalyptic borefest is bound to evoke Zardoz. And without the giant floating head ... 33 minutes.

Review - Field of Dreams

I want to like this movie. I really do. Any attempt to appreciate baseball on an emotional level is at least worth a look. I even set it up for nearly optimal viewing conditions, saving it for a chilly off-season afternoon when I’d really savor a bit of summer. But there’s just something about this tale of a guy impelled by disembodied voices to turn part of his Iowa cornfield into a baseball diamond for the ghosts of the Black Sox. I don’t fault it for being quirky and sentimental. I fault it for being so self-consciously in-your-face quirky and sentimental that it comes across as baseball transformed into a Hallmark card trying to be clever. Every time it seems like it’s going to say something honest or be entertaining in any way, it lapses once again into Kevin-Costner-y silliness. Mildly amusing

The annual parade rant, episode two

This year Thanksgiving got off to a rocky start. The older I get, the more I become a creature of habit and ritual. And for as long as I can remember, my start-of-the-holiday-season ceremony for Thanksgiving morning was getting the turkey prepped and shoved into the oven.

However, this year we decided not to cook a turkey. Though this robbed me of one of my favorite holiday rituals, it will allow me to avoid choosing between two less popular observances: the Vespers Sunday Disposal of Half a Rotten Turkey Carcass or the Easter Sunday Disposal of Two or Three Ziploc Bags of Freezer-Burned Turkey.

Fortunately, I still have the Macy’s Day Parade to comfort me. This year I turned up the sound for part of it. I also recorded it on the DVR so I could fast-forward through the ads and the marching bands (and while we’re on the subject of marching bands, honestly Blue Springs, where does any Kansas City area school district get the money for this kind of nonsense?).

Normally I wouldn’t even bother noting any of the ads, but this year one campaign proved to be a step below the rest. Dear Target, your Amy Sedaris knock-off spokeswoman comes across as dangerously insane, not cute and quirky. Thus you’re the sole recipient of this year’s Worst Ad. All the other categories are two-way ties.

I don’t follow Broadway’s doing closely enough to know if this was something from a musical or just one of our nation’s many cover bands, but whatever led CBS’s coverage off with a Beatles act became an early co-recipient of the Worst Musical Number award. “McCartney” was mouthing the lyrics so dramatically that I recognized “Get Back” without even turning the sound up.

Despite dominating out of the gate, the faux fab four ended up sharing the prize with whoever decided to make a musical out of Elf. I turned up the sound briefly just to see what kind of song they’d make out of the store decoration scene and was instantly sorry.

More than usual this year I found myself distracted by things going on in the background. For example, the talking heads weren’t anywhere near as interesting as the video billboards behind them. Sometimes the ad messages were instantly apparent, but in other cases a funny camera angle transformed a board into a colorful bit of surreal imagery.

That would have been the Biggest Distraction except for one part of the parade itself: the clowns. They help hold down the balloons. They hand out candy. They generally meander around the parade route. For the most part they seemed to be typical specimens, merrily capering or at least smiling their way through temporary employment. But every once in awhile if you look really closely you can see someone who just doesn’t quite have the clown spirit, someone a little too sullen or surly or otherwise New Yorky to be worthy of the greasepaint. My particular favorite was the clown with a bucket of glitter who waited until he was on camera, walked up and threw a big wad of it right in another clown’s face. Happy holidays!

Oddly, the tie for Most Annoying Moment didn’t involve anything inherently wrong with a float or balloon. The first came courtesy of a float promoting the upcoming video release of Despicable Me. The float itself was inoffensive, but it kept making the most annoying chuckling noise. After 30 seconds I was reminded of my pledge to keep the sound off. I can only imagine what state of raving madness it would provoke for anyone who had to ride the float from the beginning of the parade route to the end.

The other why-did-I-turn-the-sound-on moment involved the Build-A-Bear Workshop promo float. It provoked an unbearable barrage of bear-related puns from the broadcast booth.

One thing I always wondered about the balloons is if they wouldn’t be scary for kids, these huge monster things seeming more menacing than fun. In general I hope that isn’t the case. But the folks who came up with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid balloon decided to push things a bit. The thing looked alternately terrified or homicidal, depending on what angle the wind blew its free-floating right arm into. Thus it shared the Most Frightening Moment honor with the mummified corpse of Joan Rivers astride the Snow Queen float.

Even back in my grad school days I wasn’t exactly a connoisseur of controlled substances. Every once in awhile something comes along and reaffirms the value of this life choice, supplying a Moment That Made Me Grateful I Wasn’t Stoned at the Time. Two such moments cropped up during the parade: a pizza dough twirling drill team and The Young Americans, an Up-With-People-esque group that did a dance in disturbing penguin costumes.

Finally, any pursuit of a cherished childhood experience has the unavoidable side-effect of producing at least a couple of Most Painful “I’m Getting Old” Moments. The Sesame Street float inevitably has this effect. At least a few of the original cast members always show up. But what really does the trick are the Muppets. They’re a changing. I recognized Big Bird, the Cookie Monster and Grover. None of the rest of them were on the show when I watched them as a kid.

But that was a birthday present compared to the Ocean Spray float. For starters, the float itself featured a gathering of oversized animals enjoying Thanksgiving dinner. The float-riding folks interspersed among these giant woodland creatures suggested a Food of the Gods holiday feast. Semi Home Made Sandra Lee didn’t help matters much.

The real oh-I’m-so-old feature, however, was Arlo Guthrie riding a platform and singing “This Land Is Your Land.” To his credit, he’s aging well. But his appearance brought me mindful of listening to his music – both recorded and in concert – in my younger years. A dump closed on Thanksgiving indeed.

Review - The Final

Normally I have absolutely no use for torture porn, so I was profoundly surprised to find myself enjoying this prime specimen. It pits high school losers against the bullies who pick on them, with the geeks taking terrible revenge on their tormentors. The Netflix description made it sound like the torturers drew inspiration from historical examples, so I was a little disappointed when their bag of tricks was entirely contemporary and somewhat unimaginative. Further, the production suffers from some rookie mistakes in the plot and editing departments. Overall, however, I’m ashamed to admit how much fun it was for someone who’s been gone from high school as long as I have to watch the “popular kids” that infect every school in the land finally get what’s coming to them. All the entries in this sub-genre should have this much of a sense of purpose. Mildly amusing

Review – They Died with Their Boots On

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get past the historical inaccuracies. Custer went to West Point. He served as a cavalry officer in the Civil War. He married Elizabeth Bacon. He was killed at the Little Big Horn. Just about every other element of this picture is pure balderdash. It’s an approach I simply don’t understand. The facts – or at least a close approximation thereof (fair portrayals of indigenous peoples being outside Hollywood’s capabilities in 1941) – make a fine story. And with Errol Flynn in the lead role, even a realistic Custer might have seemed dashing and heroic. I suppose this might be an acceptable action movie based solely on its own merits, but I had too much trouble watching it to be able to say for certain. Mildly amusing

Review – Son of the Morning Star

It pretty much goes without saying that even a three-hour miniseries can’t come close to capturing the level of detail in Evan. S. Connell’s quintessential book about Custer and the Little Big Horn. Further, I was prepared to find some of my favorite parts of the story left by the wayside. With that in mind, overall I was pleased by what they came up with. Gary Cole does a good job in the title role, and the rest of the cast ably backs him. David Strathairn’s ability to overcome one of the most ridiculous wigs in movie history and still turn in an excellent performance as Benteen is particularly noteworthy. It may help to come into the experience with at least some interest in the subject matter, but if that applies to you then you should find this entertaining. Mildly amusing

Review – Beauty and the Beast (1946)

This is one of the most visually stunning movies I’ve ever seen. The cinematography, art direction and costume design (some of which was done by Pierre Cardin himself) are beautiful, particularly for a black and white movie. However, for me the best part is the makeup. I share Greta Garbo’s reaction to the Beast’s transformation at the end of the movie: the strange, cat-like monster is way more interesting than Jean Marais sans fur. However, I went back and forth about the story and the dialogue (much of which was in French so simple even my high school lessons nearly three decades ago allowed me to follow it without recourse to the subtitles). Sometimes it created a dreamy, childhood fairytale atmosphere, but at other times it just seemed dumb. Still, those visuals … Worth seeing

Review – Seventh Cavalry

Even for a Randolph Scott western, this is stupid stuff. I know movies in general and westerns in particular tend to play a little fast and loose with historical fact. But the departures here are genuinely excessive. Scott plays an officer who was away from duty when Custer rode out on his final mission. Overcome with guilt at having not been slaughtered, our hero volunteers himself and a squad of drunks and misfits to brave hostile Native Americans and recover the corpses of the men slain at the Little Big Horn. I think my favorite part is when they identify Custer’s body because the Sioux reverently buried him and placed Sitting Bull’s coup stick over the body as a headstone. Most of the rest of the movie enjoys a similar level of divorce from reality. See if desperate

Review – The Mortal Storm

MGM’s movies were banned from Germany after the studio released this broad assault on Nazism. It even produced a bit of a stir in the United States, as it was blatant anti-Hitler propaganda before America entered the war (and thus technically violated the Hays Code’s requirement that foreign leaders be treated with respect). Frankly, I can see why its targets were upset. This is an effective attack on the Nazis’ racist, anti-intellectual tyranny. The ending is a bit depressing, though that’s in keeping with the not-yet-mercifully-exterminated nature of the problem in 1940. Jimmy Stewart stars as a simple farmer trying to walk the line between giving in to the new regime and running afoul of its brutal thugs. Margaret Sullivan also turns in a fine performance as the daughter of a professor (Frank Morgan) arrested by stormtroopers for daring to suggest that “racial superiority” has no basis in biology. Worth seeing

Review – A High Wind in Jamaica

This movie is sort of like The Apple Dumpling Gang if it was set at sea and it hadn’t sucked. A group of kids en route from Jamaica to England end up stowing aboard a pirate ship when their original vessel is raided. The story is an odd blend of comedy and tragedy as the pirate crew becomes more and more convinced that the kids are bad luck. Further, the picture is hard on the animals and not always particularly gentle with the children. However, overall the plot is engaging, the acting competent (particularly Anthony Quinn and James Coburn as the pirate leaders) and the production values solid in a mid-60s way. Mildly amusing

Review – Dark Mirror

A vengeful ghost. A mirror portal. Standard tricks of the horror trade. Sadly, they’re put to no particular good use here. A mildly neurotic woman moves into a house with a history of strange disappearances. As she struggles to find a job, care for her kid and cope with her jerkweed husband, her photographs slowly uncover an evil presence dogging her every step. See if desperate

Review – 9

This would have been a lot more fun as a video game than it was as a movie. The plot – to the extent there is one – pits sentient rag dolls against a sinister cybernetic brain out to get them and thus complete the destruction of the last remnants of human society. Their various adventures suggest no end of interactive amusement, but just sitting back and watching them was more like, well, watching someone else play a TPS. The animation is good, but it can’t overcome a story this pointless. And of course the whole end-of-the-world thing (not to mention plentiful doll death) makes this the ideal bring-me-down for any child with too much joy in her life. Mildly amusing

Review – Sam’s Lake

This got off to a better start than I thought it would. Sure, it shapes up to be yet another young-people-foolish-enough-to-journey-into-the-woods picture. But the pace is a little less frantic and the attention to detail – particularly the eerie back story – sets it apart from most of the other movies that run on the Chiller channel. Ah, but a little past the midway point the mystery unravels, and so does the plot. From there on out it’s nothing more than another run-of-the-mill slasher movie. See if desperate

Review – The Stranglers of Bombay

After reading 50 True Tales of Terror as a kid, I was fascinated by the depredations of the Thugee, the Kali-inspired cult of anti-English robbers and murderers from the 19th century. Unfortunately, this old Hammer Studios production suffers from a lot of the same Anglophilic racism that infected the book I found so inspirational when I was 12. A dashing East India Company officer (Guy Rolfe) slowly uncovers the existence of the fiendish band of killers, battling uncooperative locals and unsympathetic superiors to bring the culprits to justice. Mildly amusing

Review – X the Unknown

A generic title for a generic monster movie. A blob emerges from deep below the Earth’s crust. Hungry for anything radioactive, it melts anyone who gets in its way. Some of the melted dude effects are kinda cool in an old black and white movie way. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the movie is a major-league snoozefest. And in retrospect I probably should have waited until next year to watch this. I already had an X for this year, and I’m starting to run low on movies that start with this rare letter. Mildly amusing

Review – The Leopard Man

In the wake of their success with Cat People, director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton try to recreate the magic and fail miserably. The two movies are united by the presence of a big cat, but otherwise they couldn’t be less alike. Well-paced supernatural suspense has been replaced by a meandering plot about an escaped leopard that adopts a Jack-the-Ripper-esque MO (a dead giveaway that something else is probably afoot). The characters are uninteresting, as is the story. At least it was relatively brief. See if desperate

Review – The Devil Bat

Giant bats are killing the townsfolk. How does suspicion not immediately fall on the creepy doctor with the foreign accent (Bela Lugosi)? Well, if people are trying to celebrate diversity and avoid stereotyping, they needn’t have bothered. The foreigner’s responsible. Indeed, he’s hatched a particularly bizarre scheme to use electricity to make ordinary bats grow to the size of German shepherds and then program them to attack anyone wearing a perfume or aftershave laced with the doctor’s special chemical. The picture is as ridiculous as the description makes it sound. See if desperate

Review – The Hands of Orlac (1935)

The original US release title of this movie was Mad Love. However, I’ve gone with the British title because it’s more interesting, more descriptive and closer to the French title of the source novel. Peter Lorre makes his American film debut as a mad doctor obsessed with the star of a torture-themed stage show. When the lady’s brilliant pianist husband loses his hands in a train wreck, the good doctor fixes things by transplanting the hands of a recently-executed, knife-throwing murderer. Or perhaps “attempts to fix things” would be a better description. Mildly amusing

Review – Count Yorga, Vampire

This was listed in the opening credits as The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire, the remnants of the picture’s pre-production origins as a soft-core porn flick. For better or worse, the nude scenes were removed from the script prior to shooting. I say “better” because in general the world can probably do without more vampire porn movies. But it’s “worse” as well, because if the movie had included sex scenes then at least it would have had something. This is nothing but dull vampire shenanigans. Oh, and PS: brutally killed cat plus unpleasant dead baby reference equals a zero rating rather than a one. Wish I’d skipped it

My eight favorite aliens

To the question “Are we alone in the universe?” science fiction offers up a resounding “no.” The genre has served up innumerable inhabitants of countless worlds, everything from colossal beasts to dangerous microbes.

With so many to choose from, selecting eight was no easy task. I tried for a mix of different kinds of aliens, from the nearly human to the not-at-all. I also tried to choose creatures from movies that were worth watching (though in a couple of cases I had to bend that criterion at least a little).

And still the set suffers from weak spots. For example, some of the best aliens are the ones who come in peace to teach us something valuable about the universe and about ourselves. However, most of the visitors on this list are the other kind, the sort that seeks to subdue, study or just plain old eat us.

A quick note on the politics of the list: I’d made my choices and written most of the descriptions when I noticed that seven of the eight aliens were uninvited guests on Earth. This naturally raises questions about the parallels between movie xenophobia and real questions about undocumented immigrants, the folks who used to be called “illegal aliens.”

Space creatures have – for good or ill – occasionally stood in for marginalized members of society. They’ve also played other allegorical roles; for example, in the 1950s they frequently served as the Red Menace. More often, however, they’re intended to be exactly what they are: something more powerful than us with which we must contend or at least interact.

In any event, the closest any of the aliens on this list come to anything politically incorrect would be the immigrant street crime elements of Predator 2 (which didn’t actually make the list, though it has a class of creature in common with one of the following eight).

 

Aliens – It isn’t every species that can presume to go by the generic “Aliens.” But these bugs pull it off nicely. It helps that an artist – and a weird one at that – designed them. Plus they’re four aliens in one: the face hugger, the chest burster, the drone and the queen. After the second movie the series loses me a bit, but even in the bad ones the aliens still kick butt (indeed, the swimming alien was the highlight of number four).

Predator – If we’re going to include Aliens, then we’re also going to have to toss in their buddies the Predators. While most of Earth’s guests from outer space either come in peace or want to take over, all these guys want to do is get a little hunting in. I’ve seen these movies dozens of times (except for number three, for which I didn’t particularly care), and I still can’t quite decide if Stan Winston’s design of the creatures’ faces – the ultimate vagina dentata – is a “oh, cool!” or “ew, nasty!” moment. Still, I do love their M.O.

The Mutant from Metaluna – Most of the aliens in This Island Earth look just like we do (except they have bigger foreheads). But even though they show up claiming to need our help to save their planet, they turn out to have a scary-looking henchman. This “mutant” is the archetypal Bug-Eyed Monster with its huge, brain-looking head, fearsome claws and shiny space suit.

Martians – Of our three closest constant neighbors in the solar system, Mars seems to be the most constant source of alien invaders. At one point we figured we’d find people on the Moon when we got there, but they seldom seemed to have much interest in making a call on us. And of course Venus filled the heads of unimaginative screenwriters with visions of Zsa Zsa Gabor in an outlandish outfit that no inhabitant of a man-free world would ever put on. But Mars, ah, there be monsters. And they’re none too shy about engaging in a little interplanetary imperialism, either. Of all the denizens of the Red Planet, my favorite are the obnoxious little creeps from Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. They indulge in just about every evil alien cliché in the book.

The Blob – One of the most unfortunate tendencies of timid filmmakers is the inclination to anthropomorphize visitors from outer space. In a universe of nearly limitless possibility, I find myself consistently disappointed when the aliens turn out to be guys with rubber appliances glued to their foreheads. Thus anyone with the guts to break out of this mold commands at least a little respect. I concede that this movie suffers in the execution, turning into a story that seldom rises above Rebel Without a Cause versus A Giant Wad of Red Jell-o. Nonetheless, it musters a good-sized dose of creepiness solely from the extra-alien nature of the alien menace.

The body snatchers – On the other hand, alien invaders can also maximize their scariness by looking exactly like us. Indeed, the main awfulness of the body snatching menace is that they want to take our places and become us (or at least a weird simulation of us). Though this theme has been explored with varying degrees of success (and in the name of different psychological and political agendas) over the years, it always inspires a shudder or two.

It – Now consider the opposite thesis. The aliens in It Came from Outer Space look nothing like us, and as nonhumans they’re inherently to be feared. But then it turns out that the few humans who are willing to overcome their instincts and extend a little trust turn out to be correct about the nature of the visitors. Because all the other aliens on this list are out to do us harm, I wanted to include at least one intelligent example of the other possibility.

The Thing – This one is every imaginable form of alien menace rolled into one. It can be a ravening monster or look exactly like us. It can infect us from within before we even know what’s happening (not unlike The Andromeda Strain, a different kind of alien that nearly made this list). It’s a BEM, a body snatcher and an advanced case of AIDS. And it doesn’t exactly hurt that the movie going on around it is pretty good as well.

Review – The Reeds

A group of attractive young people from the big city decide to take a country excursion, and … jeez, do I even need to go on with this? The only twist here is that our “heroes” venture out on a rented boat and find themselves stranded in a swampy grassland of the title water weeds. Oh, and they deliver all their lines in thick, slang-heavy English accents, which didn’t exactly make them more endearing. See if desperate

Review – City Heat

I started out all pissed off that Hollywood made a movie set in Kansas City but then cut out all the references to it. But by the end of the ordeal I found myself genuinely grateful that my hometown was spared direct association with a stinker like this. The main draw is a team-up of Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood, and perhaps if they’d made a more straightforward action movie it might have worked. Instead, this is a poorly-written, goofy comedy. Every once in awhile Eastwood gets in a good line, but otherwise it’s just too dumb for words. It didn’t particularly help that something was wrong with Encore’s copy of the movie and the sound didn’t quite match the picture. Mildly amusing

Review – Shock Waves

Underwater zombie SS stormtroopers? How the hell did they ever manage to make a bore-fest out of a concept like that? And yet they do. The cast certainly isn’t to blame. A young Brooke Adams joins veteran thespians Peter Cushing and John Carradine in a valiant attempt to do what they can with a genuinely dreadful script. A handful of folks out for a Caribbean pleasure cruise end up stranded on an island inhabited by an old German guy and a squad of undead Nazi super-soldiers. Every once in awhile the picture will muster a good visual or two, such as when the zombies first emerge from their watery resting places. Otherwise it’s a muddled, meandering mess. The nicest thing I have to say about it is that on recent re-viewing I found it somewhat less boring than the first time I saw it. Maybe it was just that I knew what to expect so I felt less let down when it sucked. Mildly amusing

Review – Anne of the Thousand Days

I found the title of this picture somewhat misleading. What I was hoping for was a movie that would focus on Anne Boleyn’s brief reign as Queen of England. After all, everyone knows the story of how she ended up with the job. What’s less clear is exactly how she went from Chief Babe of the Realm to headless corpse in so brief a time. But no, we have to start at the beginning and spend at least an hour on the all-too-familiar part of the story. And as if it wasn’t bad enough to rely on the story’s time-honored clichés, the production can’t even settle on which clichés to go with. Sometimes Anne (Genevieve Bujold) is out for revenge for the king’s interference with her plans to marry Lord Percy. But then at other points she’s grubbing power for its own sake or even doing it for love. For his part, Henry (Richard Burton) is motivated either by lust or a pathological obsession with producing a male heir. And once again the Protestant Reformation gets barely a mention. The only thing I found interesting about this was that it took nearly 20 years for this version of the story to make the jump from the Broadway stage to Hollywood, the delay caused by all the salacious elements of the tale that couldn’t be filmed – even in as tame a manner as this – until after the demise of the Hays Code. Mildly amusing

Review – Runaway

The robots are the main draw in this near-future sci fi thriller from the 80s. The thesis here is that robots will come to occupy an awkward middle ground between mere tools and actual sentience, thus requiring a special branch of the police department to go deal with them when they go haywire. One of these cops (Tom Selleck) finds himself pitted against a sinister mercenary (Gene Simmons) trying to lay his hands on some powerful microprocessors. The coolest part of the movie are the spider-like assassination robots the bad guy uses to do in anyone who gets in his way. They’re crude and stiff by modern effects standards, but their MO – first they jump on you, then they inject you with acid, then they blow themselves up just to make sure you’re good and dead – lends significant appeal. As is not uncommon with Michael Crichton projects, this one’s a little too fascinated by its own cleverness. But despite its flaws, it turns out to be a reasonably entertaining experience. Mildly amusing

Review – Splice

This is one of those mean little movies that seem to delight in nothing other than their own glum cruelty. A couple of scientists (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) fuse a burgoo of DNA together to make a vaguely human creature that swiftly grows out of control. So the best we can hope for here is a flavorless reheat of Species. Unfortunately, once the monster starts to mature the production takes a turn for the extraordinarily rotten. All the characters live in a state of constant misery, and none of them are the least bit sympathetic. And as if to spread this festival of negative emotion to the audience, the picture becomes a relentless, humorless parade of “what awful thing is going to happen next?” moments. The violent death of a housecat and the brutal rape were enough to earn this a sub-zero rating (though they certainly didn’t stop there). Avoid at all costs

Review – This Island Earth

This needed way more mutant. The first two thirds of the movie are all set-up. A brilliant scientist is lured to a secret think tank of other brilliant scientists who are concentrating on an atomic project of some kind for a guy with a strangely shaped head. Working conditions are more than a little slave-like, because the weird head people are on a tight deadline. Turns out they’re aliens trying to use the most brilliant minds on Earth to develop a new energy source so their home world can defend itself against an aggressive neighbor. Finally in the last half hour our heroes are whisked away to Metaluna, where they see first hand the awful destruction they’ve been called upon to help prevent. Unfortunately by then it’s too late for much of anything besides some random menacing by the Mutant from Metaluna, a quintessential bug-eyed monster. Production values are on the high end of the saucers-dangling-from-strings ilk, the script is weak, but the cast (including Russell “The Professor” Johnson) does what it can. Mildly amusing

My eight favorite spaceships

If we’re going to the stars, we’re going to need a way to get there. That’s a simple enough proposition, but it gets complicated quickly. Physicists remind us about the trouble with traveling fast enough to get anywhere else without taking ages to get there. Psychologists and physiologists fret about the effects of spending long periods in the absence of Earth’s gravity.

Fortunately for us, movies seldom if ever concern themselves greatly with such weighty inquiries. They simply assume that in the future scientists will come up with something that violates Einstein’s speed limit and keeps us stuck to the floor while we’re on our way. Freed from worry about how we’ll make spaceships work, we can focus on more entertaining questions such as what they will look like and what they will do.

Here are eight particularly entertaining answers.

 

Saucers, saucers and more saucers – This could be a list all by itself. The notion of saucer-shaped spacecraft runs like a river through the genre. Aliens show up in them. They use them to freak us out and attack us. They try to leave in them. And for that matter, once we take to the stars ourselves we sometimes take a page from the aliens’ book. Though it’s impossible to pick just one example, the saucer had to be on the list.

The Space Ark - Of course the other “classic” spaceship design is the rocket, that long, skinny, shiny tribute to man’s desire to penetrate the heavens. Stainless deco rockets show up just about everywhere from Destination Moon to Bugs Bunny cartoons. But if I have to settle on a single example, I’ll go with the Space Ark from When Worlds Collide. It has the look and feel we need plus an out-of-the-ordinary horizontal launch track. Its role in a fun – if somewhat far-fetched – movie doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

The Executor – I’m guessing most Star Wars fans offered a choice of vehicles from the series would probably opt for the Millennium Falcon. I hate to say it, but I sorta share Princess Leia’s initial impression of Han Solo’s dragster. Instead, for my money the baddest ride in a galaxy far, far away is Darth Vader’s personal star destroyer, the Executor. The name’s a little awkward – is he going to execute people or just make sure their estates are properly distributed? – but for a combination of smooth design and awesome firepower this ship is hard to beat.

The Martian war machines – This one’s a bit of a cheat, because technically the Martians don’t use these to cross the vast gulfs of cold, empty space. Instead they use them after they arrive to trash the place, making them more like tanks than spacecraft. Though H.G. Wells had something more like the machines from the Steven Spielberg version in mind, I strongly prefer the smooth, deco styling of the George Pal production. These things kick our asses and look good doing it.

The moon bus – As noted in the list of our eight favorite sci fi movies, one of the great appeals of the genre is the implication that the extraordinary may someday become ordinary, that in the future we (or perhaps our descendants) will be able to journey to other planets with the same ease with which we currently travel to other cities. One of the big draws of 2001: A Space Odyssey is that it presents us with just such a world. Pan Am will be able to rocket us off to an orbiting hotel, and later we can visit the Moon. While we’re there, we’ll get around on moon buses, transports that look like a cross between a spaceship and a subway car. The familiar ordinariness of the thing is what makes it so appealing. In the present I might take the bus to work, but in the future I’ll use something similar to get around a place that now I can just dream about.

The Nostromo – On the other hand, the spaceship in Alien takes this almost too far. It’s a grim, greasy, dark place guaranteed to send shivers down the spine of anyone who’s ever worked in a factory. Who wants to imagine a future where the job market will be as miserable as it is today? Still, the industrial look and feel – combined with the quibbling in the script over Human Resources issues – make the setting and the monster eerily realistic.

The Thunder Road – I vaguely remember when I was a kid and I still had a sense of wonder or at least an imagination. Explorers combines a child’s ability to turn a pile of junk into a spacecraft with just enough alien tech to make the thing actually work. The aliens’ ships are clever as well. I wish I’d seen this movie when I was young enough to really appreciate it.

The Enterprise – To be completely precise, the original TV version of the Enterprise will always be nearest and dearest to my heart. Still, the slightly modified ship from the first couple of Star Trek movies is close enough for government work. The design incorporates both the saucer and the rocket into one awesome starship. But the thing that’s always intrigued me the most about it is the fact that it makes no sense from the perspective of those of us who live with gravity and aerodynamics. On Earth this thing would never fly, but in the boundless freedom of outer space it works perfectly. That makes it as forward-thinking as the series of which it was a vital part.

Review – The Other Side of Bollywood

This low-budget documentary has its heart in the right place. If it had followed the title’s promise and stuck to an examination of the Indian film industry, it would have been an interesting production. Unfortunately, the filmmakers try for an Errol-Morris-arty look and feel. Even that might have been okay even on a low budget. But then we’re treated to extended sequences of working class Indians at work and play. If I need an emotionally charged portrait of poverty in India, I’ll re-watch Born into Brothels. Here it contributes little and takes away screen time that could have been devoted to the task at hand. Mildly amusing

Review – The Battleship Potemkin

Though this occupies a firm and well-deserved spot on any serious film student’s must-see list, the propaganda gets laid on pretty thick. Director Sergei Eisenstein was a master at treating the cinema as a graphic art, and in this silent production from 1925 you can witness the birth of composition and montage techniques that made the movies what they are today. The story, on the other hand, is a silly tale of valiant, strong and universally good proletarians versus the creepy, weak and uniformly evil forces of the Czar. Plot aside, however, even all these years later it’s still a genuine pleasure to see a brilliant artist at the top of his game. Buy the disc

Review – The Bunker (1981)

Hitler is an impossible role to play. If you try to understate the character and avoid the obvious cliché mannerisms, you don’t convince the audience or do justice to the role (not to mention that if you want “understated” then you probably shouldn’t get Anthony Hopkins for the part). On the other hand, if you play him true to form, you come off looking like a mocking impersonation. Every time I see a performance like this, I can practically hear Chaplin raving about “der sauerkrauten und der rooten tooten.” Fortunately the lead role isn’t exactly the death of this overall disappointment. The script trots out the usual “wisdom” about the final days of the Third Reich (Hitler was a nut, Bormann was a jerk, Speer was trying to do the right thing, and so on) without adding any nuance or new information. The subject itself is inherently somewhat interesting, but the production never rises above the level of appeal that any death-of-Hitler show would have commanded. Mildly amusing

Review – The Runaways

Funny how even when you don’t know quite what to expect you can still come away disappointed. Years ago a friend brought me to a state of appreciation for the work of Joan Jett, but I never knew that much about her first band, The Runaways. If they were really this vapid, it’s a miracle they ever managed to produce anything worth listening to. However, the subjects themselves may not be to blame. The movie seems to have no greater ambition than showcasing Kristen “Twilight” Stewart and Dakota Fanning doing drugs and prancing around in their underwear. Thus the picture’s only undoubted success was getting “Cherry Bomb” stuck in my head. Mildly amusing

Review – Annie

I’m genuinely amazed that such a picture could be produced without a drop of irony to be found anywhere. Honestly, I could have dealt with the treacle, the clichés, the racism, the sexism, the songs, the choreography and even the more-than-a-little-creepy relationship between Little Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks if they’d given me even a brief yes-we-realize-this-is-corny wink. But oh no. Not back in 1982 when it was “morning in America.” Nowadays of course the only reason you’d ever have to sit through an experience like this is if you get stuck in the Harmony Hut. See if desperate

Review – A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Congratulations, Hollywood. You’ve given birth to yet another unnecessary remake. This isn’t the worst slasher movie I’ve ever seen, and though I like the original I have to admit that objectively it’s at best a minor classic of the horror genre. Still, it was a much better picture than this mediocre reheat. The teen protagonists come across as empty-headed caricatures – vastly overshadowed by Jackie Earle Haley’s performance as Freddy Krueger – which makes it impossible to care about what happens to them. And though Freddy’s pre-monster career as a child molester was always part of the set’s back story, here we really get our noses rubbed in it. Every once in awhile the filmmakers manage to conjure a good shock or make a clever visual reference to the original franchise, but the rest of the movie does little beyond serving as shelf space for the occasional good parts. Mildly amusing

My eight favorite sci fi movies

So now here we are, in the century that was going to be the future. Actually, we’ve been here for a decade now, so by rights this list would have been more apropos ten years ago. But 8sails didn’t exist back then, so we’ll just have to play catch-up now.

“Science fiction” covers a lot of ground, from optimistic, outer-space extensions of Manifest Destiny to horrifying visions of future dystopias. A list of eight movies could never encompass the entire genre or even all the sci fi movies we like. These eight, however, all stand on their own merits in addition to being excellent representatives of their genre.

 

A Clockwork Orange – Though I don’t think Anthony Burgess’s novel should ever have been made into a movie, if a movie it had to be then this is the best it could have been. Malcolm McDowell turns in a delightfully over-the-top performance as a Teddy-Boy-of-the-Future robbed of his free will by a cruel experiment. From a sci-fi perspective, however, the real draw is the art direction. The picture’s world is Mid Century décor and architecture gone to hell, an eerily plausible alternative reality. The soundtrack’s creepy synthesizer distortion of familiar music doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

2001: A Space Odyssey – Sticking with Stanley Kubrick movies, let’s backtrack a picture to a more optimistic vision of the future. The Slab is the big star of the show, and of course the end sequence will probably continue to dazzle stoners for generations to come. But for my taste, the best parts are the small touches. For example, the space shuttle and space station both become more interesting via the addition of corporate logos. The suggestion is that this future isn’t entirely dissimilar to the real present, and someday we might be able to fly a Pan Am shuttle to an orbital Hilton just as easily as we can take a trip to Club Med now. It didn’t turn out to be true, but it was still a nice thought.

The Empire Strikes Back – I pretty much had to put one of the pictures in the Star Wars series on this list. The first one was a cultural phenomenon. This one was a better movie. This one won the spot.

1984 – This picture enjoys three big distinctions. First, it’s a remarkably faithful adaptation of Orwell’s famous novel. Indeed, where the two differ the movie is sometimes better than the book. Second, it was shot in the year referenced in the title and on the locations envisioned by the author 36 years earlier, making it the only production (as far as I know) to ever pull off this particular stunt. And third, it’s a really good movie. Depressing as hell, but still well worth a look.

Metropolis – This is the great grandmother of all science fiction movies. Though it isn’t the first sci fi movie ever made (Melies started playing around with trips to the moon two or three decades before this), it’s a watershed moment in the genre’s development. Fritz Lang demonstrated that script, acting (naturally somewhat diminished by the conventions of the silent era), special effects and politics could be combined into a single production.

The Day the Earth Stood Still – Speaking of politics, it must have taken some guts to stand up in the middle of the Cold War and produce a movie suggesting that “the enemy” might be just as human as us, if not more so. The simple premise – that a species capable of surviving long enough to develop interstellar flight would almost by definition have to be both more powerful and more peaceful than us – is cleverly advanced by a plot full of entertaining twists and turns. Paranoia has rarely been so gently exposed or so aptly punished.

Blade Runner – This one already made the list of our eight favorite movies. Thus I’ll just add that it’s an important part of the genre’s history as well. The art direction makes it a key moment in the movement afoot at the time to break away from the deco-clean visions of tomorrow and make the future a grimy place not entirely dissimilar to the present.

Forbidden Planet – I think I’ve seen this one more often than all the rest of the entries on the list put together, which is saying something because several of these are part of my personal collection. It’s just such a wonderful combination of elements: the story, the script, the acting, the robot, the monster. Even the dated elements – such as the Theremin and some of the effects – still hold considerable charm. And on top of its individual merit, it’s also a seminal piece of sci fi cinema. Star Trek in particular owes this movie a considerable debt.

Review – The Mad Magician

Vincent Price as an artistically-talented showman. Betrayal by an unscrupulous business associate. Fiendishly clever and elaborate revenge. Objects flying at the screen to take full advantage of movie’s 3D format. Must be House of Wax. Or at least that was what the filmmakers were hoping for. What they got instead was a hastily-assembled, black and white mess that doesn’t come anywhere near the movie it’s designed to ape. Mildly amusing

Check your flossing

Making movie lists isn’t as easy as it looks. Even after watching thousands of movies, I still find myself at a loss when trying to put a simple list of eight together.

Thus my initial inclination was to cut Mental Floss some slack when the latest issue sported a cover story on “The 25 Most Powerful Movies of the Last 25 Years” (which sadly as of this writing is not available online). I particularly appreciated the effort authors Carina Chocano and Mangesh Hattikudur put into staying consistent with the magazine’s general trivia orientation. Rather than focus on movies of earth-shattering importance, they tended to pick pictures with interesting background stories of one kind or another.

For example, the tale of how Lara Croft Tomb Raider managed to turn a profit before it was ever released was far more fascinating than the movie itself. Similarly, I enjoyed the official Kazakhstani reaction to Borat and the Taliban’s reaction to Titanic.

On the other hand, a handful of the entries were somewhat problematic, movies that for one reason or another seemed not to merit the accolades they received. I’d reclassify them as follows:

The Truman Show – The movie that helped popularize an otherwise obscure neurosis
In a world that doesn’t always make a lot of sense, it’s easy to vaguely suspect that the whole mess is a big, elaborate joke of some kind. The Truman Show caters to the adolescent fantasy that everything around us has been set up for our benefit, that everyone we know is actually a robot or an actor. Most of us grow out of this peculiar delusion. Some folks get stuck with it on a more long-term basis. However, matters aren’t helped when mental health professionals name the illness after a Hollywood movie. That just helps sell it to psychiatric hypochondriacs.

The Silence of the Lambs – The movie that was nice to bugs but hateful to the rest of the universe
I liked the trivia about how carefully the moths were handled off screen. However, treating moths with care doesn’t do much to make up for the movie’s brutal on-screen treatment of women, cops, a dog, and so on.

Sideways – The movie that … aw jeez yuppies, get over yourselves
An indie comedy about annoying wine nerds? How did I manage to avoid seeing this one? The fact that one character’s foolish whining led to a drop in sales for a perfectly serviceable grape merely makes the movie more disgraceful than it already was.

Sex, Lies and Videotape – The movie that assured independent producers that it was okay to be boring
The only reason this didn’t make the Eight movies to put you out of the mood for sex list is that when I was putting that list together I forgot this movie even existed. I saw it when it first came out. Or was it when it was first released on video? It’s been so long I don’t remember. In any event, it would have been right at home with the eight non-sexy sex movies that did make the list.

Brazil – The movie that didn’t do what Mental Floss said it did
I like Terry Gilliam’s work in general and this movie in particular. But the Mental Floss article gives it credit for starting the steampunk movement. Uh, no. If nothing else, 1984 – which came out a year earlier – featured a much more realistic depiction of alternate-reality technology. And of course more purely steampunk visuals go at least as far back as the drawings of Albert Robida, which predate Brazil by a century or so.

The Blair Witch Project – The movie that murdered the helpless tripod
For some reason some critics who don’t regularly follow horror movies seem to think that this picture is a seminal moment in the genre’s development. But in truth it spawned few successful imitators. Even its own sequel is a more traditional production. It’s notable as a great example of making a movie on the cheap and then turning a tremendous profit via viral marketing. But beyond that all it really contributes is an unfortunate plug for the notion that shaky camerawork is a legitimate art form. Burp.

The Big Lebowski – The movie that gave hope to useless white men everywhere
The Floss article observes that this one started a spurious religion on par with the Church of the Subgenius and the Flying Spaghetti Monster thing. On a less formal level, it assured over-privileged, indolent white guys that they were somehow heroic. The next time you visit Lawrence, Kansas – or a similar neo-hippie-infested college town – feast your eyes on why this is a bad idea.

Pulp Fiction – The movie that managed to hypnotize the world into thinking Quentin Tarantino had talent
Actually, I have no quarrel with the authors’ analysis of this entry. They say Pulp Fiction “reinvigorated the independent film movement, spawned hundreds of Tarantino wannabes, jump-started John Travolta’s comatose career, and brought surf music back to the radio.” If you could add “kidnapped the Lindbergh baby” and “sold missiles to Iran” to that list you’d have a complete set.

Review – Winter’s Bone

This movie is an extended, unpleasant lesson in Ozark ethics codes. When a 17-year-old girl’s family faces eviction from their shack, she sets out in search of her wayward father who put the place up as security for a bail bond. Along the way she must make her way through no end of elaborate exchanges with her fellow rustics, trying to get them to tell her what apparently nobody wants her to know. The result is approximately 15 minutes’ worth of mystery drawn out to feature length by a great big load of awkwardness. Though the production is over-arty by far, the scenery is pretty in a bleak way. I just wish it had been a little more “tell me a story” and a little less Boogen Emily Post. Mildly amusing

Review – Where’s Poppa?

Director Carl Reiner assembles a talented cast helmed by Ruth Gordon and George Segal. But then he proceeds to explore every way he can think of to offend the audience. I understand that some of the humor here – particularly the racist jokes – was more acceptable in 1970 than it is now. Further, I respect the effort to be “edgy,” to push the boundaries of good taste in the name of artistic freedom. But that does little to make this any easier to watch. The main story is about a harried New York lawyer who wants to be free of his demanding mother, but the movie is mostly made up of bizarre little subplots. This was also released as Going Ape. See if desperate

Review – The Pit and the Pendulum (2009)

At first I thought this piece of crap would have Poe spinning in his grave. Instead, I think his back-from-the-dead response would be something more like, “Okay, this has nothing at all whatsoever to do with my work, so I guess I’m not too upset about it. However, I wish they hadn’t used my name or the title of one of my better stories.” A group of standard young people shows up at a typical creepy house for an unimaginative sinister experiment leading to thoroughly predictable results. The only thing that distinguishes this from most other productions of its ilk is a large dose of homoerotic soft-core, the kind where everyone keeps their pants on. As a result, the cast is the usual pack of folks who aren’t talented enough to get work in movies where they don’t have to undress most of the way. I should also note that in the first player I used to view this DVD the subtitles wouldn’t turn off no matter what I tried. It worked better in the second one, which is fortunate because otherwise you’d find this in the abandoned movies list (which is probably where it should have ended up anyway). See if desperate

Review – The Boneyard (2009)

Technically I think this was originally a show on the Discovery Channel, but it used up as much of my life as a feature-length movie would have, so I’m going to go ahead and review it. In true high-band cable style, this is a made-on-the-cheap documentary liberally peppered with dramatic recreations of all of the least interesting parts of the story. In the early 80s a couple of losers – main perpetrator Leonard Lake and sidekick Charles Ng – tortured and murdered somewhere between one and two dozen people. Lake cheated justice by popping a cyanide pill shortly after his arrest. Because the evidence didn’t tie Ng as tightly to the crimes, it took a lot of time and effort to assemble the case against him and bring him to trial. This production dwells almost exclusively on the forensic investigation and the wrangling in the courtroom. In other words, it’s nearly as boring as a real trial. See if desperate

Review – Tower of London (1962)

For some reason Vincent Price and Roger Corman set out to improve Richard III by shooting it as a Corman-style exploitation movie. Unfortunately, replacing Shakespeare’s beautiful language with extra ghosts and torture sequences wasn’t exactly a step in the right direction. The cast is able enough, but the script provides few interesting twists or memorable dialogue exchanges. A couple of the torture sequences are engaging in an “ew!” way, but otherwise the Bard’s version is better. Mildly amusing

Review – Red Sonja

Brigitte Nielsen stakes her claim to the title of Queen of Mullets in this sword and sorcery classic from 1985. Our square-shouldered, crimson-haired heroine is out for revenge against an evil queen (Sandahl Bergman), and a cast of loyal sidekicks (including a highly Conan-esque Arnold Schwarzenegger) come along for the ride. Speaking of whom, this picture’s production values are unfortunately on par with the second Conan movie. According to the trivia on IMDb, Schwarzenegger used to tell his kids that if they didn’t behave he’d make them watch this movie. I’m embarrassed to admit that I have nothing more eloquent than that to say about it. See if desperate

Review – Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

At this point I’m willing to agree with the title’s imperative. Once again Peter Cushing steps into the role of the world’s most famous mad scientist. But this time around the guy’s a real creep. He blackmails a young doctor and his wife into helping him resume his experiments, and then he furthers his career with murder and rape. Even the usual parade of corpse hacking and brain swapping has become so commonplace that nobody seems to care much about it anymore (except of course for a few meddling townsfolk). See if desperate

Review – The Curse of Frankenstein

Mary Shelly gets Hammered in this vaguely faithful retelling of the classic tale. The picture pairs Peter Cushing as the doctor and Christopher Lee as the creature, and between the two of them they make a reasonable success of things. Lee’s makeup in particular makes the actor look like a badly-used corpse while at the same time avoiding legal trouble with Universal. Though this is neither the high point of Hammer’s legendary portfolio nor the best version of Frankenstein I’ve ever seen, it’s still reasonably entertaining. Mildly amusing

Review – Frankenstein Created Woman

Of all the Hammer Frankensteins, this is the most convoluted. The orphan of an executed murderer grows up to be a gopher for the good doctor (Peter Cushing) and his assistant. After an altercation at a local pub, the young man ends up tried and convicted for a murder he didn’t commit. After seeing him guillotined, his distraught girlfriend (former Playboy model Susan Denberg) drowns herself. Enter Dr. Frankenstein, who uses an energy field to trap the lad’s soul until it can be inserted into the girl’s body. Back from the dead and thirsty for revenge s/he goes on a killing spree targeting the actual culprits. Though we’ve clearly strayed a distance from Mary Shelly’s creature and creator, I guess I’ve seen worse things done with the Frankenstein name. Mildly amusing

Eight songs I never want to hear at the ballpark again

As noted in a blog post last year, one of the perils of holding season tickets for a Major League Baseball team is that by the end of the season you’ve gotten a thorough dose of all the franchise’s between-innings entertainment gimmicks. The Hot Dog Derby. The Wee Tyke Home Run Challenge. The Shrieking Host Trivia Game. And most of all, any song that gets played on a regular basis.

Even a song you like turns stale after it’s played over and over. Further, at Kauffman Stadium – home of the perpetually cellar-dwelling Kansas City Royals – the combination of a good song and a heapin’ helpin’ of rotten baseball can turn into a Ludovico Treatment experience.

If such a thing can happen to a good piece of music, then songs that were nerve grating to begin with … well, consider these eight specimens.

 

Centerfield – Dreadful songwriters everywhere take note: if you have nothing but bad music in your soul but still want to share your “gift” with the world, just stick a baseball reference into your work somewhere. Sing about being an all-star, or making the batter swing, or similar cliché. Back in the early 80s a talentless hack named Terry Cashman not only wrote a bad song about the sport – “Talkin’ Baseball” – but also adapted it with a different version for each MLB team. Now that’s marketing genius.

The all-time champ of this trick is former CCR front-man John Fogerty. “Centerfield” is the most goshawful parade of random clichés ever set to music. Honestly, this song could have been written by jotting baseball items – the sights and smells of summer, the names of some great players, references to “The Mighty Casey” and the like – onto index cards, shuffling them and putting pen to paper. Baseball fans are a sentimental lot, liable to go all teary-eyed over any reference to our beloved pastime. But surely we aren’t too simple minded to see through schlock like this. 

And if it was just ill-informed schlock, that might have been endurable. But Fogerty waves his ignorance around like a mascot with a victory banner after a home team win. The second verse is the main source of offense. It starts with the crap about Casey. Then it goes on to say “Say hey, Willie, tell Ty Cobb.” Even mentioning Willie Mays in the same breath with the virulent white supremacist Cobb is enough to toss the whole mess in the trash forever. But just to emphasize that he has no idea what he’s even singing about, he pronounces the racist bastard’s name “Tee.”

The final line in the verse is “Don’t say it ain’t so, you know the time is now.” Once again the songwriter’s stupidity rears its ugly head. I imagine a young fan looking up at Shoeless Joe Jackson and pleading “Don’t say it ain’t so, Joe.” Somewhere in that double negative, the tyke is begging his hero for assurance that he was indeed neck deep in a gambling scandal. Stupid stupid stupid.

The Boys of Summer – Taking the “baseball reference” thing one step farther, it turns out you don’t even have to make the song about the game. Just adding a familiar phrase or two is apparently enough to get your crap played at the ballpark. Take Eagles alum Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” This song has nothing to do with baseball. But because “boys of summer” is by sheer coincidence also a reference to baseball players, we have to spend season after season listening to Henley whine about getting old.

The Summer of 69 – And here’s another one. The Kansas City Royals franchise was founded in 1969, so maybe we’re the only ones who get stuck with this (or perhaps it plays in Queens as well in honor of the “Miracle Mets”). So Bryan Adams misses being a shiftless teenager? What the hell does that have to do with baseball?It isn’t even nostalgia for adolescence in 1969, when Adams was nine years old (and on that basis you can probably figure out for yourself what the number actually refers to).

Crazy Train – This Ozzy Ozborne tune has even less to do with the game than the last two put together. Indeed, if it didn’t start with Ozzy yelling “All aboard!” it would have no relevance at all. However, those first two words make in ever-so-mildly apt when the situation calls for the home fans to gloat because their team just loaded the bases. It’s a small silver lining on a big, dark cloud for Royals fans, because this happens so seldom that we don’t have to endure the song too frequently.

The home run theme from The Natural – At least this one has a legitimate baseball connection. The folks in the booth tend to play it at the obvious moment: as a player is rounding the bases after hitting one out of the park. This wouldn’t bother me at all except for one thing. Back in 1999 Royals great George Brett was selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame. They hyped his induction heavily that summer, and the plugs included this tune in the background. Thus in my mind it’s associated with the team’s glory days. Listening to it after some expensive free agent has-been or I-29 ping-pong ball accidentally clears the fences is bittersweet with emphasis on the former.

And now we come to the real heart of the problem. The franchise makes a little money from people who show up to watch the game. The family fun zone draws out a few more customers. But after observing crowd behavior at the ballpark for nearly 40 years now, I’ve reached a conclusion about which I am quite certain: the primary source of revenue for the Kansas City Royals is the mob of beer-swilling mooks who treat the ballpark as a giant, expensive bar with an outrageous cover charge.

Here class warfare rears its ugly head (not that drunken assholism is limited to a single class). I respect the right of the lumpenproletariat to listen to their music of choice while consuming their beverages of choice. But in a large public venue such as a stadium, some accommodation should be made for those of us who don’t care for redneck drinking screed any more than we want to hear the Phelps cult’s opinions about homosexuality. I’m willing to put up with at least some songs I don’t like because they may give pleasure to those around me. But a few cross a line that shouldn’t be that hard to draw. These final three, for example.

Sweet Home Alabama – If Alabama was the entire United States, this would be our national anthem. It’s geographically inappropriate in a world that includes plenty of songs about Kansas City, the Show Me State and the Sunflower State (hell, there’s an entire band named after Kansas). But for the most part it’s a relatively inoffensive little tune.

When it isn’t being highly offensive, that is. I care less than nothing about an ideological feud between the likes of Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd (aside from the suggestion that if someone makes a legitimate criticism of your state that sometimes it’s better just to take the hit). But a couple of verses later we’re confronted by the following observation “In Birmingham they love the governor (ooh ooh ooh).” That thought and the rest of the verse aren’t exactly strong praise for Wallace, but at the very least they’re an expression of a preference for segregation over Northern liberal meddling.

But that evades the real issue. Why disrupt a ballgame with a song that even mentions segregation? Or if the topic needs to be raised for collective edification between innings, why present anything other than a sound condemnation of the practice? Would we have to hear this song if the lyrics went “In Berlin they love the Fuhrer (heil heil heil)”? And if you’re about to point out that comparing anything to Hitler is automatically rhetorically invalid, please ponder this: how many centuries of slavery and genocide are the moral equivalent of a decade and a half of Nazism (especially when that selfsame apartheid is apparently a “going concern”)?

They never have the time to play the entire song anyway. So why not just cut the verses that suck?

Whiskey for My Men and Beer for My Horses – This thing makes “Sweet Home Alabama” sound like “We Shall Overcome.” Any song about ordering alcohol is a natural at a venue that depends heavily on beer sales, so the chorus fits well enough as ballpark fare. But the rest of the lyrics … seriously, did anybody bother to listen to this song before putting it on? This asshole is singing about how great it would be if we could only solve the nation’s crime problem by saddling up and going out lynching. Whenever it plays I’m brought mindful of Hang ‘Em High, a movie about an innocent man lynched by a pack of morons. He survives the ordeal and spends the rest of the movie exacting revenge. The thought of Clint Eastwood blowing Toby Keith’s head off fills my heart with cheer.

Friends in Low Places – Several years ago a terrible thing rose out of Fenway and spread across the land: the unofficial ballpark song. After discovering that the bean-eating throngs loved to sing along with “Sweet Caroline,” the Red Sox powers-that-be saw to it that it was played at every game. Fortunately for the Royals’ faithful, we didn’t get saddled with Neil Diamond. Unfortunately for us, we got saddled with Garth Brooks. Once a game beers are placed temporarily in cup holders so everyone can wrap arms around one another and sway back and forth to the charming tale of some drunken bozo who ruins his ex’s social event.

I hit this one hard last year, so I’ll sum up by standing on my previous statements.