Super Movies! The one that was the first Disney superhero movie

 

Title: The Rocketeer

What Year?: 1991

Classification: Runnerup/ Mashup

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

In the last month or so, I’ve been going through the process of evaluating which of my review features to continue. For this feature in particular, what I quickly recognized is that, despite the theme and a number of very early candidates, I never really had a plan for what to do. If anything, this feature has been about how eclectic “comic book” movies really are. In further pondering what I might want to do before wrapping this up, I had no trouble at all coming up with a lineup of movies, most of which I had had in mind for a very long time. In the midst of them, there was one more I thought of mostly because I had recently heard it mentioned elsewhere recently. On further consideration, I decided that this was indeed the one that the feature wouldn’t be complete without, all the more so as I considered its history. With that, I present The Rocketeer, a movie that kid me didn’t like.

Our story begins with our generically masculine hero Cliff going on a test flight of a plane that in real life killed almost everyone who ever flew it. Surprisingly, he only crashes after the plane is damaged in a gun battle between criminals and uncertainly identified law enforcement agents that ends with a fiery car crash on the runway. When Cliff and his mechanic buddy (not named Buddy, but it wouldn’t have been surprising) look around their hangar, they discover the bad guys left something behind, a shiny experimental rocket pack. Meanwhile, we meet Cliff’s love interest, Jenny, a struggling actress trying to get a role alongside a jerk movie star named Neville Sinclair. The shenanigans and mishaps continue as Cliff tries out the rocket pack and also gets Jenny fired. After a public rescue in costume, he acquires the name The Rocketeer, but also draws the attention of the bad guys, particularly a huge and nearly invulnerable goon named Lothar. They want the rocket pack, and soon they kidnap Jenny to get it. To save her, Cliff must go to face the leader of the bad guys- none other than the movie star Sinclair!

The Rocketeer was a 1991 movie by Disney/ Buena Vista, based on a comic by Dave Stevens first published in 1982. Stevens reportedly pitched a film based on his character to several studios before it was optioned by Disney around 1986, in parallel with several other comic/ superhero properties. The film was directed by ILM veteran Joe Johnston, following his successful debut with Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, with Billy Campbell in the title role, Jennifer Connelly as Jenny and Timothy Dalton as Sinclair. Other cast included Alan Arkin as the mechanic Peevy and former basketball player Tiny Ron Taylor as Lothar. The movie received a high-profile release and intensive merchandising, though plans for a toy line were cancelled by Disney. The film was a commercial disappointment, despite favorable critical reviews, earning $46.7 million against an estimated budget of up to $40M. A parody of the film was created for the Disney cartoon Talespin, titled “Bullethead Baloo”, which aired before the movie’s release.

Going to my experiences, I very clearly remember seeing this movie on VHS around the time of its original release. My strongest further recollection is that I was more impressed by the cartoon parody than the actual movie. When I got to thinking about it again, I ordered a Blu Ray rather than go through the wait for it to come through my Netflix queue. As I watched it, I found it strange and unsatisfying for reasons I couldn’t quite define, almost certainly the same reaction as I had as a kid. As I have worked out my thoughts for this review, what finally dawned on me is that this a movie that tries to evoke nostalgia for a bygone era without demonstrating any real understanding of it. The strange part about this is that there were in fact plenty of successful attempts through the 1980s and ‘90s either to revive 1930s properties or create original works set within the period: Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon, Darkman, even the revived Batman franchise, which effectively built up from the premise of an alternate universe where Art Deco never died. And then what gets most irritating is that I encountered and liked many of these works before and since, as well as plenty of stuff actually from the 1930s. (Stanley Weinbaum gets a name drop.) If I don’t like or “get” a movie like this, the problem cannot be just with me.

Turning to the movie itself, the obvious problems come out in the casting, with the Rocketeer/ Campbell being the most prominent casualty. This is admittedly very subjective, but I personally cannot get any sense of fun from the character or the actor. To make the obvious comparison, Indiana Jones spends more time screwing up than accomplishing anything, but it was always fun to watch Harrison Ford playing him. Just to show this isn’t arm-waving, I offer Arkin and especially Dalton for contrast, easily the best of the male cast and the two who most genuinely feel like they belong here. Lothar is an extra element that doesn’t work as well as it should; it’s all good fun, but the Rondo Hatton makeup is distracting and no more effective than the likes of Richard Kiel and Bill Heinzman were without it. But to me, the egregious offender is Connelly, who never does much more than coast along. Again, this is a personal call, but I find her even more devoid of energy and enthusiasm than Campbell, and the “chemistry” between them is even more bafflingly lacking. (I am aware they were apparently “involved” in real life, but I decline to comment on that.) I find all the more fault as she is quite possibly the best performer in the whole movie, yet I still can’t find at any moment when it seems like she wants to do anything but read her lines, collect her paycheck and get off the set.

With all that in mind, there are still problems well beyond what routine analysis can account for. This is where the critic really can’t get much further without looking at the comic, which I didn’t care to add to my time and expenses for one movie review. The gut feeling I get, however, is that this feels like what would happen if someone looked at any given comic book and drew exactly the wrong conclusions about the medium. It has all the action, the machines and costumes, even a fair amount of humor, but almost none of the vivid characters, the social commentary or moral values that make the best examples interesting. In parallel to these flaws is the simple fact that this was given to an effects guy, with the typical outcome (see Silent Running) of “good” effects that not only fail to make up for other problems but are themselves undermined by subtle flaws in framing and pacing. I could easily add a further rant about the James Horner soundtrack, which feels like Horner not just copying himself but deliberately watering it down. And that brings us to the elephant in the room, the almost incalculable “Disney” factor, in which almost everything feels as tame and slowed down as a kiddie ride.

Now I’m going longer than usual, and I still don’t have the “one scene”. Just by blind random, I’m going with our introduction to Dalton’s character. We find him on the set of what is presumably a historical adventure, matching blades and banter with a villain as a masked adventurer. There’s a full-fledged “meta” feel as Dalton hams up the role within a role, effectively enough that we could well believe this is how he would behave with or without cameras rolling. In the middle of it all, our Errol Flynn analog removes his mask for a dramatic reveal that draws a cry from the onlooking starlet, but of course means nothing to us. The defeat of the villain is quickly put out of the way so he can lay down innuendo on the leading lady. It’s exactly the kind of effective moment that makes a flawed movie more frustrating. It’s clear in this scene that those involved in the film understood the time and setting they were portraying. So why does the film as a whole keep failing to connect with the time and ultimately the audience.

In conclusion, this is where I would usually explain my rating. This time, however, all I can say is that I was genuinely surprised to give a rating this low to such a clearly competent production. The only movie I’ve covered so far that I can compare it to is Lady Snowblood, but unlike that movie, I feel no hesitation and even less regret. The deeper parallel is that both movies represent “should” have had no trouble connecting with me in particular. For all my life, I have appreciated 1930s media, both from the period and about it, possibly even more than Japanese cinema. The problem with this movie is not that I can’t appreciate what it is trying to do, but that it absolutely fails, to a degree that is only fully apparent if you know the period and source material as well as I do now. Even so, I can’t believe this was entirely lost on regular viewers and impressionable kids when the movie came out, or it wouldn’t have been struggling at the box office in the same timeframe where movies like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Batman were succeeding. The lesson is that authenticity matters, no matter how limited the audience’s frame of reference. And if you can’t do that, you’re better off doing something else.

Mystery Monday: Genericzilla knockoff???

 

It's the fifth week of the month, and it finally crossed my mind, I don't really need to do more movie reviews. Instead, I decided it was time for an extra installment of mysteries for a new acquisition I couldn't think of a better place for. In the last few weeks, I caught wind of something I hadn't seen before, and put in an order online. What I got is the dino/ creature featured above (with the Truckstop Queen and Duchess as usual), at face value a routine knockoff on the vein of Generic Godzilla. But, as we will see momentarily, things are stranger and more complicated than they look, and the trails might be more directly entangled. Moving forward, here's a few "unboxing" pics, or rather unwrapping.

When I ordered this guy, I had three pieces of information, reliable or otherwise. First, it was advertised as 9 inches tall, a figure some sellers with similar items hedged as 8". Second, it had no markings except "China". Third, it was speculated that it might be from Dormei, the same infamous manufacturer that made Generic Godzilla. I knew I wasn't getting to the bottom of this without a specimen in hand, and it was pleased with the unusual and vaguely attractive color scheme, so I ordered it for not a lot less than I paid for a full-sized Dormei original. Here's a pic of him straight out of the plastic.

What was moderately intriguing was that the figure came with the tail off. It could have been removed for shipping, but it seemed possible that this was in fact a "vintage" specimen that never got sold. That raised the further possibility that the plastic wrapping was original shipping material, but I didn't see any signs that it was particularly old. What was most significant by far was that the socket for the tail looked quite a bit like that of Genericzilla. Here's a couple more pics.

Something else I determined on further examination was that the figure as about 8.5 inches, which happened to be pretty close to the "authorized" but not very good Godzillas made by Imperial in the 1970s and/ or early '80s. Given that context, there was a definite potential tie to Dormei. While I consider it doubtful that they were the manufacturer (apart from anything else, they put their name on things way too goofy for this to be the one they covered their tracks for), there is a very good chance that both makers knew each other's handiwork. As a further experiment, I detached an arm for inspection, which I knew I could do without ill effects on the Dormei specimen. It turned out to be harder than expected, mainly because of considerably softer material, but it wasn't too hard to remove and reattach. It turned out, if anything, that it looked even more like Dormei.

When I play with Godzilla, he can actually get hurt!

One more thing I decided to look into was the "original" Dormei Genericzilla, a variant I acquired when I posted about it last Spring. As I noted at the time, he had a head a lot more similar to the actual Toho design, especially in the 1970s. On examining them side by side, I found them too similar to be simple coincidence, insofar as even finer details on the snout match up. I'd have to watch a few Godzilla movies to decide if it can be accounted for by a common source. Here's a comparison shot and a closeup.

And, while I'm at it, here's a back shot. This is where we get into unusual territory. The spiky stuff on Godzilla's back are a distinctive feature I never quite worked out as a kid, and notably absent from many knockoffs/ bootlegs. Here, the protuberances, sometimes described as "shark fins", aren't close enough to be in litigious territory any deeper than it was already, but remain strikingly elaborate, especially with the triple rows. Incidentally, one of the lesser spines on the tail outright broke off, which should show in the pics.

And that's the end of the trail, for the moment. Having examined this carefully, I believe that it could if anything be older than the Dormei Genericzillas. What's decisive in my mind is the nearly indescribable feel, rough and almost powdery. (The skin texture is one more thing a lot more like the source material.) I tried looking for more info, but found only more online listings with no more information than I could figure out. One thing that was evident is that these things cost way too much not to be relatively rare, to the point that some are actually priced higher than Dormei Genericzillas. What made things more interesting is that there are some strange mutations out there still clearly based on the same molds. Here's my favorite.

Generic Godzilla or generic Gigan?

And it wouldn't be complete without a lineup, this time with the Walmart giant robot and the Robotech Red Guy!

And now I'm calling it a night. That's all for now, more to come!

Featured Creature, The one Stan Winston couldn't save

 

Title: Congo

What Year?: 1995

Classification: Runnerup

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

In the course of my reviews, something I have increasingly pondered is that the 1990s have been coming up as a locus for lists of “worst” movies, conspicuously Troll 2.  It’s enough to raise the question, were the 1990s a unique time for “bad” movies, or is this just a matter of shifting memory? What I find even more intriguing is, were science fiction films really better or worse than the “mainstream” films of the decade? As a case in point, I decided to cover a movie I’ve been somewhat surprised to discover has attracted notoriety. By sheer coincidence, it also happens to be yet another ape movie. Here is Congo, a movie based on a Michael Crichton novel that would probably have been forgotten if not for Jurassic Park.

Our story begins with a standard ill-fated expedition, led by a familiar face. We then meet Karen, a take-charge lady scientist sent to find out what happened, and Peter, a researcher who has tried teaching sign language to apes. The pair connect when Peter’s star pupil, a gorilla named Amy, paints a picture of her original home, a ruined city somewhere in the African jungle. That’s enough to attract the interest of Karen’s boss and a seedy Romanian you wouldn’t buy a used Yugo from, who believe that it’s a clue to the location of an ancient diamond mine. It’s further revealed that these diamonds aren’t just rocks with artificially-inflated prices, but valuable material for communications technology. With money from the Romanian and further help from an African guide, they make their way through the perils of the jungle and a post-colonial warzone. But their prize is still ahead- and guarded by mutated apes bred and trained to kill all intruders!

Congo was a 1995 film by Paramount Pictures, based on a 1980 novel by Michael Crichton (see Futureworld and Andromeda Strain). The film was given a $50 million budget and a range of high level talent, including a score by Jerry Goldsmith, effects from ILM and Stan Winston, and a cast led by Laura Linney as Karen and Ernie Hudson of Ghostbusters as the guide. Other cast included Tim Curry as the Romanian Homolka,  and B-movie stalwart Bruce Campbell as the leader of an il-fated expedition. The film differed from the book in removing a rival corporation and certain references to interbreeding between humans and apes. The movie received extensive merchandising, including a tie-in “Volcano Burrito” (?!) from Taco Bell. The movie made a reasonable $152M box office, but received negative reviews and long-term ridicule. It has remained available on disc and for streaming.

For my experiences, this is a relatively rare movie I recall seeing in the theater and not much else, which by now should be a red-alert siren. The real core of my memories is reading Michael Crichton in the late 1980s and/ or early 1990s, which in itself is a good introduction to this movie’s problems. Of the books I read then, the first was certainly Jurassic Park (see my Retro Raptors dino blog), and the next would have been Sphere, which was in many ways even better. (What the Hell happened with the movie for that one can wait for another day.) After that distinguished pair, the best I read back then would be The Terminal Man. By comparison, Congo was mostly an entertaining curiosity, combining Crichton’s techno-thriller formula with the jungle-adventure genre. Its better points arose from the thematic collision of corporate greed and post-colonial politics. Its weaknesses centered on science that was sketchy even for the 1980s, particularly the insinuation of human/ ape interbreeding (see Ingagi) and the uncritical acceptance of primate language. In hindsight, those who greenlit the movie went in with what was already a dated and problematic property, and quickly made things worse on very front.

With all that said up front, I have to add that this movie went a long way to stay on my good side, to the point that I gave it an extra viewing and found it more favorable. Its greatest real handicap, common to belated adaptations, is that it feels like it’s imitating sources that really came out later than the source material, particularly Aliens and Jurassic Park. It’s made up for by good dialogue and characters. The most watchable and flat-out entertaining moments are from Hudson, who comes across as knowledgeable and competent without leaning on overdone animist spirituality. (His accent is puzzle in itself.) Inevitably, Curry chews on the scenery, yet eventually manages to present a nuanced character, a man with a boy’s dreams still under the cynical surface. Needless to say, the actual leads are far less impressive, especially Peter. The most actively irritating scenes all come from half-hearted efforts to introduce romantic tension, the one thing that Crichton refreshingly avoided. There’s a further disappointment in the thought of what might have been if Campbell had received a bigger role, especially in the finale, which feels like an entire Evil Dead outing crammed into 30 minutes.

That leaves the apes, and this is where things get dodgy. It’s still not generally known how much Hollywood relied on misleading substitutions in portrayals of the apes, a conceit that was in fact forced by the dangerous temperament of actual adults of almost all species. (That right there should have been a red flag for the interbreeding myth.) In that context, this movie was a monumental breakthrough, but in hindsight, it invites harsher judgment than it deserves. Amy (credited to both Lola Noh and Misty Rosas) is a fine demonstration of practical effects, with the only problem being that she looks a bit small. While there are certain moments that overdo the cute (especially a mindboggling smoking sequence), she is on the whole less anthropomorphic than in the books. It’s the hostile hybrid apes that fare worse than can be easily explained. The best thing to be said is that they move very convincingly, something only stop-motion masters had ever done before, and it’s especially unnerving to see the whole group emerge en masse. The big problem is the design, which is a profound missed opportunity. Crichton’s concept, loopy as it was, could have been absolutely terrifying if done right, perhaps as simply as a scaled-up bonobo. Instead, we literally get “ugly gorillas”, more pitiful than menacing in closeups.

For the “one scene” I really wanted to do a different scene I will give honorable mention, a terrifying hippo encounter around the midpoint. But the one I cannot avoid is the volcanic eruption that interrupts the finale, simply because it does virtually everything wrong. My standing rant on this subject is that the Hollywood fascination with lava is like worrying about getting lead poisoning from a machine gun. It's as hot as a blast furnace with the viscosity of wet cement; in a significant eruption, the odds are you’d be dead long before the stuff got anywhere near you. Here, we don’t even get the buildup of lava oozing down the mountainside. Instead, it bursts through the walls of the underground lair like it was coming out of a burst water main, interrupting the final battle. What’s amusing is that there’s still ample time for both the apes and humans to retreat (not that it would do them any good). The main characters use the opportunity to make a standard dramatic escape. The hybrids, on the other hand, manage to lose several of their number, then start actually throwing themselves into the flow like defeated samurai committing sepuku. And this is the part nobody gets right, as lava is much too dense for anything to sink, and far too hot for any organic matter but bone to survive even momentarily…

In closing, I have a little more to say about the rating. A non-trivial reason I decided to review this movie at all is that I haven’t yet given a “bad” review under this feature. Even with that context, I figured in advance that it would get no better or worse than what I have given it. After taking a look at the movie itself, I came close to relenting and bumping it higher, particularly with Hudson’s performance factored in. It’s the kind of thing I often do for movies that have acquired a negative reputation (see Memoirs of An Invisible Man).  This is a case, however, where the critics were duly provoked even if they weren’t strictly “right”. This wasn’t a troubled or controversial production like Brainstorm or the 1990s Dr. Moreau, but on the contrary, one that was made under virtually ideal conditions. That in itself is the surest proof that this movie could and should have been better, and  enough for me  to treat it harder than I might. And with that, I’m done.

Crypto Corner: Microchip Madness???

 

It’s the middle of an “off” week, and I’ve been debating what to do. I decided it was time for another round of Forteana, and I decided to do a subject I’ve been meaning to get to elsewhere. Lately, the crazy has been ramping up around theories that vaccines are being used to implant microchips, and the more curious claim that vaccination somehow produces a form of magnetism. The latter idea in particular is just loopy enough to fall in the realm of anomalism, so I’m diving right in.

The first and relatively routine thing to note is that the conspiracy theorists suppose technology that is well beyond anything known or likely in the present. Per an insightful assessment at The Atlantic (see here to get around a paywall threshold), there are known devices that are claimed to be injectable through a hypodermic needle that do satisfy the requirements of a self-powered transmitter rather than a more routine passive device. But there remain significant obstacles, particularly the functionality of the power supply (incidentally one application where Matrix-style bioelectricity makes sense). What this really means is equipment that costs thousands and would take years to improve and test. But what’s really noteworthy is that it’s not at all clear that a test as simple as the theorists imagine would work. First, the thing to test with is a magnet, not a piece of metal, which some have done but many have not. Second, you would have to find the exact spot where the implant came to rest, which would be potentially unpredictable even if you could find the original injection site (a non-trivial problem with the whole proposition). Third, miniature electronics would mostly be made of copper and silica, which normally wouldn’t stick to a magnet. Finally, anything with enough iron or steel to attract a magnet would probably set off a metal detector, which in itself is usually enough to leave real-world authorities annoyed.

That leaves the question why objects would stick to human skin. The simplest explanations all involve trickery or at least “fudging”, such as applying saliva to the skin or the object before performing the test or simply having the object fall off after a limited time. More unambiguous demonstrations might involve genuine biological anomalies, particularly abnormally high perspiration and/ or natural oils and other secretions. In theory, there might even be actual magnetic anomalies from elevated iron levels in the blood, though it would probably take virtually more iron than blood to produce a noticeable effect. As usual, this would invite a spectrum of actors, from the willfully fraudulent to the sincerely misled, plus a certain number of pranksters perhaps aiming to debunk or mock the phenomenon. The most telling cases are those who have sought out doctors or scientists with every sign of sincerity for an explanation why objects “stick to their bodies.

The real question, of course, is whether this has been going on all along. In fact, it’s not even hard to find decades of investigation on “magnetic” people. Typical representative cases (notably from the files of the late James Randi) are virtually identical to the recent plague of online videos (covered in Forbes of all places). All that needs to be noted is that neutral observers have easily shown that the phenomenon “works” equally well whether the object is magnetic, ferrous, or entirely non-metallic. Looking further afield, there is a reasonable body of research on whether humans are able to detect magnetic fields, so far inconclusive at best. At the very edges, one might consider the many accounts of UFO witnesses who encounter scrambled radio and TV signals and other malfunctioning devices before during and after their encounters. If one is willing to consider biological electromagnetism at all, then the possibility opens up that this has more to do with the witness than the putative Fortean entities they observe. Also from the same realm come those who recount receiving invasive implants from paraterrestrial abusers, in certain very odd cases found to correspond to benign growths, accidentally ingested objects, and other harmless medical anomalies.

This brings us back to the truly central phenomenon, the pervasive belief of conspiracy theorists that they are themselves being “watched” by known or unknown government entities. The grim reality that has long plagued the Fortean community is that those attracted to unusual phenomena include a very high proportion of unstable personalities. It’s all too plausible that they would attract at least passing scrutiny from law enforcement and other authorities, but they are equally apt to perceive MIBs and other entities as elusive or subjective as UFOs and sasquatch. In this context, the only thing novel in the antivaxxers’ conceptual architecture is the back-breaking inversion of logic. Rather than apply their resources to the debatable task of monitoring the cranks and crazies, it’s suddenly the compliant and law-abiding citizens that the “authorities” want to track down to the smallest step, regardless of how they could possibly compile and analyze such a vast quantity of data. And they can’t think of a better way than implanting tens and hundreds of millions with experimental technology that might or might not literally explode on the first encounter with an MRI machine. That way lies madness, but also the self-centeredness that is the other side of the same coin to paranoia.

With that, I’m wrapping this up. It’s a short piece, yet exactly as much as the subject that Back when I was first getting into self-publishing and blogging, I covered anti-vax nonsense on something like a full time basis. Coming back to it now, I find that I take to it quickly, but I equally quickly lose patience. It’s a lingering blight of our culture that we can no longer afford to believe will simply go away. The brighter side is that in the current crisis, the media are finally listening to us. And now I’m calling it a night.

Featured Creature: The one that's an anthro murder mystery

 

Title: Link aka Link The Butler

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Mashup/ Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

In considering the possibilities for this feature, the biggest challenge has been defining an if possible limiting the scope of it. So far, my rule of thumb has been to stay outside the 1970s-‘80s timeframe I chose for my Space 1979 feature. However, I have definitely planned to cover some of the 1980s films I never got to elsewhere. With this review, I’m starting with a case and point, an egregiously representative ‘80s movie that I still never found to fit in with the runnerups and knockoffs of my previous feature. As we will see, this is first and foremost because of its unquestionable and audacious originality. Here is Link, possibly cinema’s only full-fledged anthropology horror film.

Our story begins with a roving POV shot of a nighttime city street, as the unseen stalker chases a cat and peers into a second-floor apartment. We then meet a college student named Jane and her professor Philip, a very British primatologist who doesn’t so much express sexism and colonialism as leave them an unspoken given. Jane is soon invited to come to the professor’s country estate, where he keeps a trio of primates as something between pets, servants and adopted children. The professor introduces her to his oldest and dominant charge, a former circus ape named Link who has willingly adopted wearing clothes and also learned to use matches. Tensions start to rise as Jane questions Philip’s harsh treatment of the apes and his critical assessment of their intelligence. Things take a strange and uncomfortable turn when the professor suddenly disappears, leaving Jane to manage the apes. As Link grows more unruly, she soon realizes that he is a danger both to the other animals and to humans. When her boyfriend and his buddies show up, Link goes on the warpath. Can Jane escape, or has the ape finally bested mankind?

Link was a British horror film made by EMI Films, a media conglomerate that had associated with MGM and Columbia. The production was directed by Australian filmmaker Richard Franklin, who optioned a story outline for the film in 1979 but did not obtain funding until after his success with the 1983 film Psycho II. The film starred American Elizabeth Shue as Jane following a breakthrough appearance in Karate Kid, with British veteran Terence Stamp as the professor. The title character/ creature Link was written as a chimp but portrayed by an orangutan known as Locke, with significant makeup and prosthetics used to change the appearance of the non-African ape. Jerry Goldsmith provided a score for the movie, noted for its similarities to his earlier score for Gremlins. The finished film was released in the US by (I hate my life) the Cannon Group, with significant cuts. The movie was reviewed by Cinemassacre in 2018, while the film was difficult to obtain except on VHS. In 2019, the film was released on DVD and Blu Ray by Kino Lorber, featuring a 103-minute cut apparently used for earlier VHS releases with additional “deleted” scenes as bonus features.

For my experiences, this is one of a fair number of films I first heard of from Cinemassacre (see Tourist Trap). I bought and viewed it in early 2020, after I had started this blog but before I got things in gear. It stood out in my memory as an odd movie that “should” have connected with me a lot more than it did, and a viewing for this review only emphasized how odd and uncomfortable it is. It’s classified as “horror”, but if anything, it’s a bit too “mainstream” for that, and the same applies even more so for science fiction. The “feel” I pick up from it is a Victorian murder mystery where several of the suspects happen to be non-human. It’s this pool of influence that best accounts for its surprisingly effective satirical tone, and also its curiously mild content, which is well within PG-13 or even “70s PG” levels, uncomfortable nudity and all. The sledgehammer blow that comes out of the cloud of fluff is a post-modern tone that rivals The Thing. Several key plot point, including the fate of the professor and one of the apes, only get murkier with analysis and repeat viewings. It’s all the more disconcerting that this is achieved with none of the supposedly “hallucinogenic” tricks of more routine genre films. As traditionalists like George Romero demonstrated all along, linear narration and camerawork show terror and madness better than trendy jump cuts and  random shock imagery ever did.

That still leaves the apes themselves. The elephant in the room here is that the movie clearly draws on dated and overoptimistic appraisals of primate intelligence. Here, as in many things, there is at least ambiguity. The apes at times seem a little too good at communicating their thoughts in human terms, but then the human characters, including the Homo-supremacist professor, consistently speak to them in normal English. There’s a further sense of a malign positive feedback loop with the professor, who treats them with contempt that he hides in his lectures to the students, but never quite descends into sadism for its own sake. What gets most intriguing is Link’s evident ability to hide his handiwork or play dumb. His appearance and mannerisms are disarming, almost certainly more so than a “real” adult chimp would be. That is enough to get away with several apparent mishaps that look ominous in hindsight, like the comical destruction of one of the manor’s only phones, but again, we never get a clear answer. The most unnerving development, albeit dictated the mystery conceit, is that he quickly learns to hide the bodies of humans and animals that he has killed, suggesting that he has some notion of human law and government. Things get even more darkly amusing when a surviving ape named Imp urges Jane to kill him, ultimately raising a little doubt how many of the deaths and misdeeds are committed by Link alone. 

At this point, I feel I must go a bit longer to discuss the finale and the buildup to it. The big plot twist is the disappearance of the professor, early and abrupt enough that it’s counterintuitively difficult to pinpoint when it actually happens. That is followed by the appearance of an animal trader and exterminator, worth further note as the one character who is clearly free from an anthropomorphic and romantic view of the apes. It’s at this point that the tone becomes disjointed, in no small part because of Jane’s irritating naivete. We get comical moments that still fit the discomforting mood as she locks Link outside like a disobedient pet. Things outwardly go into high gear once the college students/ creature fodder arrive (for once all male!), but to me, what follows mostly undermines what has so far been an intriguing and subtle movie. Part of the problem is certainly that the filmmakers still don’t step up to the level of action and outright carnage that would “earn” the R rating they got anyway. But there’s also a deeper sense that the movie never catches up with itself, and it shows especially in the Goldsmith score (see the Deep Rising soundtrack review). It’s good, as it should be, but what was lively and fittingly mischievous at the start never adjusts to the quite dark events that unfold (including what is surely an homage to King Kong). At a certain point, it starts to feel like the composer was given a pitch for a different movie than was actually made, which judging from the track record of novelizations might well be what happened.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and this time, I’m going with a “deleted” scene. I have to say be way of introduction that the DVD includes a startling 24 minutes of footage, of which I find only two or three that would definitely have improved the film as a whole. The last and most impressive finds the professor and Jane arguing more forcefully than usual about primate intelligence and how the researchers treat them. (I suspect this is “out of order”, since an immediately preceding scene already has the professor absent.) The professor, who previously told his students that apes can perform at a human level on intelligence tests, now asserts that even the best performance of an ape can still be equaled or bettered by a human child. Jane retorts that an ape might not “like” exercises on human terms. At this point, the professor starts pulling plastic fruit out of what will be a fateful cabinet. He finally fumes, “We tried with real fruit, and let him eat what he got right”, obviously with no improvement. It’s one of the more thoughtful and (unfortunately) accurate reflections on the problems of non-human intelligence to come out of the minor wave of ‘80s ape movies, and one doesn’t have to agree with the professor to understand the pure frustration.

In conclusion, I feel like I need to explain why I have spent this much time on a movie with a mixed review. It should already be clear that this is a film with enough flaws and good points for a much longer analysis than this. In the proverbial light of day, the strongest indication of its quality and relevance is that its flaws remain as insightful as its strengths. It is worth further note as a film that changing social attitudes alone have ensured could never be made again. It is a good film, certainly worth the time and effort to watch, but perhaps just as well to rent or borrow rather than buy. With that, I am calling it a day.

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Pterosaurs!

 

In planning out the blog for this month, I semi-seriously debated whether to depart from a certain formula I have in place for balancing the movie reviews with toy/ collectible posts (plus fiction and "miscellaneous" content), in which I alternate between 3 to 2 or 2 to 3 for every full week of posts. What settled things in my mind was that if I didn't do a "2 to 3" week, I was probably going to end up skipping this feature for the month. So, I went ahead, and to kid myself into thinking this will be short, I decided to do a revisit of some earlier material, specifically the most famous dinos that aren't dinosaurs, the pterosaurs. To start off, here's a few pics I flat-out forgot to put in the 1/72 Dino Riders post last month, of a pteranodon-type pterosaur with the usual rider and weapons.

What most interested me about this one is that incorporates an idea I have thought about on and off myself. In fantasy and the pulp/ space opera style of science fiction, including the original Dino Riders toys and cartoon, characters riding winged creatures are almost always mounted on top like a rider on a horse (already a little tricky with a camel). It always seemed to me that there are a lot of reasons this doesn't make sense, even apart from the question of whether a conventionally biological flying creature could carry a human-sized payload. It would in every way work as well or better to suspend the pilot underneath, a configuration already used in hang gliders. There's less drag, especially in a prone position. It moves the pilot and the supports for the "saddle" away from the wing surfaces and the creature's center of mass. If the pilot is armed, there's far less risk of hitting the creature by accident. Finally, if the worst happens and the pilot gets ejected, there's a chance the creature could catch him with its hindlimbs before he falls to his death (assuming, of course, that it doesn't want him to). With that all in mind, this little thing isn't the best demonstration, in no small part because the frame and weapons are bulkier than they need to be, but remain an interesting departure from convention. Here's a closeup, and a pic with the patchisaur pteranodon.

"Up, up and... well, off the ground is a start."

Since this was a bit thin, I decided to include another guy, purchased not too long ago used. I've shown pics in certain forums where another user was able to trace this to a specific company somewhere in China, but I don't care to run it down again. What made it intriguing enough to buy is that it's large and detailed, yet still looks "off" on several points of anatomy. The strangest part is the teeth, which would more realistically be uniform in size and shape, yet, the wonky fangs do match well enough with Eudimorphodon, one of the earliest and most unusual pterosaurs we know anything about. Here's a few pics of him.

With that, I'm ready to wrap this up, but first, a reprise of the patchisaur pteranodon. I commented in the Deiner dino post that it was surprisingly innovative to show hair on a pterosaur in the 1970s, With that context in mind, the ubiquitous patchi is even more mindboggling. If, as I believe, it was first made along with the more notorious patchisaurs, it dates from very early '70s. Already, even at this level, we see insulating hair portrayed. But then we have the inexplicable feathers, which don't even match the underside of the wing. This is the beauty of bootleg/ knockoff dinosaurs. They can be silly, goofy and willfully inaccurate, but it's even more impressive when they do something right.

That's all for now, more to come!

No Good Very Bad Movies 2: The one that was unmovied by everybody

 

Title: Ingagi

What Year?: 1930

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

In considering the possibilities for this feature, what I kept running into is a fundamental weakness of the “worst” movie list: For any given place and time, the most incompetent and worthless art end up either forgotten, failed or simply destroyed with the passage of time. With this in mind, I knew if I did go down this road, I would have to do something with “lost” films, already the subject of my extensive unwritten “unmovie” file (see… Fantastic Four?). Inevitably, I already had one particular film at the very top of my list, one I had even mentioned (and misspelled) in the course of an earlier review. It happens to be not just a possible lost movie, but a box office smash, a notorious hoax, and one of the most actively censored and suppressed films in U.S. history. Here is Ingagi, a film that tried to pass off porn as anthropology using other people’s footage, and possibly inspired King Kong in the bargain.

Our story begins with a text crawl introducing a very important and certainly not completely made-up expedition to the darkest parts of unexplored Africa, apparently narrated by the most irritatingly banal voice money could buy. What follows is an hour of grainy African tribal rituals, wildlife footage that’s actually interesting, suspiciously pristine shots of the expedition in camp and animals that don’t live in Africa, and several supposedly dramatic animal attacks that are clearly staged since none of the lions try to kill the narrator. It all builds up to the final 20 minutes, in which we see pygmies, unclothed native women, a strange hairy child, and finally, a woman offered to a gorilla as either a sacrifice or a bride!

Ingagi was a 1930 exploitation/ erotic film released by a studio identified as Congo Pictures, and presented as a documentary of an expedition in which at least one crew member had been killed. In fact, the vast majority of the film’s footage was taken without permission from earlier sources, particularly an otherwise lost 1915 film titled Heart of Africa. Investigations showed that sequences purporting to show interbreeding between African natives and apes were created with a suited actor identified as Charles Gemora and local African-American women hired to appear nude as “half-human” natives. Its controversial claims and content led to investigations and condemnation by the FTC, the Better Business Bureau and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (later the MPA), but apparently not from the NAACP or other civil rights organizations. The film was ultimately suppressed, in part by further copyright infringement litigation, after grossing an estimated unadjusted $4 million box office from at least 7 and possibly more than 10 million tickets sold. Further rumors held that it influenced RKO’s decision to make King Kong. It was long considered “lost” or at least inaccessible, though prints were known or reported to exist in the Library of Congress and elsewhere. A Blu Ray of the complete film was released by Kino Lorber in January 2021.

I can’t say when I first heard of this movie, though it was definitely in connection with Kong. What has kept me vaguely fascinated is how obviously false its premises were. The perception of apes as potential man-eaters and symbols of primal savagery was suspect enough; from what we know now, the chimp is omnivorous enough to give substance to certain dark tales, but then, they are the one ape most like us. The notion or even suggestion that humans and apes might interbreed was ridiculous at face value. Even an illiterate farmer would presumably know that a horse and a donkey can only produce a sterile mule, and the equines are more like each other than a chimp is to a human. (And, as scientists are fond of pointing out, a shaved chimp would look lily-white…) Yet, I can think of dead-serious speculation on the subject into the 1970s at least. It was enough to keep me monitoring the usual channels for any sign that this film might become available. When I finally found it online for free, I was ready to go, and if there’s one thing I can say without hesitation, it’s that I got my money’s worth.

At this point, I am once again straining for words. This movie is easily among the top 5 or 10 worst things I have ever watched, and the one thing I can think of off the top of my head that I might put on an equal footing is the Battletoads TV pilot. The difference, of course, is that entries of that ilk can be put away in twenty-some minutes, whereas this is close to an hour and a half, and it was shown and publicly advertised in the USA. I can easily believe that this is the worst English-language feature film to survive at all, and making the usual adjustments for context actually makes it more appalling. Again, this wasn’t a foreign TV show or an indie porno flying under the radar, but a top-earning film. Watching this movie with its history in mind is like wandering into an alternate universe where Inseminoid is getting a franchise reboot.

And of course, that still isn’t talking about the movie. I can laugh as I’m writing this, but I cannot say emphatically enough, there is absolutely no fun factor in watching the actual film. It’s like the Midas touch in reverse, taking elements that should be tolerable if not entertaining and turning them into a grueling ordeal that feels like a time dilation. The narration is the obvious spearhead of the assault on the senses and sanity, spouting off pretentious hype and eventually preposterous lies without any trace of the energetic, nudging hokum that a PT Barnum or a real-life Carl Denham could have brought to the affair. But the choice of footage can’t be underestimated, either. There’s a little entertainment value in picking out the benign errors and fabrications, like alligators mixed in with the crocs, the bestial orangutans and “flesh-eating” armadillos that aren’t even from Africa, and the preposterously unthreatening “tortadillo”. But then there’s the insulting finale, an entire hour in, where you can barely make out anything except that the gorilla somehow looks smaller than the human actors. In many ways, however, the most distasteful of many moments are the tribal rituals. It all feels undignified as well as suspect, and the offense is greatly magnified by the narrator.

That leaves me with “one scene”, and I definitely had one in mind. A little over 20 minutes into this “Heart of Darkness” slog, we have the first of far too many festive scenes of tribal life, in this case women preparing food with something like butter churns. What makes it moderately interesting is that there are children wandering around. Strikingly, the ones who aren’t otherwise occupied very consistently look directly at the camera. It’s enough for the enlightened and introspective viewer to ponder just how alien westerners with camera equipment would have been to tribal people, and just how discomforting it would have been to go through the motions of their lives in front of the travelers’ machine. Then, just in case you were wondering if this was somehow seeping through to the people behind the film, one of the woman bends over, and the narrator sees fit to remark that the natives are “quite shapely”, as if this was in itself a remarkable discovery. (There’s another point where a similar “compliment” is bestowed on native men!) It perfectly distills the whole feel of the movie, smugly hinting that this is a progressively hip take on racial relations, when in reality,  it comes across like the auctioneer at a slave market.

In conclusion, I come as usual to the rating. Make no mistake, this movie is not just bad, but insulting, vile, and outright evil in its own small and ignorant way. Yet, to hold these things against it feels like blaming a dung beetle for eating dung. This kind of movie isn’t simply a product of its time, but the perfect and honest summation of it, and as such, it is the abyss that stares back at those who stare too long into it. It can be further said that it makes even the small steps of the era stand out as leaps forward, like the casting of Nobel Johnson as the witch doctor in King Kong, a reasonably dignified role for a fine actor and a real-life activist who had founded his own studio to give African-Americans better representation in Hollywood. In the verdict of history, the movie deserved to be lost, but the world still deserves to have it. With that, I for one am done with it.

The Adventures of Sidekick Carl Part 11!

 I'm back with another installment of Sidekick Carl. As usual, here's links for the first and previous installments, and while I'm at it the scene I put in just to introduce the character. By the way, I found the full quote featured below, but stayed with what I had.

The eyes were what showed, huge and brightly, deeply red, filling the silhouette that was the face. “I am Abl C’Doen,” the voice said. “I come from a world beyond time and space as you know it. I can bestow great wisdom upon you, or I can do great harm. All I ask for is that you follow my instructions when I call upon you… you, your successors, and perhaps your children. And there will be a limit, at least once, as many as three times, and then you will again be free to do as you please.” Three men looked at each other, one in a wheelchair, one with a mustache, and a third who drank from a flask. It was the man in the wheelchair who nodded…

Then the cartoon blinked out as the TV turned off. A woman, the same who had given her husband coordinates for Dana Schachter’s RV, turned away with a sigh. “Nonsense,” she said. “That’s not how it happened at all…”

* * *

By the time the intruder showed signs of regaining consciousness, Carl and Dana had him tied up with a cable from a winch at the front of her RV. “His name is Ivan Trepan,” Carl said. He was back in his jumpsuit and helmet. “He worked as a specialist in reverse engineering. What he really did was hacking, industrial espionage and the occasional burglary. One of his clients paid him to find out what a competitor who did contracting for the Agency was really working on. We never did find out ourselves. Something to do with quantum particles. He found a machine, then he turned it on, and the next anyone knew, the building was turned inside out. A team from the Agency went in, to figure out what happened. They assumed anyone who had been in there was already dead, until one of them saw a Deinonychus…”

“Yeah,” Dana said, “I remember the cartoon, now that I think about it. Did you really fight him? Does he know you, I mean, from back then?”

He leaned in to examine the captive. He was very overweight, and clearly heavily built to begin with. “He fought a lot of heroes,” he said. “Constructor and I were the first. He was on his own, probably just trying to figure out what he’d become. We captured him, but then he escaped. Constructor fought him two, maybe three times after that. I was along twice. By then, he went back to being paid help. He worked for Audrey, the Raven, a few others. The last was probably Colonel Stryker… At least, we couldn’t think of any other way a renegade Marine got a pygmy hippo to guard his control room. It was Captain Thunder who beat him that time, if it was him. After that blew over, he dropped out, just gone. Constructor figured he turned into something nobody would be looking for.” He pulled the figure upright and stared at his face.

“So,” Dana interrupted, “I don’t suppose he’s the kind who would come out of hiding just to settle an old grudge.”

“No,” Carl said, a little more thoughtfully. “Absolutely not. He’s a goon, pure and simple. Just with more power and brains than usual.”

Dana leaned forward to look into his eyes. “Can we hold him?” she said. “Without killing him?”

“Well, whatever he does isn’t like the cartoons,” Carl said. “For one thing, he can only imitate warm-blooded vertebrates, and he needs to touch it or see it first. He can’t just turn into something make-believe like a griffin or a unicorn, either, or at least he never pulled it off. For another, he can’t use the transformation to heal an injury; hurt him in one form, he’ll still be hurt when he turns into something else. The big thing is, he can’t do anything about his mass; nothing can mess with that. If he turned into an elephant or a rat, it would be as heavy as he is, and proportioned accordingly. And that’s how he got the way he is. At first, he was only a little over 200 pounds; dangerous, but not too much for a big-league superhuman. He had to put on weight so he could turn into bigger things. He must’ve been over 500 pounds, before he disappeared… Thinking about it now, Constructor must have been wondering about the dirk cat in the Angeles zoo came from, after he spent months searching the same country…”

At that, Ivan finally raised his head and opened his eyes. “Okay, you got me,” he rasped. “Was the dirk cat in the zoo. Perfect cover, if you think about it.”

“Carl,” Dana said, “can I help?”

“Get in the RV,” Carl said. “Start the engine. Put the gear in reverse.”

“Damn,” Ivan rumbled. “You always were the cold one. For what it’s worth… Constructor prob’ly wasn’t wrong. Did my own search, before I got caught. Needed to know, in case they ever got a female for a breeding program. Found scents, tracks, bones, eventually. Might’ve been 30 years old, then. Maybe more, not less.”

Carl dropped to a crouch. “You know what I want,” he said. “If it came to that, it’s more important to me than keeping you here. Who sent you?”

Ivan only laugh. “You said yourself, I’m a goon with brains,” he said. “Smart goons don’t talk.”

“I suppose not,” Carl said. “Any chance you’d tell me how the client found you?”

Ivan tried to scratch, in a way that only made sense for a cat. “Found me in the zoo,” he said. “Told me they knew who I was, said the zookeepers were going to find out. I already knew. They gave me a ride, said they had a job.”

“They,” Carl said.

Ivan laughed again. “It’s always `they’,” he said. “They come and go, they can fall and be replaced, but the powers and principalities of theyness always remain.”

“Bill the Galactic Hero, by Harry Harrison,” Carl said. “Not exact, but not bad after 8 years in a zoo. So… did they say why?”

“They didn’t know,” Ivan said. “Or knew, and still didn’t understand. I could tell.”

As he spoke, Carl looked up uneasily. There was a sound, still faint. His gaze snapped back to the captive. “But there was more, wasn’t there?” he said. “You may be the kind who asks why, but you wouldn’t do anything without the `how’. You tried to kill me before, and never even came that close. You would have told them just how hard it is to kill me, if they didn’t already know. So what did they give you, to convince you it was worth trying again?”

“Oh, they knew,” Ivan said. “Had data, from a dozen places. I was impressed. They had a diagram, too. Places the nanites could be slow to respond, centers of nanite production, possible power sources…”

Carl shook his head. “There had to be more,” he said. “You were sent because you could try the brute force approach and still get away if it didn’t work. And, of course, you won’t talk. But the only real point  would be to figure out if they needed to try another way. Something new, something anyone who investigated would know had never been tried before…”

“Tell me something I didn’t know,” Ivan said.

Carl cocked his head slightly. “Dana,” he called out, “back up. Fast.” He could make out the frown on her face, even as she hit the gas.

He realized afterward that they hadn’t figured on the proportions. But all he saw was the head and neck growing longer and longer, so fast that the tightly bound torso contracted. That was when one arm and then another swung free, already rapidly expanding into enormous leathery wings. He dived into a fissure in the rock, just before a bill as log as he was tall could run him through. As he stared up, the creature seemed to freeze in mid-air. A loop of the cable was still around its foot. The creature gave a shriek of clear desperation, then it pulled free. Dana had gone 100 yards before she brought the RV to a halt.

Carl rose and turned, in time to see an armored figure step into the path of the distant headlights. A visor snapped up. “Damn it, Carl,” the agent said, “couldn’t you wait for backup just once?”

“Actually, no,” Carl said. With that, he sat down on an outcropping, still staring up into the starry sky.