Futures Past: The Captain N comic book

 As I write this, I'm two months and counting in my sabbatical from blogging, and have also spent two weeks watching my retro gaming parody/ fan novel not sell, and bought a new computer for good measure. In the midst of all this, I got to thinking more about something I mentioned once before, a traumatic experience that scarred an entire generation. I speak, of course, of Captain N: The Game Master, a show even kids who were several years/ eons away from Batman: The Animated Series knew was kaka. And what really brought me back to it wasn't writing a 100,000-word novel, or buying a Samus figure for three times its retail price, but finding out there was a comic book. And by reputation, it is actually... good? Okay? Tolerable??? Clearly, I was going to have to investigate first-hand.

So, to back things up, I did indeed watch Captain N first-hand during its run, and as usual, I have some very distinct recollections  that I now know don't line up with the actual run of the show. I'm sure I saw it first during a vacation that could have been before I had a TV at home, a story arc I assumed was the pilot that I figured out would actually be episodes 4 and/ or 5. It could easily have been a year or more before I watched it again, on the same network affiliate where I first saw Darkwing Duck, in a slot that required getting up early to watch it at all. I can recall several of the more famed/ notorious episodes (including their Tetris one!), of which I'm sure all were in a half-hour, single-story format. From the research that I did for this post, that means I only saw seasons 1 and 2, the last episode of which aired in very early 1991. However, I'm sure I was watching it well after that, probably into 1992 if not later. This fits with certain reports that it was in network syndication as late as 1994.

Now, with all the easy jokes already at hand, I'm sure everyone is expecting me either to destroy this show or defend it as a neglected classic. However, that simply isn't how it was. The now-storied clashes of titans that defined modern animation were all happening after school between Fox Kids and the Disney Afternoon.  Even back then, it was obvious that Saturday mornings were the low end of the pool, the usually short-lived experiments, the outdated-on-arrival tie-ins, the reruns and reboots of shows you had thought you were too old for the first time around. If you accepted the ritual of getting up before 7 in the morning, then you were probably going to watch whatever they threw at us without complaining. And you could get lucky, with shows like Darkwing Duck or a good episode of Garfield And Friends. Then again, you could get the likes of ProStars, Karate Kid and Hammer Man, all of which I most certainly watched in the same timeframe if not the same network and lineup as Captain N. And in their company, yes, Captain N reached the proverbial high standard of mediocrity. We were already past the Dark Ages, into a time where even a low-tier cash grab could be expected to have some measure of technical quality and narrative coherence. If it came to that, when Mother Brain was competent, when Simon Belmont wasn't actively stupid, when Kevin and Princess Lana aren't vying to be both bland and irritating (yes, even compared to Simon and Kid Icarus), when they actually did something creative with the "guest" game characters no matter how little sense it made in relation to the game, it could be entertaining.

And then there is the comic, which I had absolutely no idea existed until noting a few passing mentions in connection with Metroid. This one was published by Valiant, also responsible for a Super Mario comic I'm now sure I encountered in the wild sometime in the 1990s. The first issue was published in May 1990. Alas, the run ended in September of the same year after only five issues. In its short run and after, it gained a reputation as both more faithful to the source games and far better in quality than the TV series. Unsurprisingly, copies are scarce and quite expensive. Fortunately, the real-world heroes at Captain N.net have assembled a library for all the internet to read, for the moment.

Meanwhile, what brought me to this comic was its chief claim to fame or infamy: Unlike the entirety of the TV series, it featured Samus Aran as a major character. In fact, she was introduced as a "guest" character in the last of several storylines in the first issue of the comic, and continued to appear at least once in every remaining issue of the run. In the first appearance, titled "Money Changes Everything", she was set up as a neutral bounty hunter willing to consider an offer from Mother Brain. By "The Happy Zone" in the following issue, she was already established as a member of the "N Team" and a rival to Princess Lana for the affections of Captain N/ Kevin, which admittedly wasn't a big deal in the TV series. After appearing in a single panel of "The Fabulous Powers of Captain N" in issue 3, she got a full protagonist treatment in "Breakout" in issue 4, where a corrupt judge sends her and Princess Lana to a prison planet from which they must escape. In issue five, she got not one but two appearances. First, in "Garbageworld", a time travel mishap sends her to a future where Kevin is finally willing to reciprocate her interest, but also is reduced to leading the remnants of the resistance to Mother Brain from an interstellar garbage dump. Then in "When Friends Fall Out", Princess Lana discovers evidence that the bounty hunter was responsible for the disappearance of the old king of Videoland, in a story that was obviously meant to be finished in the announced but never printed issue 6.

So, with that out of the way, is this comic any good? Having read the Samus story arc, and skimmed a few more storylines, I can certainly affirm that this is vastly better than the TV show. The unavoidable punchline is, this is pretty much like saying the show was better than the Battletoads pilot. We aren't just comparing two different things, but two things in very different stages of development. The relative strengths of the comic come down to the fact that it is trying to establish its world and characters, but there was a point when the show made some effort to do the same. Whether the same level of quality could have been maintained over a longer run is unknowable at best. What can be seen all too clearly is that this is far from a top-notch comic for its own or any other time. The artwork is no better than average for a newspaper comic, and particularly weak when called on to establish a larger setting, the one thing that the show was undisputedly good at as long as it was trying at all. The stories serve up several duds, notably "Breakout". The real bottom line is that the comic is still everything the show was reviled for, a middling to low budget cash-in built around references to niche pseudo-mythology, though with the difference that it gets said mythology mostly right.

And then there is Samus, the one thing that made this at all memorable. As with many things, you can see where they were trying, not so much where they did this right. Sure, she's a developed and sympathetic female character with a "dark" side that isn't simply waved away by the power of love (yet...). However, while her open infatuation with the male lead isn't exactly "stereotypical" as such, it is quickly magnified to a level that can only be regarded as either actually disturbing or wholly contrived, to the point that she seriously goes through with accepting the garbage world timeline. Given the general intelligence of the material, it can be allowed that this really is meant to show her conflicting emotions and very gray morality. The deeper problem is that the story arc never pushes its own point. Every time she is presented with a choice between her mercenary ways and the good guys' ideals, the story always throws a softball rather than making her admit to past misdeeds or ongoing flaws. It's by all means a step forward, especially for a video game tie-in (Hell, the show wasn't afraid to show the dark side of unrequited "love" either), but it's the kind that shows just how far we still had to go. Oh yes, and this could all look far, far worse if we actually knew how the Hell old our "hero" is... 

So that's Captain N, the show and the comic book. So, was this worth it? Considering how notorious this has gotten, it was definitely worth a rematch, and I'm more than happy to have dug up the comic book. For myself, I hope I have at least given some perspective. By my standard rant, this wasn't "good" by any means, but anyone who thinks this is the "worst" we got is either too young or suffering from repressed memories. (Hey, sometimes, I wish I could come down with that...) All in all, a weekend isn't too much time for a trip down this rabbit hole. That's all for now, more to come!

Image credit valiant.fandom.com.

Animation Defenestration: The one that was supposed to be the worst Disney movie

 

Title: Chicken Little

What Year?: 2005

Classification: Mashup

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

 

As I write this, I’m closing on my 200^th movie review, and I reminded myself that I not only haven’t done an installment of this feature in almost 2 months (see, dear Logos, Lord of the Rings) but still haven’t cracked double digits. The latter fact is in part because the load has been split between this and my “worst” movies feature, and I’ve already had some doozies on both sides. In the process, I’ve ended up with some loose ends and paths I declined over others. With this review, I’m coming back to the biggest of these, a notorious film that didn’t interest me as much as others that were entirely obscure. While I have never questioned the resulting decisions, I knew a rematch was do sooner or later. Once I did get a look at the material in question, I never doubted a review was in order. With that, I present Chicken Little, the one people say is the worst Disney movie ever.

Our story begins with a town full of anthropomorphic animals where our title character causes a panic when he insists that an object he can’t locate fell from the sky. The townsfolk laugh it off, even though they reacted more disproportionately than the kid ever does, and he goes back to being bullied by his classmates. Things take a positive turn as he gets closer to his friends, then wins the approval of his borderline-neglectful father and his peers by winning a baseball game. But then he gets clonked by another mysterious artifact from the sky, a piece of superscience material that can turn invisible. The band of friends soon realize that a cloaked alien ship is overhead, and get followed by a small little alien. However, Chicken Little is unable to convince the townspeople, despite being backed up by his friends, until the aliens begin an attack. It turns out that the commander is trying to find his own son, and ready to obliterate the town in retaliation. Can Chicken Little save the day, or is our hero deep fried?

Chicken Little was a 2005 CGI animated film by Disney, the first such feature created without the involvement of Pixar. The film had the same title as a World War 2 propaganda short film, which was unrelated except for a shared folk tale source. Development was reportedly prolonged by repeated rewrites, including a change of the main character’s gender. The film starred Zach Braff as Chicken Little and Joan Cusack as friend/ love interest Abby, with Garry Marshall as the father Buck. A high-profile supporting cast included Patrick Stewart, Adam West (see Batman), and Don Knotts in his final role as mayor Turkey Lurky. The film was a commercial success, earning a worldwide gross of $314 million against an estimated $150M budget. However, it received negative contemporary reviews and acquired a further reputation as a “worst” Disney movie in online lists and reviews. It remains available on Disney Plus.

For my usual experiences, I really only considered watching this film as part of my project to find a representative “worst” Disney movie, which led to my reviews of The Black Cauldron here and The Wild under Very Bad Movies. What I dragged to the table was the certain knowledge that the actual “worsts” weren’t really on the radar. Any seasoned animation scholar or fan could tell you that the most objectively and genuinely awful things Disney ever made were from long, long ago, when much of their output still amounted to shorts. (I have a certain entry in mind, but I can wait till I am very prepared.) For inexcusable low quality in the feature-length category, it’s quite fair to start a lot closer to home, and the mid-2000s movies, especially those made “in-house”, are definitely a perfect storm. It was a transitional period of full of throwbacks, experiments, and direct-to-video sequels and other quickies that weren’t intended to compete on the general market. The end result was a few immediate hits, a handful of eventually accepted “classics” that struggled or failed in their own time, and a bumper crop of entries that would be either notorious or forgotten. Even sight unseen, it’s hard to take it as anything but blind bad luck that Chicken Little became the most maligned of them all.

Moving forward, the central reality of the film is that it feels made for kids first, with very little of the usual “Disney Renaissance” nudging toward teens and adults. If this is taken as an honest choice rather than suicide by focus group, many of its arguable flaws become excusable or at least understandable. The story is episodic and simple. The animated characters (especially the aliens and the Fish Out Of Water) are boldly rendered and vaguely stylized. Multiple scenes focus on preteen nightmares and wish fulfillment, complete with dodgeball and missing pants. (Must… suppress… Donald Duck rant…) The adult authority figures, to some extent including Buck, are exaggerated or caricatured, with little if any further explanation of their reasoning and motivations. Finally, the resolution is brought about by non-violent negotiation that happens to coincide with the main characters’ reconciliation. All of which is to say that this isn’t great, but realistic enough to stay within its limitations.

On a deeper level, what the film has going for it are a genuinely likable main character and a quite strong story. The real problem is that the film repeatedly squanders its potential, to the point that even its good moments become frustrating long before the end. The obvious recurring problem is that Chicken Little’s dilemmas depend consistently on others being irrational and/ or actively mean, which by all means works for the bullies at his school, but not for the adults. Unless what we see is distorted by the protagonist’s viewpoint (the kind of ambiguity a typical Disney Afternoon episode would have set up), the adults are entirely to blame at almost every turn. They know he’s a kid; they clearly believe he is overimaginative; so there’s absolutely no reason for them to charge about in a mob based only on what he says. The deeper and especially irritating difficulty is that Chicken Little is really no better in comparison. When he finds obviously advanced alien technology, he doesn’t mention it to an adult until after he loses it. He doesn’t appeal to his friends to confirm his story until the adults are already suspicious. And in the finale, when the townsfolk are by all appearances being massacred in front of him, he could literally wave his little alien friend in front of any of the combat mechs at any time. Instead, he rushes around a literal battlefield to get the fuzzball to a completely arbitrary point. The fundamental problem isn’t that this is entirely unbelievable; it’s that nobody except Buck ever admits a mistake, much less learns from it.

That leaves the “one scene”, and the one that stood out to me is the baseball game. As Chicken Little takes the plate, there’s a familiar, perhaps jarring voice from the very adult announcer. That would be Harry Shearer of The Simpsons using the voice of Kent Brockman, in a pleasant touch if you can adjust to it. There’s an intended comical moment as our protagonist tries to raise a bat literally bigger than he does, which really emphasizes how little of this assumed world makes any sense, internally or otherwise. If this was a properly worked out multispecies society, there would be some kind of handicapping system here, or else the other team would be switching out their pitcher for one closer to the batter’s size. As it is, it’s obvious that Chicken Little can get a walk just by standing there, something that others loudly and repeatedly say to him. The announcer narrates as he swings nevertheless, and gets completely undeserved credit for what follows.

In closing, what I find myself coming back to is who on Earth the usually savvy Disney marketing engine thought they were making this movie for. In objective quality, it isn’t nearly as bad as The Wild (except Disney can’t deny technically making it), nor is it quite as muddled and willfully mediocre as The Black Cauldron was. The fact remains that Disney clearly miscalculated, far more badly and fundamentally than they did with immediate box office failures and disappointments like Treasure Planet and Meet The Robinsons (I’m thinking, I’m thinking…). In the proverbial light of day, this was a movie that tried to be “middle of the road” on a 5-lane freeway, too dumb for adults, too scary and cynical for kids, and too strange for any part of the mainstream. If there was a “right” move for Disney, it was to cut their losses and turn this one out to pasture on the direct-to-video market, where the shell-shocked parents and animation fans would probably have been grateful for anything that reached a high standard of mediocrity. But that, of course, would have meant putting their reputation ahead of making actual money. So, touche, Mouse. And with that, I am done.

Animation Defenestration: The one with Woody Allen as an ant

 

Title: Antz

What Year?: 1998

Classification: Runnerup

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

 

In planning out this feature, something that quickly came home is that if I really got back into this, I would be dealing with a much wider field than I have with any other feature, and a lot of potential for pure random even by my standards. With this review, I have a case in point. I had planned a weekend review to hit the milestone of 180 reviews, and watched a movie I had thought about for a long time to fill the slot. Then I got something completely different as an incoming disc from my subscription queue, one I really hadn’t planned to do this soon if at all even though I had already referenced it before. In a further first, it happens to represent a “runnerup” to a movie I already classified as such, with a possibly even more convoluted backstory. And with that, I present our exhibit, Antz, a movie that hit theaters at the same time as A Bug’s Life.

Our story begins with a cutaway view of the world underneath a grassy park, which brings us to an anthropomorphic ant talking to his psychiatrist. As he complains about being dwarfed by the colony around him, the doctor succinctly comments, “You are insignificant!” As the story proceeds, we get to know our familiar-looking character, a worker named Z. His fortunes seem to change when an attractive female named Bala dances with him, but he then discovers that the new girl is a royal heir slumming it. To get another chance with the princess, he switches places with his soldier ant friend, only to be sent by the commander General Mandible, the lady’s actual fiancé, into a massacre at the hands of a rival termite colony.  When Z returns as the sole survivor, the general allows him to appear as a hero, but quickly decides to eliminate him as a threat to his own unfolding schemes. To survive, Z has to flee with Bala in tow, toward a rumored paradise called Insectopia. Together, they must navigate the strange hazards of the surface world and the giants who dominate it. Then their final trial will be the choice between their newfound freedom or returning to the colony- before General Mandible destroys it!

Antz was a CGI animated film by SKG Dreamworks, released in 1998 shortly before the Disney/ Pixar film A Bug’s Life. The film was believed to have been based on a proposed story “Army Ants”, originally presented to Disney prior to Dreamworks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg’s departure from the company.  The animation was created by Pacific Data Images, a company that had previously worked on Terminator 2, Star Trek 6 and Sleepwalkers (can’t win them all). The high-profile voice cast was led by Woody Allen as Z and Sharon Stone as Bala, with Gene Hackman (see… Superman 4?) as General Mandible. Sylvester Stallone (see Judge Dredd) and Danny Glover of Lethal Weapon were featured as the soldier ants Weaver and Baratas. Both Antz and A Bug’s Life both attracted controversy for their similarities to each other. Critics ultimately noted substantial differences in theme, tone and potential audience, with Gene Siskel favoring Antz as a superior film. An ACAP award was given to the score by Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell. The movie earned a box office of $171 million against a budget estimated at up to $105 million. It remains available on home video, including streaming.

For my experiences, this is a movie I remember seeing in the theater, and at absolutely no time since before a viewing for this review. What really stands out is that I had no trouble piecing together the story and many of the scenes in advance, with ease and clarity even by my world’s-worst-superpower standards. (Have I mentioned lately that I found Krull?) That right there can serve as an encapsulation of the movie’s strengths and weaknesses: It is by all means memorable, yet not the kind of movie you hold onto or seek out. I had further experienced that myself a few years back when I saw this movie for a ludicrous price at a library sale, but still passed on buying it. When I finally decided to come back to it, what interested me most was simply assessing whether this was really any different than A Bug’s Life, or simply a film with even less luck. After viewing it, the only answer I can see is what I was ready to say from memory alone: One film tried to be timeless, the other tried to be trendy, and that made all the difference.

Moving forward, the first thing to note is that Antz is in many ways superior in animation, and I already commented at length what a high mark A Bug’s Life set. However, this quickly becomes “part of the problem”, and I find myself distracted trying to account for why. The easy and obvious answer is the sheer “uncanny valley” factor, and that is certainly here. It shows especially in the modeled faces of the ants, which for all the hype sometimes fail even at matching the actor; Bala in particular looks almost androgynous. Yet, I cannot accept this as the whole answer, especially with Pixar’s contemporary work factored in. To me, the deeper answer is that the animation fails to keep the viewer interested and invested in the world it portrays; the unhelpful phrase “sense of wonder” definitely comes into play. On this vein, the most telling sequences are those where the ants come in contact with humans. It should be eerie and terrifying to see ourselves through the eyes of a far smaller creature, and we get glimpses of that, like a magnifying glass that decimates the bugs like the Independence Day death ray. But there simply isn’t enough here to sustain the kind of mood that would reward the effort. I find it all the more telling that I personally found it noteworthy that A Bug’s Life never portrays humans at all.

That still leaves the issues of the characters and story. To me, there’s answer enough in Hackman’s character, which I count as the single reason I rate the movie as low as I have. Here, the unavoidable impression I get is that the film is referencing sources it does not understand. As far as we can speak of an anti-war genre (traceable in animation to “Peace On Earth” at least), the best examples dictate that there doesn’t have to be a conventional “villain” at all.  We can see this with Hackman himself in Crimson Tide; whether you take him as sympathetic or a sadist, his lines are clearly drawn at disloyalty to the leaders of the state. Here, we have a character who could be in the right or at least have a fair point, especially if his plan was limited to overthrowing the colony’s monarch. All we get, however, is eugenics-style muttering that ignores the actual biology of the ants, while his actual scheme is sheer lunacy on the level of Dr. Strangelove. The worst part is that the straight-up crazy angle could certainly have worked, if it was offered and developed, but we never get anywhere near the self-evident insanity of General Ripper (who still isn’t quite as crazy as Megavolt!). What we really end up with is a character whose actions are dictated by the story’s point rather than the character or the narrative, which greatly weakens the moral itself. As I think over all the other issues I could point out, I find very few that do not come back to the exact same problem.

That leaves the “one scene”, and there never were any that stood above the one I remembered from the theater. As we go into the middle act, Z marches with the soldier ants to battle. As they march, the bugs sing an almost comically grim version of “The Ants Go Marching One By One” that stuck in my mind stronger than anything else in the film. What works just as well, if not quite as memorably, is the dialogue between Z and Baratas, voiced superbly by Glover. (That reminds me, I need to find an excuse to review Predator 2.) As Z nervously asks about the enemy termites’ capabilities, the seasoned warrior casually gives a description worthy of the Starship Troopers space bugs. When Z starts to question their mission, Baratas merely remarks  “I like you, you have a sense of humor!” It’s a funny yet introspective scene that feels like it belongs in a 1960s/ ‘70s “protest” film, so of course, there’s nothing in the film that follows it up.

In closing, I find myself coming back not to the rating but to the classification. This movie perfectly embodies what I always thought of as a “runnerup”, with A Bug’s Life as the obvious counterpart. What’s unique, of course, is that I actually reviewed the “mainstream” movie first, and also classified it as a runnerup. To me, it really wasn’t counterintuitive that two films could count as “runnerups” to each other. It just never previously happened that any two such movies had otherwise comparable “profiles”, especially at the time of their release. What I really had in mind, however, was the extent to which even A Bug’s Life ended up in the shadows of other movies before and since. It may be a “raw deal”, but it’s typical for any time and place where circumstances see the creation not just of a new genre but of a virtually new medium. Time may move on, yet those who were there will remember, which is exactly where people like me step in. And with that, I’m done for another day.

Space 1979 Prototype Trilogy 2: The one with a transgender mad scientist

 

Title: Wild, Wild Planet aka Criminals of the Galaxy

What Year?: 1965 (copyright)/1966 (Italian release)/ 1967 (US release)

Classification: Prototype/ Mashup

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (2/5)

 

With this review, I’m continuing a survey of some of the older movies to come to my attention. The next up is one I debated including because it is relatively well-known, and especially because it has ties to another movie I’ve covered, in fact the very first 1960s movie I reviewed. As usual, what I knew about it was enough to go in, and this time shell out a fair amount of money to buy it. What I found was something that still doesn’t “fit”, but is too weird to ignore. I present Wild, Wild Planet, the movie that led to The Green Slime.

Our story begins on a space station where pulsating organs lie in tanks and on operating tables, including what appear to be human brains and eyes. We learn that this is a sort of organ-replacement project by Dr. Nurmi, a scenery-chewing scientist who spars with the station commander, Mike Halstead. The doctor takes a further interest in Connie, a spunky woman involved with the commander, despite or possibly because of the fact that she enthusiastically beats up several beefy men in self-defense training. The commander becomes suspicious when he hears of a wave of disappearances on Earth, carried out by a group of mysterious women and their silent accomplices, tall men in silvery trench coats that turn out to hide an extra pair of arms. It turns out that these are creations of Dr. Nurmi, sent to gather subjects for his research and shrink them for easy handling and concealment in the process. And our best sense of what his research is emerges as we see his next plan, to fuse himself and Connie into a single perfect being. It’s up to Mike to save the day, except his superiors have already put him under house arrest!

Wild, Wild Planet was a film by Italian low budget/ exploitation director Antonio Margheriti. It was the first of an informal “Gamma One” series of four films, all made with overlapping costumes, sets and effects. Some accounts say that it was produced as a TV pilot, though this is difficult to harmonize with the quick production of the additional films. The film starred American Tony Russell as the commander and Italian Lisa Gastoni as Connie, with Massimo Serato as the mad doctor Nurmi. The movie was filmed in 1965, but was released in Italy along with at least one other “Gamma One” film the following year, under the title Criminals of the Galaxy. US release was delayed until 1967, when it was given its current title apparently based on the Western/ proto-steampunk show Wild, Wild West. Several of Margheriti’s coproducers went on to make The Green Slime without his participation, using a similar space station setting and models. The original film was neglected by comparison with The Green Slime, but has remained available. Amazon currently offers it either for streaming or on DVD-R.

For my personal experiences, I caught wind of this one when I was reviewing The Green Slime. That turned my interest to Japanese films, which if anything are comparatively familiar to western audiences. However, I definitely remained interested in this movie and others in the nominal series. The main question in my mind was whether to take a look at several entries, but availability was sketchy enough that I decided it was just as well to let one represent them all. I finally went in after looking at several other reviews, which were detailed enough to leave no real surprises. Still, there was really no way to prepare for just how weird and illogical this one really is, even by Italian movie standards.

The foremost thing to talk about here is the villain, a traditional mad scientist with an emphasis on the “mad”. I have mentioned (see Ewoks) that my benchmark for a literally psychotic villain is Megavolt from Darkwing Duck. By comparison, even the Joker’s plans will follow a logical path to a goal that makes some measure of sense from his viewpoint and philosophy. Megavolt’s schemes, on the other hand, are routinely incomprehensible in motive, means and objective whether or not he bothers to explain it. This movie’s villain is truly as close as you will get to Megavolt crazy in the live-action medium (though the alien outlaw from The Hidden definitely gets honorable mention). What becomes disconcerting is that what we can make of his worldview is sophisticated and even progressive. He accepts a woman as superior to male subjects and presumably broadly equal to himself. He is seemingly willing to take on female biological qualities, making him more or less “transgender”. The problem, of course, is how this is all going to work, something he has evidently thought through but certainly doesn’t explain for our benefit, and in the best Bond villain tradition (only 3 years after Dr. No!), he already explains far more than he needs to.

The real pros and cons lie in the simple fact that this is an Italian science fiction movie, made a decade before masters like Argento and Cozzi showed what could be done with actual budgets. The models and effects are cheerfully cheap, with an impressive further disregard for continuity and basic safety considerations. The goons are game, especially the weird, seemingly interchangeable trenchcoated mutants. The supporting cast is divided between monotone and histrionic. What quickly becomes irritating if not intolerable is the “hero”. He is dismissive of others, especially women, to the point of almost writing off several leads. When he does get involved, his non sequitirs and leaps of logic are as nonsensical as the doctor’s schemes, except he actually has formal power to abuse in a trail of harassment, threats and misogyny. Worst of all, there is never a point where he is forced to admit a mistake, but on the contrary is handed a continuous supply of contrived affirmation. Even when confronted for accusing the doctor with little if any evidence and invading the privacy of innocent civilians (warrants already seem to have gone out the window), he simply fumes about “rules” and goes right back on the trail.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I found it difficult even to decide if this one was handing me too much or too little to work with. I finally went with one I had already considered discussing at greater length above, the movie’s big action sequence where Mike and the crew break into Nurmi’s Earthside lab. It starts with a tense moment as they use their ray guns to burn through a sealed door, and what you are bound to notice is that their props shoot some kind of actual flame. They are spotted by a lab tech type, who runs away. For reasons that aren’t obvious, the commander tells his men to let him go. They have trouble enough as they burst in, and are met by more lab techs and several of the four-armed goons. The mutants are at their peak of menace as they charge, but alas, nobody gave them their own guns. Meanwhile, the guns continue to flame, as Mike declares, “Keep blasting!” At times, the flashes in the muzzle seem to correspond to the source of an otherwise unseen energy beam, which is about how an actual energy weapon would look. At several points, however, a target is literally set ablaze, always a tech with a thick vest. At least once, there is charring visible, consistent with some kind of protective clothing. It’s a reassuring moment of sanity, unless you remember this is from the studio system that filmed Zombie with a real shark and the real Brooklyn Bridge.

In closing, I must say that this is another movie that fell in a frustrating middle ground, a trend that I’m already sure will continue if I continue with this period. It’s too entertaining to receive the lowest rating, but nowhere near good enough to get a rating equal to what I gave Cyborg 2087. The one thing that keeps it on my good side is the preview of what the Italians would do in the coming decades. There can be no doubt that it laid the way for the likes of Zombie and Starcrash, but there can be equally little doubt that even lesser talents such as Fulci could do at least as well as this. Add in its considerable flaws, and what remains is a movie that’s not the worst, but certainly not great.

Rogues' Roundup Special: Last stand!

 

For today, I'm back with another roundup, this time for something that wasn't going to fit anywhere else. Lately, I've been keeping the Truckstop Queen and sisters on my desk for morale, and that's meant a lot more accidental clonkings, including a few near misses to the Spiff ships. That finally drove me to invest in some action figure stands. In the process, I figured out the sisters were made for a different peg size than other figures in my collection, including the Dumpster Drag Queen from the same manufacturer, which finally drove me to make a special acquisition. But first, let's start with the first set I got.

The stands shown here are from NECA, purchased as a 10-pack for about half price and still more than I cared for. They were advertised for 6 to 8 inch figures, but the pegs are the right size for a Star Wars figure. Inexplicably, this proved too big for the sisters. The pegs are also a bit long, though it's easy enough to pare them down. Fortunately, they were just right for two other troublesome figures. One is Funko Darkwing Duck, previously introduced, who is rather unaccountably prone to falling over. (It might be the hat.) The other is the Predator, apparently a mail-order entry in the 1990s Kenner Aliens/ Predator line, which I picked up for dirt ages ago. He's obviously big, and he has the kind of stance first popular in the '90s that makes it look like he's doing stretches. The stands were just right for these two, especially the Predator. It also turned out the stands would fit the Drag Queen. Here's one more pic with her in the lineup, plus Bossk.

Meanwhile, I was back to square 1 with the sisters. I had already ordered one figure in the box, which turned out not to have the stand, and the one that came with the Drag Queen was a bust. I might have ended up ordering yet another figure, but I finally found a halfway decent deal for a loose stand from the carded version of the figure. When it arrived, I was ready to believe it still might not work. Of course, it was the right size, finally. As a bonus, it turned out it would support the Truckstop Queen (aka Kate) in what I always thought her most natural pose would be. Here's some more pics.

Taken on Couch Mark 2. You might be able to see a gold button that I use to tell them apart.

My real hope was that the stand might support two figures as well as one. As shown above, it was no trouble to get one figure to stay upright on one peg and even on one foot. The real problem was that two figures made for a tight fit. Still, I could make do.

"Sure, Kong's fun, but the Big Red Robotech Guy is husband material...."

When I was putting this together, I thought of one more experiment. I knew the Drag Queen and the Predator could fit on the same pegs, but the stand the former came with was more complicated. I think the sculpted can did as much to keep him upright as the pegs, but I did get the Predator on the Drag Queen's stand, and it fits him as well as anything else. Here's the pics.

I told my agent Predator 2 was a bad idea.

That's all for now, more to come!