Movie Mania: Most heroicest movie tracks!!!

 I'm two days behind on blogging, and I'm trying to hold down my fiction post count, so here's something a bit different. I'm doing a rundown of the most heroic movie score tracks, at least from the eras and genres of films I usually cover. Here's my list in top 10 format, with a bit of handicapping to avoid overrepresentation of composers or franchises.

10. Action Pack/ "Peter Changes His Mind", Simon Haseley, Dawn of the Dead-  I covered this extensively in my Dawn/ Day of the Dead soundtrack post and video. A tough-as-nails SWAT trooper contemplates self-termination, decides to kill zombies instead. It gets made fun of, and I have joined in, but it's a textbook case of cheesy/ "bad" music that really works. What could be more life-affirming than plowing through the undead hordes to literal football music?

9. "Klendathu Drop," Basil Poledouris, Starship Troopers-  The space troopers invade a planet of Bugs, get slaughtered. It's great music with enough of an edge to fit the themes. And the cover is, ah, different...

8. "Futile Escape", James Horner, Aliens- I couldn't avoid this one. The Colonial Marines make a fighting retreat from the xenomorph swarm, get picked off one by one starting with Bill Paxton. It's not as popular as "Ripley's Rescue", but it ups the game for a sequence that ratchets up the tension as things go from bad to worse. Also proves Horner could compete with the best on the law of averages.

7. "The Asteroid Field", John Williams, The Empire Strikes Back- The Millennium Falcon runs from the Empire through a swarm of deadly space rocks. The best incidental music from the greatest science fiction film of all time by the most accomplished science fiction/ adventure composer, and we're still not even in the top 5...

6. Star Trek First Contact/ Main Theme, Jerry Goldsmith- A showdown with the Borg is introduced with a surprisingly subtle opening. The composer of the "Next Gen" theme returns with a theme that's truly noble. Oh yeah, I wrote this one up for my Revenant Review ebook that I'm still waiting for someone to buy.

5. Conan the Destroyer/ Main Theme, Basil Poledouris- The second movie featuring the most famous sword-and-sorcery hero opens with an epic opening theme. You can argue whether the movie is better than the first one (it is), but the soundtrack is among the very best from an underrated composer. And see the movie review and expanded soundtrack post...

4. "Ride of the Firemares," James Horner, Krull- A band of heroes race against time to the evil overlord's teleporting castle on magic horses. The effects aren't great, but the music is epic. See my soundtrack post while you're at it...

3. "Building the Crate", John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams, Chicken Run- Claymation chickens race to build an aircraft before their owner completes a machine to make them all into pot pies. It's a masterpiece of frenetic energy with real emotional weight. The moral in case you missed it, we're all the chickens.

2. Superman/ Main Theme, John Williams- The most epic theme from the master. Just because it's virtually impossible for the hero to lose doesn't mean he can't be awesome.

1. "Entr' Acte", Jerry Goldsmith, Patton- The high point of the soundtrack that convinced me that Goldsmith was as good as Williams. It's the essence of victory; what more is there to say?

And that's really all I wanted to do for this. Things like this are why I love movie music as much as I love movies. If anything, it may seem like I'm not being as eclectic as I usually am, but that's because the very best movies are the ones that tend to go above my radar. As an extra, here's an updated playlist covering most of this list plus a few surprises. While I'm at it, here's the one I'm proudest of (after the one that's literally one song), my Poledouris playlist. That's all for now, more to come.

Movie Mania: Predator soundtracks!

 

It's Halloween weekend, and I still haven't gotten the nominal Thursday post up. This time, I have something I was waiting on. In the last month, I ordered the soundtracks for both Predator movies (see my Predator 2 review). Here's a rundown on how they compare. First up, here's a pic of the original soundtrack and insert.

Now, I really need to back up. I'm as much a soundtrack fan as I am a movie fan, and I can boast of knowing all the major guys from the 1970s through the '90s by both their names and their work. As a further consequence, I'm pretty good at recognizing composers without looking things up or waiting for the credits. The thing is, it's a trick whose results vary. Just for example, it's not hard to recognize James Horner (see the Krull soundtrack post), who had a certain vocabulary of cues he would usually work in. On the other hand, I've never pinned down Basil Poledouris (see the Conan the Destroyer and Starship Troopers soundtracks), the composer I've come to praise most often and highly. The composer I've had the highest success rate with is the one behind these soundtracks, Alan Silvestri, otherwise best known for the Back to the Future franchise. Just among the movies I've reviewed, I ID'ed him in Death Becomes Her, and I had already known he scored Mac And Me. Looking through my files, I found more that he composed that I hadn't remembered: Judge Dredd, The Wild (you really can't win them all), and The Mummy Returns. I still wondered if there were a few I had left unmentioned, so I checked his filmography. I was a little surprised not to find any more.

Moving forward, the disc I have here is actually the second release of the Predator soundtrack, put out in 2010 by Intrada. To my surprise, it has never been released as a digital album, so prices can be quite high. I got it by making an unopposed bid to a seller overseas. As a further reminder, I don't generally collect these things because I'm some techno-Luddite, but because it is far too often the only way to get what I'm looking for. There's really not a lot to say about the music itself. If you know the movie or the composer, it's everything you would expect. It's a little under an hour and 15 minutes, which is at least good background noise for the buck. The high points go with the build-up to the action sequences, capturing a sense of mischief that runs through the composer's work. If there's a downside, it's that there is little to remind you where in the film it would be. The nifty extra is the insert booklet, which has the feel of what they would have done if this had come out in the 1980s. Here's a couple pics of the contents.

Next up is the second album, which did get a "vintage" release by Varese Sarabande, an outfit that released the first version of the Predator soundtrack in 2003. It's 45 minutes long, so not quite as much return on the investment, though it's not as expensive as the original, either. As I commented when reviewing the movie, the music is improved as much as it could be improved, with a cool Afro-Caribbean vibe. If anything, it ramps up a bit for the finale, showing that the composer was getting better. Here's a few pics.

And that's really enough for me. I love movie soundtracks, and this is from a guy whom I would have expected to cover a lot sooner. (Also, Silvestri is still alive and active.) He may not be on anybody's best list (I would count him as about number 5 for his era, and Williams and Goldsmith were already tied for 1), but his music is distinctive and genuinely fun. It's exactly what you would expect from good movie music and good music period. That's all for now, more to come!

Movie Mania: Willow novelization

It's time for the first post of the second off-week of the month, and for once, I decided I've done enough movie reviews. To depart as little as possible from formula, I'm going to do another novelization review, specifically that of Willow. As a bonus, it happens to be from Wayland Drew, the author of the Dragonslayer novel, which I previously held up (well before posting a review of the movie) as perhaps the finest of its kind. Unfortunately, lightning did not quite strike twice.

For the background, I already covered a lot of this when I reviewed the movie. Willow was the last of the 1980s fantasy wave, and unlike many of its predecessors, it made a lot of money. It also got a lot of merchandising I can vaguely remember, including an NES game and a now-notorious toy line that I would probably have loved if I had gotten any. A novelization was presumably inevitable, though no tale seems to tell how the task fell to Wayland Drew. Per the lore, the novel is based on a script sold to Lucas more than the film, which is really on par for novelizations. As it happened, it was published immediately after a novelization of Batteries Not Included (a movie that never quite fit in my plans so far) in 1987, and the year before his last confirmed novel Halfway Man in 1989.

Going in, what interested me most was that such a comparatively obscure author was chosen to novelize a major film. Sure, vintage novelizations were anything but prestigious, and the semi-respectable novelizers like Alan Dean Foster (see the Aliens novels post) were busy enough that anyone else looking to do a job was unlikely to be turned down. Still, Drew presented an odd choice, an author with a modest profile and output whose work (apparently including Halfway Man) often fell outside the sci fi/ fantasy genre. The obvious connection is that a good part of the ILM crew had worked on the effects for Dragonslayer (and for that matter Batteries Not Included). If just one or a few big names at ILM had read the book, it might well have been enough to give the author an inside track with Lucasfilm and perhaps Lucas himself. Therefore, it's plausible that Drew was approached or even talked into it, at a time when he was by all indications getting out of the business. Whatever the backstory, Willow was his last ride, and certainly interesting on those terms alone. While I'm at it, here's the back cover.

Moving onto the book, I will admit I'm doing this on shorter notice than other posts like this. With other novelizations, I have gone in with at least two readings and normally a block of weeks or even months to think things over before posting about it. This time around, I'm starting the post before I technically finished reading it even once. On the other hand, I had been able to go through the majority of the book faster than any I've read in a long while, which I found more than enough to comment on the quality. As a bit of further context, I finished one more rereading of Dragonslayer not long ago. One more thing I will freely admit is that, if anything, the earlier novelization made me a little more critical of the present book. In those terms, Willow is in some ways more polished, but seems aimed at younger readers, which would certainly have been justified. What's more difficult to account for is that it seems more conventional than the film it's based on, complete with a number of convenient and comforting genre tropes that the finished film was bold enough to move away from.

On the plus side, there is inevitably a lot more worldbuilding and general depth in the novel. There's a lot more backstory for Madmartigan, Bavmorda and Sorsha, including a full account of the villainess's relationship with the father of the princess. There is also a whole story-within-a-story tale of a revered Nelwyn hunter/ warrior who barely gets a name within the film. We also get an expanded view of the powers of the magical infant, who seems to charm animals and the elements just by being what she is. Occasionally, things get more grim and graphic than the film despite the "kid-friendly" tone, conspicuously the implied fate of a group of mothers and children imprisoned by the queen. It's here that things get hit or miss by simple familiarity.  I find this most in the portrayal of Tir Asleen, which in the movie is just a big, distant castle. Here, it's so hidden away by magic that leaves its very existence conceivably in doubt, calling to mind the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty or the cautionary Lord Dunsany tale "Carcassonne". In addition, the revealed destruction of the castle is attributed to a spell of Bavmorda that you can easily predict will be reversed at her defeat. It's all unquestionably effective, but as already noted, it brings in familiar elements the movie did just fine without.

One more thing on the "con" side is a strange sort of temporal distortion that gets more pronounced toward the end, something I had noticed this before with the Dawn of the Dead novelization. Here, it's most notable with the courtyard fight, which is as far as I got. In the film, it's an almost comically over-the-top sequence with one of the most surreal monsters on record. In the book, the whole battle is covered in 10 pages, including only 3 with the Eborsisk. It's understandable that an author working with only pages in a script would fall short of the vision of a director, yet this is more egregious than usual. There's a further odd touch in the handling of the trolls, who represent perhaps the most intriguing combatants in the film. In the book, they're introduced much earlier, specifically as rather pitiful servants of Bavmorda. In an impressive touch, one of them actually talks, revealing an even more malign personality than might be expected. What gets weird is that the book describes the transformation of a troll into a "gibbering, jiggling mass of shapeless goo", without connecting it with the Eborsisk, which is portrayed as laying in wait the whole time. It removes several of the movie's more striking improbabilities, but on the whole, what we got on screen was more satisfying. One more thing is that the segment in the book ends at page 241 of the novel's 276 pages, and if you know the movie, there's a lot more that must have been crammed into even less space.

On the whole, this remains one of the more surprisingly impressive novelizations to be encountered. For me, it raises the niggling doubt how much of the universally accepted notoriety of 1980s novelizations came from those who had really read a significant number of them. There's no reason to doubt many if not most were as bad as people say, but even in the iffy ones, there's plenty that's interesting, insightful and just plain bonkers. It's exactly why I intend to keep my collection and add to it when I can. With that, I'm done for another day. That's all for now, more to come!

No Good Very Bad Movies 23: The one by Oliver Stone

 

Title: The Hand

What Year?: 1981

Classification: Unnatural Experiment

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/3)

 

As I write this, I’ve been developing ideas for either wrapping up this feature, spinning it off, or both. I got the idea to do a run with a theme: Very weird films by famous or notorious directors. That immediately brought up one film which I’d had in mind all along, and another I had definitely meant to look up sooner or later. The present selection is the odd one, a movie I saw not long after I started doing reviews but never had a use for anytime since, until I thought of doing this. I’m doing it first because it’s the one I had to get on a tight time table, and the one that really makes me mad, in no small part because it’s easily the most polished and professional movie to come up in this feature. I present The Hand, a movie with the talents of Oliver Stone, Michael Caine, and the best practical effects guys who ever lived, and it is… just… stupid.

Our story begins with a quick introduction to an artist named Jonathan Landsdale who does a Conan-like comic strip, and his wife and daughter. The marriage is clearly strained, as the couple get into an argument that ends in an automobile accident. In the aftermath, he is left with his drawing hand severed and never found. As he struggles with his new disability and worsening personal and professional life, he begins to have visions of his missing hand wandering with a life of its own. Soon, strange accidents begin to befall those he believes have wronged him. Meanwhile, he takes a teaching position that comes with a cabin, and soon strikes up romance with a college girl, yet the disturbances soon follow. Is the hand really come to life, is it all in his head, or is it his own subconscious revenge? Can he salvage his old life or the new one? Spoiler- even the people making this movie don’t really care!

The Hand was a 1981 film directed by Oliver Stone from his own screenplay, based on the novel The Lizard’s Tail by Marc Brandel. The film was produced Edward R. Pressman, evidently as a Canadian-American project as the budget was reported as 6.5 million Canadian dollars. It was Stone’s only feature-length directorial credit between his 1974 debut with Seizure and 1986, when he made his mainstream breakthrough with Platoon. The film starred Michael Caine as Jonathan Landsdale, with Andrea Marcovicci as Mrs. Landsdale and Annie McEnroe as his student Stella. Effects for the hand were provided by a team that included Carlo Rambaldi (see Conan The Destroyer, ET), Thomas Burman (Cat People) and Stan Winston (see Invaders From Mars, Leviathan, etc,etc). the soundtrack was composed by James Horner. The film had a reported box office of $2.4 million, less than half its budget. It was also poorly received by critics, with Peter Nicholls describing the film as “deeply confused”. The film was somewhat more successful on home video, and is currently available in digital form. Pressman and McEnroe married, and have a son born in 1987.

For my experiences, I suppose what made me vaguely interested going in was how iconic the premise of the disembodied hand is, compared to how few films really use it, especially on “straight” terms. The definitive treatment was and remains the late-Gothic 1919 horror story “The Beast With Five Fingers” and its 1946 cinematic treatment with Peter Lorre (which I still haven’t seen). Since then, it’s become fairly routine to have undead (not to mention aliens, robots, etc.) whose bits keep coming when dismembered, as in Splinter.  To make the self-driven hand a main antagonist remains far more novel and most obvious in the realm of parody/ comedy, as in Evil Dead 2 and Idle Hands.  With that context, the present film stood out even sight unseen as both earlier than many it could be compared to and seemingly completely serious. With further hindsight, this was all a very strong indication of the problems to come.

Moving forward, the central reality of the film is simply that there is indeed little if anything that can be considered funny, intentionally otherwise. Caine and most of the rest of the cast play their roles very seriously, which brings out a sense of domestic awkwardness in the film’s better moments. The story told is likewise very much in the tragic form as the protagonist goes from troubled to abusive, even if there isn’t much effort to make us like the protagonist or anyone else. In certain lights, this is a big part of the problem, as Caine’s character never pushes the emotional gauge far past neutral. He isn’t sympathetic enough to be a “fallen hero”, not entertaining enough to be a lovable rogue, and without a trace of the gleefully over-the-top villain who would keep us watching just to see his comeuppance. It doesn’t help that he never seems distressed or even disoriented by his supposedly worsening blackouts and dissociations. On that front, I cut off a longer rant just to compare to Bruce Campbell as Ash. He’s obviously no equal to Caine, but the one thing he’s good at is making you like his character and absolutely believe he is in a terrible and terrifying situation.  Here, the vibe is a classy actor trying to play a character who can barely pretend to care, and the result is that we don’t either.

Then what really tugs at my mind is the effects, and this aspect of the film that first got me to its strange vibe: This is not simply a movie that could have been better, but one that could have been more effective if it was worse. The hand looks every bit as good as it should, yet it’s oddly unimpressive. The obvious issue is with the concept; the hand succeeds so well that it looks like any other hand, and it was already clear that it’s hard to make this scary, especially with the surprisingly low body count. What gets strange is comparing it to movies that are by any standard inferior, like the stop-motion finger spider in Bride Of Re-Animator or Winston’s own loose arm in Dead And Buried. The most egregious yet instructive comparison is with Dead Alive, where virtually everything looks like kaka on purpose. What that very odd film succeeds in is creating a sense of the surreal, to go with an already psychotic level of energy. By comparison, the effects here simply feed into a dull linear realism that directly undermines the movie’s already thin pretenses. Then this is as good a point as any to rant about the ending, which is no more or less than a cop-out interrupted by another cop-out.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I really couldn’t come up with anything better than the set-up sequence. A few minutes into the film, Jonathan and his spouse are arguing during a drive through the countryside. In the midst of the quarrel, the lady speeds up and tries to pass a slow-moving truck. Suddenly, they find themselves hemmed in between an oncoming truck and a big brick of a car crowding in from behind. In the most amusing touch, Jonathan tries to wave back the other driver back, and of course he’s having none of it. Naturally, a gruesome collision follows, in which we don’t really see anything though the chain of events is quite clear. The emphasis is on the aftermath, as Jonathan/ Caine rushes out. It’s as grisly, cynical and sleazy as the movie is supposed to be, and in my usual refrain, what follows does not live up to it.

In closing, what I find worth commenting on is my background as a self-advocate, which is certainly a major reason I have gone as I have on this movie. As I keep saying, I have enough problems that I can get the stoned-out-of-your-mind experience going off my meds. Throughout my time doing reviews, I have regularly dealt with movies that try to imply themes of mental illness and sheer unreality by doing weird and random for its own sake. What’s really noteworthy is that the ones that come anywhere close to succeeding wouldn’t really change if  the subtexts were explicit. If The DayTime Ended, House or Death Bed were framed as a schizophrenoid episode or a bad acid trip, they would still be every bit as weird and disconcerting as they already are. These movies may not be that good in their own right, but they have the authenticity that keeps eluding polished mainstream fair. And with that I’m calling this one done.

Movie Mania: Top 10/ 20 best movies reviewed!

 

As I write this, I’m just about to his 200 movie reviews, without doing anything to monetize my work, and I decided to do something different, that is, what everybody else who does what I do does sooner or later: Assemble a list of the best movies I’ve reviewed.  This might seem either Herculean or moot, given the quality of the movies I usually review. In fact, a good part of the list that’s been emerging in my mind are ones I knew would be here as soon as I reviewed them, usually because I normally wouldn’t have reviewed them. The rest have tended to follow naturally by reputation as much as quality, though parts of this are still fuzzy. So, here comes the top 10 list, not necessarily in order but definitely by tier.

 

1.     They Live- A movie so good and successful I reviewed it on the technicality that there was a comic book. Two guys discover that aliens have secretly conquered the world and fight back. It’s a bona fide cult classic that’s become a mainstream success. Top of the line.

2.     Galaxy Quest- Another cult movie that went mainstream. The washed-up cast of a science fiction show are recruited for a real war by aliens who think their adventures are history. High-level snark turns into an effective tribute to Trek and the serials and B-movies that influenced it. Good fun, with lots of laughs and real heart.

3.     Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger- An old personal favorite, the swansong of the great Ray Harryhausen. The titular sailor goes on a voyage to a polar lost world to cure a prince transformed into a baboon. It’s Harryhausen at the top of his game with the baboon prince, a troglodyte and an assortment of monsters. A good and beautiful thing.

4.     Deep Rising- Really tied for three, another all-time favorite of mine. Mercenaries hired by a mysterious employer must fight their way out of a cruise ship infested by swarms of man-eating tentacle-worms. It’s a perfect blend of monster movie, action and comedy, with ILM-assisted CGI monsters and a Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack so awesome it got its own review first.

5.     Flash Gordon- My only top 5 substitution, one of the movies that got me doing this in the first place. Flash Gordon must save the Earth and Dale Arden from the over-the-top villainy of Ming the Merciless… actually, everything is over the top, including the theme song by Queen. It’s a genuinely clever tribute/ send-up and the most egregiously ‘70s thing on this list, though it happened to come out in 1980. “Flash…”

6.     Sole Survivor- One more favorite, a criminally neglected zombie movie from the director of Night of the Comet. The only survivor of a plane crash is stalked by undead assassins so stealthy only a nosey coroner notices them. It’s a polarizing movie among those who have seen it at all, worth a look wherever you can get it.

7.     The Hidden- Another bona fide cult movie. A mind-controlling alien goes on a crime spree in a series of hosts, just ahead of a cop and a federal agent with his own secret. It’s half sci fi, half police procedural, all action, with a surprising satirical bite.

8.     Krull- One more “favorite” that I spent years finding. When world of swords and sorcery is invaded by the sentient fortress of the Beast and his biomechanoid warriors, a prince leads a motley band on a quest to rescue his bride. It’s a fine piece of 1980s fantasy, with another awesome soundtrack.

9.     Terrorvision- My only other substitution on this list, a classic from the Band Crew. A kid fights an alien that climbed out of a satellite TV box, while his parents are more concerned with their swinger party. It’s dumb but fun with an edge, greatly improved by a very creepy monster, tongue-in-cheek performances from Mary Woronov and Gerrit Graham, and a bonkers theme song. Whoop, whoop…

10.  The Last Starfighter- Maybe the most iconic movie I’ve reviewed. A teenage guy discovers that his favorite video game is really a test for an interstellar Federation analog, and ends up flying their prototype fighter in the counterattack. It’s the definitive ‘80s movie, spiced up by Daniel O’Herlihy and Robert Preston.

 

An immediate word in order on this list is that there are certain movies I’ve excluded. First, I’ve chosen to look only at live-action theatrical films, so there’s no animation and no TV movies. Second, I haven’t adjusted the list for my most recent reviews, so I passed over Dragonslayer and a few others. Third, I set aside several films that I reviewed under very special circumstances, several of which I declined to give a rating. With all these adjustments, it still came out with the lineup I would have expected. 

 

The depressing lesson from this list is that my first and most extensive feature, Space 1979, barely got into the top 5, though I had no trouble filling out the rest of the list with these entries. There also aren’t any movies that are that obscure. What intrigued me more was that there weren’t that many that I gave the highest rating, either 4 or 5 depending on the feature. I suppose this is because I’m more critical of higher-profile of movies. It also reflects that these are movies that took more real risks, which in turn meant flaws in both concept and execution. The lesson is that ambition matters.

 

Now, because I really don’t know when to quit, here’s more to make this a top 20 list.

 

11.  Hancock- Possibly the only movie that I made a feature for. A disgruntled superhero prone to doing more damage than the bad guys saves a PR agent who teaches him to relate to ordinary humanity. It’s an underrated satire that still came out ahead of much of the modern superhero movie wave.

12.  Highway To Hell- The most egregious cult movie to come on my radar. A pizza deliveryman must rescue his fiancée from the devil in a post-apocalyptic Hellscape. It’s a surrealist fantasy that didn’t have an audience in its own time, very cool and it knows it.

13.  Duel- Narrowly removed for the top 10, the greatest TV movie ever. An unseen trucker chases everyman David Mann in the directorial debut of Steven Spielberg. It’s pure adrenaline with a side of social commentary, and that’s all it needs to be.

14.  Night of the Creeps- Classic 1980s zombie movie. Brain slugs reanimate the dead to wreak havoc on a college campus. Another action/ sci fi/ police procedural mashup, with Tom Atkins taking charge and stomping scenery.

15.  Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)- Absolutely serious. A shipwrecked UN negotiator discovers an island where animals have been uplifted into intelligent humanoids. It’s the best adaptation of a classic science fiction novel, with superb effects from Stan Winston and the embarrassingly high entertainment value of Val Kilmer being a jerk, i.e. by all indications Val Kilmer.

16.  Two Evil Eyes- Another zombie entry, the most actually obscure movie I’ve reviewed. A trophy wife and her lover hypnotize her husband to change his will and then hide his body in the freezer, but he still talks to them; followed by another tale of madness and murder allegedly based on Edgar Allen Poe. It’s included as a stand-in for several otherwise worthier works of the late, great George Romero, which is more than fair given its inexplicably overlooked status.

17.  The Wild, Wild Planet- A substitution for a well-known mainstream film, included as a twofer for films before 1970 and Italian movies. An international lawman and sexist idiot  faces a madder-than-usual scientist whose plan to perfect the human race includes fusing himself with a feisty damsel. It’s a very, very odd film I was definitely too hard on the first time around, entertaining enough for “so bad it’s good” viewing with moments that are surreal or completely unsettling.

18.  Splinter- Another very good zombie movie, and best non-animated entry from the current millennium. Carjackers and their victims are trapped in a gas station by a parasitic lifeform that reanimates humans, animals and pieces thereof. It’s body horror at its most brutal, with top-notch effects and a good cast.

19.  The Dungeonmaster- Another representative offense from the Band crew, barely bumped for Terrorvision. A hotshot computer programmer is challenged by a sorcerer, leading to a series of barely connected episodes that span time, space and genres. It’s one big pile of random from seven different directors, yet better than the sum of its parts.

20.  The Phantom Tollbooth- One from the animation category. A boy travels through a fantasy land divided between the kingdoms of numbers and words, on a quest to save the princesses of Rhyme and Reason from the demons of ignorance. It’s egregious psychedelic Sixties animation allegedly for kids, and the final effort from MGM animation.

 

With that, I’m wrapping this up. I haven’t gotten in everything I hoped, and I’m already pleading with myself to get in just one more really significant film, but I know if I keep at this, the list is going to be 200. So, I’m going to wrap this up, call it a night, and figure out what I’m going to do for my actual 200^th review. That’s all for now, more to come!

Featured Creature: The one that starred an Ewok

 

Title: Willow

What Year?: 1982 (preproduction)/ 1988 (release)

Classification: Knockoff/ Mashup

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

As I write this, I’m approaching the end of my second year of hypergraphia on this blog, and one thing I decided I wanted to do was bring this feature to a full dozen reviews. As usual, I already had an ample backlog, and what I had really been wanting to get to was a specific time and genre, 1980s fantasy movies. I had already covered a fair number of entries, starting with Krull and coming most recently to (dear Logos, Bakshi's) Lord of the Rings. However, I still felt that a more in-depth survey was in order. Out of all the very promising examples I considered, there was one that stood out, as one of the very last, as the most influential to film history, and in certain lights as the very best. I present Willow, the George Lucas movie that maybe ripped off Tolkien.

Our story begins with a fast-paced introduction to a sword-and-sorcery world where a sorceress queen is fixated on destroying a baby that is prophesied to destroy her and become queen. The skullduggery ends with an iffy Biblical image of a baby floating downstream. The orphan ends up in the realm of a dwarfish race, where she is discovered by the family of an aspiring magician named Willow. Initially, he is opposed to getting involved, offering a line that will be prophetic in its own right, “Let’s push it downstream and forget we ever saw it.” When the agents of the queen Bavmorda arrive, however, he is convinced to return the infant safely to the humans, which the midgets refer to as dakini. When he emerges into the human realm, he finds himself in the midst of a war between the sorceress and an apparently free realm. He soon meets up with a sketchy but competent swordsman Madmartigan, who reluctantly joins a further quest to find a good sorceress who can aid them. A long and perilous journey still lies ahead, with the queen’s general and her own daughter close behind, and in the end, it is Willow who must face the queen to save the child’s life!

Willow was a 1988 fantasy film produced by George Lucas and directed by Ron Howard, reportedly from a story Lucas had created in 1972. Warwick Davis, the actor who played the Ewok Wicket in Return of the Jedi (see Battle For Endor) was offered the lead role as early as 1982. The eventual film starred Warwick and Val Kilmer (see Island of Dr. Moreau) as Madmartigan, with Joanne Whalley as Sorsha and Jean Marsh as Queen Bavmorda. Effects were provided by ILM, including a “go-motion” monster by Phil Tippett (all hail Phil) and a transformation sequence created with CGI “morphing”. The soundtrack was composed by James Horner (see the Krull soundtrack review). A merchandise campaign included a novelization by Wayland Drew, who also wrote the Dragonslayer novel, and an NES game from Capcom. The film was a financial success, earning $137.6 million against a $35M budget, but failed to revive interest in the fantasy genre. Kilmer and Whalley were married from 1988 to 1995. The film was released on VHS and DVD in 2001, and on Blu Ray and digital formats in 2019.

For my experiences, this is the quite rare ‘80s movie that I definitely remember seeing in the theater. From all my recollections, I liked it well enough but wasn’t otherwise impressed, and I definitely suspected Lucas had copied Lord of the Rings as well as Star Wars. (As I was prepared to point out at greater length, no evidence has emerged that Lucas was concerned enough to reach out to Tolkien or his estate.) What I had no way to contextualize at the time was how few movies had even tried what Willow did. By my own estimation, the only films of the 1980s fantasy wave that were both original and successful as “straight” sword-and-sorcery were Dragonslayer and Krull, and I have already documented the price they paid literally and figuratively. The rest of the field, good or bad, is dominated by late entries in older properties (kind of including Conan), movies that really belong in satire or other genres (I count Princess Bride as the former and Dark Crystal as the latter, though I’m not sure what), and more or less intentional low-budget “camp” (see Adventures of Hercules, if anything). Willow was nothing less than the last stand for serious, big-budget high fantasy. What really drove me to that appraisal was the protracted delay getting the damn thing on Blu Ray, which pushed me to the point of trading jokes whether George Lucas wanted it to be seen. It was in those dire straits that I truly took in both the non-trivial flaws of the film and just how far it exceeded anything else up to its time.

Moving forward, it can first and foremost be reiterated that even considered as an LOTR knockoff, Willow is at a minimum as good as anything we got prior to the Peter Jackson trilogy. Even then, there really isn’t that much that is owed to Tolkien more than any other fantasy. The story and characters would be a checklist of cliches even in the early 1970s, yet Lucas succeeds in elevating this to likable and interesting characters in a fleshed-out world. Due credit must be given to the uniformly good cast and performances, perhaps especially Kilmer, who manages to balance entertaining and competent with every appearance of self-awareness. Then the obvious edge comes from the effects, which on consideration are deceptively limited. The one big “set piece” effect is the rampage of the nearly stationary two-headed dragon/ patchisaur and even that is balanced by the very low-tech trolls.  The rest of the action scenes are more about sword-swinging and punching than monsters and magic, while the effects are doled out when they are actually needed, to the point that some of the very best are relatively easy to miss. My personal favorite, which I first noticed on bootleg VHS, is a sort of incense burner that comes to life during the magicians’ duel of the finale. It lurches along in glorious go-motion for just a few moments before being disposed of, yet it makes a disconcerting foe while it lasts.

The part that’s difficult to explain or describe is that this all feels realistic. Part of this is that the villains, or at least their leaders, are dignified enough to be a convincing threat. But the other, almost counterintuitive side is that they are usually reasonably balanced against the heroes. For once, the forces of good include an actual army that seems no more or less capable than the hordes of evil, and have their own sorceress to boot. Willow and Madmartigan are correspondingly fallible, with the mage gradually emulating the warrior’s combination of arrogance and dirty tricks. What’s most impressive are the actual fights. This is neither stylized swordplay nor overchoreographed martial arts, but a series of brawls where blades are rammed efficiently into guts and even the sorceresses don’t hesitate to punch each other. The magic itself gets grim and gritty, as attested by the gruesome transformation of a troll into a gooey embryonic dragon. I wondered further if the demise of the villain somehow inspired the Toxo Warriors and their propensity to blow themselves up.

That leaves the “one scene”, and to me, the most memorable is the first encounter between Willow and Madmartigan. I’m sure I remember this from way back in the theater, though I’m sure I couldn’t have appreciated many of the layers of the scene. The party of midgets discover the warrior left to die in a cage. When Willow approaches, there’s a decent jump scare as the warrior grabs hold of him. Madmartigan quickly realizes some nuance in order when he demands water but has to let Willow go to get it. In the process, he refers to the little people as “peck”, clearly derogatory enough to compare to some familiar names, while they refer to him as “dakini” (an Asian term for anything between an ogre and a minor god), which obviously isn’t complimentary either. When he figures out they mostly just want to leave the baby and go home, he quickly offers to take care of her. Then there’s the part I certainly would have overlooked, as the warrior continues to refer to Willow as “peck”. When Willow takes explicit offense, he begins repeating the slur, notwithstanding Willow’s threat to turn him to stone. It’s an understated treatment of prejudice that becomes the beginning of a partnership, unfortunate only in that such subtlety has been lost in Lucas’s more recent work.

In closing, this is truly a case where I have said everything I wanted. It should be clear that I could have taken the rating down a notch, and there are certainly equal or better films I have treated more harshly. What brings it up is the time and genre context. As already outlined, 1980s fantasy was a trend that started marginal and went downhill from there. In that company, this might not be the “best”, yet it is strong enough that the films it can be compared to fairly (including most of those I mention above) are simply “different” rather than better or worse. What does set it apart is its transitional status, bridging the refined arts of stop-motion and practical effects with CGI, with a decent soundtrack from James Horner in the bargain. It’s more than enough to rate at least a little above the sum of its parts, especially for those who saw it back when. And with that, I’m done for another day.

Image credit Moby Games.

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.

Movie Mania! Starship Troopers soundtrack

 

As I write this, I'm still behind lining up movie reviews, so I'm doing a little bit of catchup with another soundtrack post. This time around, I have my newest acquisition, the Starship Troopers soundtrack, which I ordered as a follow-up to my review of the direct-to-video threequel. It's of further note as the second soundtrack from Basil Poledouris, last sighted with the Conan the Destroyer soundtrack. Here's a pic of the disc and the insert booklet.

Poledouris is by my own estimation number three of the top film composers of the 1970s through the '90s, with John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith being deadlocked for 1. (James Horner sometimes did as well or better, as evidenced by the Krull soundtrack, but he was prolific enough to get by on the law of averages.) In addition to the soundtracks already under consideration, he scored the likes of Red Dawn, RoboCop, Hunt For Red October, and Breakdown. He kept up his output longer than most, only really tapering off a few years before his death in 2006. His most famous works, at least after the Conan movies, were for Paul Verhoeven, which in fact only accounted for 3 movies: RoboCop, Starship Troopers and the obscure historical adventure Flesh And Blood. 

The present CD was clearly created to promote the movie, which in hindsight was iffy. From my own research, it is not available in digital format, though there are a fair number of recordings of the "Klendathu Drop" track. The booklet includes some pretty good publicity stills. Here's a few pics of the album back and the booklet interior.

For the album itself, the one big problem is that it's quite short at only 36 minutes, which is still longer than Deep Rising and not nearly as padded out as the Zombie soundtrack. It starts with a short track of the Fednet march that opens the movie, then jumps right to "Klendathu Drop", which is really in the middle of the film. It's a bit awkward, and feels like an admission what people would buy the album for. All in all, it's as good as it should be, yet doesn't feel quite up to the composer's usual standards. My strongest reaction is that it feels like a symptom of the problems already in the movie, above all the strange and pervasive lack of emotional depth. Just compare the "Brain Bug" track and sequence with perhaps Poldouris' finest single work, "Looking For Me" from Robocop. The latter makes you picture the characters, almost down to their body language if you're familiar enough with both the music and the film. The former just conjures up a weird giant bug, because the people were never that interesting to begin with.

In case that's too much of a downer, here's the link for my own personal playlist of Poledouris' work. It's been a while since I've listened to it, and I'm once again amazed that I haven't lost a few tracks to deletions and take-downs. No more introductions, just listen to it! Or don't, it's your call. And that's all for now, more to come!