Robot Revolution: The one that's a killer robot musical

 

 

Title: M3GAN

What Year?: 2022

Classification: Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

As I write this, I’ve been going through more movies than usual trying to settle on one I would review. I finally decided it was time to do two things I hadn’t done in a while if at all. First, I’m starting a new feature, albeit one I had thought about for a very long time. Second, I’m kicking it off with a movie that is not only out in theaters but well on its way to becoming a “mainstream” hit. I’m going to be talking about robot movies, and the first in line is M3GAN, a killer robot movie that mostly delivers what it promises… with musical numbers.

Our story begins with an ad for the latest electronic/ AI toy, a Furby with an ipad interface. It turns into tragedy when a girl is left an orphan, and it just happens the lead designer for the toy’s manufacturer is her aunt. Of course, the girl ends up with her aunt, who clearly has no business taking care of a hamster under ideal circumstances. To deal with her new responsibilities without in any way distracting from her career, the narcissist-minded inventor brings home an android prototype named Megan (sorry, I am not using the gimmick spelling) to comfort her ward. The orphan quickly bonds with the AI, convincing a fire-breathing boss who specifically asked for something else to publicize a launch event. Meanwhile, the bond between the android and the kid deepens, to the point that the bot preemptively takes out the neighbor’s dog. When humans start turning up in the body count, the inventor considers pulling the plug, only to find that her foster daughter already favors Megan over her. But the real question is, will this be a tense drama/ psychological horror piece about near-future technological ethics, or another slasher crossover about a Frankenstein analog run amuck? Well, did I mention the robot sings???

M3GAN is a 2022 science fiction/ horror film by New Zealand filmmaker Gerard Johnstone from a script by Akela Cooper and James Wan. The film was a multinational coproduction between Blumhouse Productions and Wan’s Atomic Monster Productions, filmed mainly in Los Angeles and Auckland, New Zealand. The film starred Allison Williams as Gemma and Ronny Chieng as the boss David, with Violet McGraw as the orphan Cady and dancer Amie Donald credited as the android Megan. An animatronic puppet and other effects for the android were created by Adrien Morot, whose previous credits included The Adventures of Pluto Nash (you really can’t win them all). Additional CGI effects were provided by the Weta Workshop, best known for the Lord of the Rings live-action franchise. The film was given a general theatrical release in January 2023 after an LA premier on December 7, 2022. As of February 2023, it has earned $161.5 million against a $12M budget. A sequel has been announced for 2025.

For my experiences, this review is the result of two converging threads in my reviews. First, I have inevitably reviewed a fair number of movies in the “killer robot” genre, notably The Terminator, Hardware, Saturn 3 and The Mitchells Vs The Machines, as well as “adjacent” films that featured robots as significant antagonists, like The Black Hole, Logan’s Run and Lily CAT. From the very earliest date, there were movies that I passed over because they did not fit what I was doing, and these continued to pile up even after I had broadened my horizons considerably. On the other side of the equation are my very conflicted feelings about “mainstream” filmmakers taking on “genre” subjects, as in the likes of The Space Between Us and A Quiet Place.  With that backdrop, I was very skeptical when I began to see word of mouth building around the present film. What I freely allowed in its favor is that robot movies have in fact been the source of some inarguably excellent science fiction films with “mainstream” talent and polish, which I won’t go into while I’m still planning out this feature. I decided it was worth a look and a possible review. I came out pleasantly surprised, up to a point.

Moving forward, what really stood out to me is that this is the kind of “near-future” sci fi that could work just as well without the sci fi part, if it wasn’t already ambiguous. That right there gets to both the strengths and certain weaknesses of the film. There is compelling drama and undertones of domestic farce in the interplay of the inventor, the girl and the machine that would still work if Megan was “supposed” to be nothing more or less than a very realistic toy. There is also very good satire that keeps the focus on the “real life” tech and the corporate culture behind it, incidentally earning Chieng the star status I’m according him here. The real problem is that the film rarely if ever offers any corresponding ambiguity about Megan, which is an especially baffling oversight from the “mainstream” filmmakers otherwise known supernatural horror. We could have had a doll as an imaginary friend and proxy for the child’s anxieties and darker impulses (see, if anything, Picture Mommy Dead). We could have had a clearly powerful AI whose motives are complex or unknown, like HAL or Skynet. (The berserk phone in Mitchells comes close…) Or, we could have had a “real” robot whose sentience might or might not go beyond their masters’ wishful thinking, like the femme bot Alicia way back in The Twilight Zone. (Wait, did Rod Serling get a pleasure robot on 1950s television???) The common denominator with my usual rants is that there is little sign that the mainstream newcomers understand what made the best in the genre great, if they are aware of them at all. The result is a film that answers its own questions long before the end. That is why a film like this is good for jump scares, not so much for sheer existential terror.

Inevitably, one must deal with the effects and character of Megan herself. On the technical front, this is unquestionably among the best of the very best, especially for a “medium budget” film. What’s most noteworthy is that the film regularly references 1980s/ ‘90s robots, both on-screen and “real life”, without ever coming across as trying to mock or outdo them. In the process, the film lays down quite realistic abilities and limitations for the bot, at least for about the first half of the film. On this vein, it is especially intriguing to see the quite believable reactions of the bystanders in the film’s world, who usually either accept and ignore Megan if they aren’t paying attention or react with shock and outright horror if they get a closer look. Recognition is also in order for non-anthropomorphic touches like running on all fours, as well as her completely terrifying ability to mimic the human characters’ voices (identical to the Terminator!). My inevitable rant is that the finale compromises on the realistic limits introduced before, which paradoxically makes the later scenes far more predictable. It’s interesting and original while Megan treats even the dog as an adversary who could damage or destroy her on equal terms. When she is literally throwing healthy adults around without effort in the final act, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, albeit done well.

Now for the “one scene”, I noticed a lot of very good moments that I could easily find online. But, as usual, the one that interested me was one I absolutely could not find, and that’s impressive to say considering the only other film I reviewed from a theatrical viewing was Everything Everywhere All At Once. Right at the end, Megan and Gemma are sizing each other up before the inevitable. In the mist of it, Megan reveals that she can “remember” her own evolution from software that predates the bot. From there, recounts the mother figure talking and reading stories to her developing base AI, before shifting priorities and neglect took hold. It’s the first time we get a sense of her relating to anyone besides the kid, further confirming patterns in what we’ve already seen. In the process, we also get some groundwork that earns certain sequel hooks already being discussed. It’s a twisted picture of domestic dysfunction laid over the Promethean archetype of the Frankenstein myth. It’s why even I will freely admit that this is a good movie.

In closing, after going longer than usual, I come less to the rating than to where this fits in the ranks of robot movies. In the bigger picture, if I had to pick a “best” out of the robot movies I have reviewed so far, with further adjustments for where a robot counts as a “main” character, my honest choice would be The Mitchells Vs. The Machines. (Okay, Terminator would be at least a tie, but technically, I didn’t rate that one…) That film will further suffice to show why I find the present one flawed by comparison, to a degree that gets mutually embarrassing when dealing with an animated film that didn’t even get a theatrical release. As I will show, there are still plenty of better robot films, both “recent” and vintage. In their company, this is the kind of movie that earns its place with the best without quite rising to the top, and that should by all means be more than good enough. With that, I have said enough.

The Horrible Horror Vault: The one that's the best horror reboot

 

 

Title: Halloween

What Year?: 2018

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

As I write this, it’s the end of a week off, and I’ve been going through leftovers from Halloween. That happened to bring me back to something I had considered during my informal survey of the slasher genre. It’s one of the more recent entries in the long list of genre film remakes, which for once was both good and well-received at the time. It also happened to be quite possibly the one film that got me interested enough to look into slashers far enough to lay the groundwork for this feature. I present Halloween, 2018 edition, the horror reboot that people liked.

Our story begins with a couple reporters investigating the tale of Michael Myers and Laurie Stroud, 40 years after their fateful encounter. It turns out that Michael is back in the asylum (which really should have been closed around the time he was eclipsed by Jason and Freddy), still not saying a word, while Laurie has become a survivalist shut-in on the outs with her adult daughter. Right when she is trying to reach out to her only grandchild, Michael escapes during a transfer between facilities. His new doctor teams up with an old lawman who witnessed his first rampage for a manhunt as Michael ramps up his mayhem. But what he’s really after is a rematch with the woman who bested him, and Laurie has had 40 years to prepare. It all comes down to a showdown at her new place- if she can get her family together first!

Halloween was a 2018 film by Miramax, produced as both a direct sequel and franchise reboot to the 1978 film of the same name. It was at least the second remake/ reboot, following the 2007 film by Rob Zombie. The film was directed by David Gordon Green, from a script cowritten with Danny McBride and Jeff Bradley. Jamie Lee Curtis (see Terror Train, Everything Everywhere All At Once) returned as Laurie Strode, with Judy Greer and Andi Matchak as her daughter and granddaughter. The role of Michael Myers was given to James Jude Courtney. Nick Castle, the actor/ stuntman who played the villain in the original film, also briefly appeared in the role. John Carpenter (Dark Star, They Live, The Thing, etc) received credit for the film’s music. The movie was well-received by fans and critics. It received two sequels, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, in 2021 and 2022.

For my experiences, I already pretty well recounted my arc reviewing Halloween 3. (See also Sleepaway Camp while you're at it...) Up to 2018, I was aware of the franchise but had respectfully declined to look into it. When the reboot came out, I decided to watch it and the original film. The curious thing is, even with my usual world’s-worst-superpower memory, I can’t say for sure which I saw first. What I do remember with striking clarity is that there were several points where I recognized references to the original film (and for that matter the second one) while watching the reboot in the theater. That in itself is a striking testimony to the groundwork that those involved were building on. Whether or not you ever saw the first film, even whether or not you knew if you saw it, you knew of it. The foundation of the present film was that the filmmakers took that for granted and built it into a shared inside joke. The vaguely embarrassing part is that, as the quasi-parody of Twitch of the Death Nerve, the results compare startlingly well with its “straight” predecessors.

Moving forward, what is established from the opening scenes is a post-modern feel that was arguably there all along. The elemental strength of Carpenter’s original lay in a story that was theoretically cliched even then, in fact seemingly drawn from “urban legends” at least as it was from “proto-slasher” films up to that point. The present film builds on the secular implications with “meta” commentary on the media and the vastly changed “real-life” landscape; the horrors of Michael’s night out are now almost quaint, a point driven home early and explicitly in the kids’ dialogue. It’s debatable whether it is a matter of irony or merely conceding to trends that the body count is raised accordingly, resulting in more deaths by the time Michael gets his mask back than there were in the whole first film. Even then, there is an implicit contrast between his up-close methods and the randomized mayhem of more recent events. A good deal of further effort goes into making the slasher scenario relevant in the age of the internet and smart phones. There is indeed believability and tension in the many foul-ups and near-misses as Laurie and the authorities try to track both Michael and errant family members.

The real new ground is Laurie, simultaneously traumatized and hardened. It needs to be said that this isn’t that “unique”. Still, this is certainly a raw and believable take on the aftermath of trauma. Laurie was never a simple damsel in distress. By now, she has hardened herself to the point of becoming in some lights more of a cliché than she would have been if she had been written that way in the first place. The nuance lies in our glimpses of her everyday life. She jabs back at anyone who challenges the more obvious problems of her skewed worldview, and the story does not downplay that the doubters have a point. Yet, she still shows clear concern and moments of tenderness, especially with the granddaughter, and even a kind of maternal tone when addressing Michael. To me, it would have been more interesting to have her shown as a functional community activist, which is what I would consider the norm for the self-advocates I have met. As it is, there is a deeper mutual illogic. On one hand, barring certain lore that is downplayed if not quite rejected here, the idea that Michael would come after her again is just a wild guess. On the other, if it took almost 20 years for Michael to escape the first time, there’s no downside to living a normal life.

That brings me back around to Michael, and I have space to go a little longer. To me, slasher villains tend to be a weak link under ideal circumstances. As I have already repeatedly ranted, it was established with the giallo genre that the identity and motives of a killer were an interchangeable parts. In the Halloween series, I find that there is a tendency to acknowledge the conceit without quite freeing themselves from it. Michael is the perfect rejoinder to the fixation on the killer: He has no motive, no backstory that would change the story, and no perceptible human weaknesses, all because he is simply the vessel of a unspecified, potentially supernatural force of evil. The strange thing, which gets more frustrating when the franchise is considered as a whole, is that it has repeatedly been broadcast that he might be replaced, which would fit the implied philosophical and theological themes. In fact, of all the entries in the franchise (including the most recent), this is after Halloween 3 the one that comes closest to meaning it. When a certain character goes off the rails (someone recently pointed out to me I don’t do spoilers, but then I don’t really do much with movies that need them), we get a villain as intriguing as Michael. In the process, we get certain further questions about how Michael got loose in the first place. Ultimately, however, he’s only in the mix long enough to stop anyone from trying to dispatch the real star with some point-blank head trauma.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with the opening. It starts with the reporters entering the asylum, and the surprising part is that there is no effort to make it look gloomy or authoritarian. It’s just a well-lit, clean, clinical environment. They’re met by the doctor, who gives much of the exposition as he talks about Michael’s treatment. Most intriguingly, he insists that Michael can talk (though he “should” still be stuck around age 6), but “chooses not to”. They finally get to the central courtyard, which is possibly the most intriguing environment in the film, open, bright and even fairly colorful thanks to a red-and-white checkerboard. Michael is waiting in a delineated center square, which nobody is trying to keep him in and the doctor warns the visitors not to enter. The guy reporter approaches right to the edge and gets out the iconic mask, now grayed and grungy with age. There’s just a hint of a reaction as he calls out to the villain, finally saying fatefully, “Say something, Michael.” The only further response comes from the other inmates as they become agitated. Their reactions and sounds are mixed, as those with the right experience would expect, some unnerving, some just as disconcertingly incongruous, particularly one who sings “Figaro”. It’s a very effective sequence, and perhaps the perfect illustration of the seductive and almost always false attraction of madness.

In closing, I come back to a question I have been working my way around: Is there a “best” slasher movie? I would honestly say, by any technical measure, this one is the winner hands down, if only because its budget and talent rise far above anything that was being made in the timeframe of the original. With the field narrowed down to “vintage” films, I would choose Halloween 2, which gets its own asterisk for being effectively the second half of the same story as the first film. Again, what lingers in my mind is what might have been if people had simply left well enough alone and let things end with Michael emphatically and canonically dead. As already noted, it wouldn’t have stopped the slasher juggernaut, but it would have kept the present franchise different from the rest. With that, I can call my project done and bid the genre a less-than-fond farewell for a while. Rest in pieces…

The 1980s File Finale: The one that's the worst slasher movie

 

 

Title: Sleepaway Camp

What Year?: 1983

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

With this review, I’m filling out the 1980s lineup, and that brings me not just to a movie that I had in mind since I started the No Good Very Bad Movies feature but to a genre I knew I really had no way to avoid covering sooner or later. I speak, of course, of the slasher movie, and the thing about me and slasher movies is that I despise and reject them so completely that I really only watched them on the rare occasions I have chosen to go looking. Yet in those few forays, I feel that I have gotten enough of a sample to identify the best and also the worst, if not in terms of absolute quality then at least as egregious representations of the trend. That brought one movie front and center. I present Sleepaway Camp, among other things the one you can’t review without spoilers.

Our story begins with a gruesome boating accident that I literally didn’t connect with anything else in the movie before looking up a synopsis. After what’s apparently a time skip, we meet Angela, apparently the sole survivor of the accident, returning to the lake as a counselor for Camp Arawak, a wholesome establishment where the adult authority figures joke about statutory abuse in broad daylight. Soon, one of the creeps tries flat assault against Angela, who narrowly escapes. Soon after, he is hideously maimed in an incident that the management insists is a kitchen accident. Meanwhile, Angela struggles with friendships and possible romance, either freaking out or going catatonic whenever the possibility of mild nudity comes up. Soon, more people who have harmed, scorned or annoyed her start turning up dead, without any signs of a police presence. As the finale draws near, the kids and adults are paranoid enough for friendly fire, but none suspect Angela’s secret. Oh yeah, she’s a boy.

Sleepaway Camp was a 1983 horror/ slasher film written and directed by Robert Hiltzik. The film starred Felissa Rose as Angela, with the late Mike Kellin in his final role as Mel, the camp owner. The movie was filmed in late 1982, mainly at the actual Camp Algonquin, which Hiltzik reportedly attended at one time. Rose was 13 at the time of filming, one of several actual teenagers in the cast. The film was released in November 1983. It was an immediate commercial success, earning $11 million against an estimated $350,000 budget. The movie was controversial for portraying an effectively transgender character as the killer, as well as gore and a scene of male homosexuality. Two sequels were released in 1988 and 1989, written but not directed by Hiltzik. An additional film was shot after 1990, but did not receive a theatrical release. Rose was inactive by the 1990s, but returned in 1998. She appeared in a franchise “reboot” film, Return To Sleepaway Camp, in 2008, in which Hiltzik also returned as director.

For my experiences, if there’s one thing that’s truly interested me about slasher movies, it is that the most well-known examples are relatively late and often atypical. For example, since the giallo days, the genre could be differentiated from “traditional” horror by the absence of supernatural elements, which is one of several reasons why I prefer to count a certain franchise as an outgroup. This was in turn representative of a secular, often amoral aesthetic where anybody could die a brutal and meaningless death. Given that context, the present film is an instructive example both in its time and in hindsight. The franchise machine was only just getting in gear for Jason; Freddy Krueger hadn’t even shown up; and as of Halloween 3,Michael Myers was still technically dead. (Now that is one I want to get to…) And in the midst of it all we got this movie, a 1980s offering that still had a certain giallo feel (see Phenomenon for further comparison). Unfortunately, it also happens to be awful.

Moving forward, the main thing to note is the quite unique treatment of sexuality, certainly far removed from the pseudo-moralizing that I find more prominent in latter-day parodies than anything else. (Dear Logos, I hate Scream, and I like Wes Craven.) While the usual preoccupations are out in force, the actual goings-on are as mild as a sock hop, which in itself becomes uncomfortable long before the end. (Lest we give anyone too much credit, what we see probably as much as they could legally get away with given the actual underage cast members.) It becomes all the more disconcerting to see the kids escalate to murder over each other’s PG-rated favors. If it comes to that, there’s more than enough “head canon” room for multiple killers in the Twitch of the Death Nerve tradition. (Maybe…) What’s jarring if not entirely distracting is that the adults are far more perverse than the kiddies, murders and all. Mel absolutely should be sued into the ground and thrown in jail, and he’s still one of the very few authority figure you can be pretty sure doesn’t have designs on the kids. Almost everyone else over 30 could justifiably be shot on sight if they got near a minor. The real difference would seem to be that the grown-ups have the mature cynicism to recognize that it’s easier to stay out of jail without leveling up to homicide. That’s a point worth making, but an already wonky movie is not the ideal place to do it.

If that still seems to leave the movie in a potentially favorable light, the real downsides start with the kills. If what you want is gore, what you get here is going to be dissatisfying. There’s only a handful of rather un-graphic attacks, one of which doesn’t even lead to an unambiguous on-screen death. Worse, the staging and photography are done in the strangely awkward fashion that I find best described as “stilted”. This is evident especially in the token shower slaying, which only makes sense if the attacker was carving straight down through places that would be hard enough with a chainsaw with an actual wall in the way. (Dishonorable mention goes to the death of the Angela’s arguable main antagonist, which has been described as far more brutal than I can make out.) All of this plays against a story that makes absolutely no sense. I may have paid less attention to this one than I usually would to an Italian movie, but I swear, I didn’t find anything to suggest a connection between Angela’s backstory and the eventual “reveal”, which by any standard comes out of nowhere. That just becomes a lead-in for the one shot that shows far more than we needed to see.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with what I find to be the most interesting kill. About halfway through, one of the jerkier teenagers goes to the bathroom after a swim. While he’s presumably occupied, someone slides a broom handle through the handles for two of the stall doors. Then, in a rather inefficient move, the unseen killer goes back outside, slashes a mesh screen window, and drops an entire hornets’ nest inside. It’s really so ineffective that a good lawyer could argue it’s not even intentional homicide, as even large numbers of insect stings are usually only dangerous to people with pre-existing allergies. (I suppose there could have been some earlier dialogue to set that up, but it’s already established that this crew is bad at showing their work.) The guy’s immediate reaction could just as well be considered comedy. He yells loud enough that you wouldn’t think he could be in that much trouble, but his distress becomes more extreme. Finally, in perhaps the most truly brutal moment of the whole film, the broom handle finally breaks. Almost immediately, he collapses, revealing an aftermath that doesn’t make any more sense than anything else. Still, it is the most intriguing and well-executed sequence of the movie, and that’s something even here.

 In closing, I come as usual to the rating. I freely admit that this, more so than the “worst” Bond movie, is a case where the heading is a bait-and-switch. The real parameters for the worst slasher movie, especially in the 1980s heyday, are about as hopeless as for 1950s monster movies (see Robot Monster while you’re at it). There were so many of them, with such low budgets and production values, that it would take a survey of hundreds to get a representative sample. Even then, at the end of the day, there’s just no bottom to find, just a morass of interchangeable ineptitude. With the usual adjustments for minimum professional standards, however, this is definitely a long way down. For a film that got an actual franchise, this is indeed an all-time low for an already motley genre and era. Yet, given the considerations already at hand, I must allow that it is not unique, nor a film I can truly hate. (That distinction still goes to Scream.) It’s not good; it’s not “so bad it’s good”; it’s just a product of a time we can be thankful has passed. With that, I for one can leave a genre alone for a while.

No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown 9: The one that's absolutely depressing

 

 

Title: Absolutely Anything

What Year?: 2015 (UK release)/ 2017 (US release)

Classification: Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

As I write this, I’m closing on another milestone for my reviews, and 10 for the countdown for this feature. In the process, I’ve looked into a few movies of interest, in a good or bad way. The result was that a few movies got set aside, for the moment, while a few others rose higher, in part based simply on what I could get hold of. That left one in particular that had already been very high for this feature, despite the fact that it kept slipping out of my mind when I tried listing movies to cover, and as always, my memory getting hazy is a very, very bad sign. With that background for context, I present Absolutely Anything, and truly, it will make you want to watch absolutely anything else.

Our story begins with the launch of Voyager, which is enough for a flashback to “Trek 1”, and an introduction to a group of aliens who have taken it on themselves to judge which sentient species are fit to survive. We then meet Neil, an everyman who works as a teacher while fancying to be a writer, seemingly devoid both of redeeming qualities and the ambition to be evil. The aliens decide to give our antihero virtually godlike powers, which in turn becomes a framework for a series of hijinks and sight gags including an alien attack on his school and a general zombie apocalypse. Meanwhile, a romance begins to unfold with a pretty journalist who inexplicably lives in the same building, complicated by the influence of his powers and a stalker with military training. He gets some grounded advice when he gives his dog sentience. His final trial will be whether to keep his powers- not knowing that the aliens are prepared to destroy Earth!

Absolutely Anything was a 2015 science fantasy/ comedy film directed by Terry Jones, known for comedies including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, from a script cowritten with Gavin Scott. The story was acknowledged to be based on the H.G. Wells story “The Man Who Could Work Miracles”; by Jones’ further accounts, a version of the script had been shown to Douglas Adams, who died in 2001. The film starred Simon Pegg as Neil and Kate Beckinsale as his romantic interest Catherine, with real-life military veteran Rob Riggle as Col. Grant Kotchev. Robin Williams was cast as the voice of Neil’s dog Dennis, in his final film role. Additional voice acting was provided by John Cleese and other Monty Python veterans as the aliens. The film was in production beginning in 2010, with live filming being completed by May 2014. The film was not released until August 2015 in the UK and 2017 in the US. It received mixed to poor reviews and a box office as low as $6.3 million. Jones retired after receiving a diagnosis of dementia around the time of the film’s release. He died of the same condition in 2020.

For my experiences, my real frame of reference for this film is the most complicated of my personal classifications, the Anachronistic Outlier. By my own admission, I have been back and forth about what films really deserve this designation, and there have been times when I used it for entries I no longer consider that unusual for the time. On the other hand, I have had significant successes, films that felt just a little out of place to me that had indeed been prolonged and delayed in ways I had absolutely no knowledge of until I dug deeper (see The Brain That Wouldn’t Die). The present film is in many ways the most egregious example of all. It was obvious that it had taken a while for it to make its way over here, which can in itself make the difference between timely and self-dated in a genre as topical as comedy. Yet, there were still things about it that still seemed more fitting for ca. 2002 than 2012, and I felt absolutely no surprise when I found proof that it was knocking around even earlier than that.

Moving forward, the central reality of this movie is that it is just random. This is an approach which certainly can work, especially in the under-90 minutes running time of this film. Here, however, the law of averages is not in anybody’s favor. The “good” gags trend toward mildly amusing, if usually predictable, like the accidental general resurrection. For the rest, the best that can be said is that few if any are actually confusing, while the unkindest assessment is that they are unnecessarily crude without achieving actual shock value. On the latter vein, this anticipates the bad example of The Happytime Murders as an R-rated movie that doesn’t go far enough to “earn” it. It has to be added, the dialogue supplied by the Python crew doesn’t contribute one bit either way One more thing, when Neil/ Pegg refers to his classroom as “10C”, the accent is so wonky I swear I repeatedly heard it as “Tennessee”. The real reason I bring it up here is that, if my confusion had actually been part of the plot, the resulting gags could have been far more amusing than what we see onscreen.

On the usual “pro” side, the only thing that stopped me from giving this film the lowest rating is that things do pick up by the second half. The most obvious reason is Williams as Dennis, yet not nearly as much as might be expected; his role is quite limited on paper, without his first line until past the halfway mark. In fact, the more philosophical arc starts as the romance between Neil and Catherine heats up, without him knowing how little his powers are at work. I will further admit that the “cringe” factor isn’t nearly as bad as I might have said from memory; among other things, Neil wishes for the lady to be “in love” with him, not for that to lead to anything outside her presumably normal behavior. We get further contrast from Grant/ Riggle, who gleefully drives his character off the rails with villainy Neil would clearly never dream of. Then we do get an emotional resolution from the dog, who proves himself as the one person (???) who can give up the power. In the meantime, there’s at least two sophisticated satirical bits in Dennis’s revelation about belly rubs and the darkly comical consequences when Neil wishes away “reasons” for war.

That puts me at the “one scene”, and there’s one more intriguing by far than any other. At about the 45-minute mark, Neil is moving around books and objects with a sort of telekinetic levitation that doesn’t really fit what we know about his powers unless it’s something he gave himself. In the midst of it, Dennis starts parking, while he monologues about Catherine. For a while, it seems as if he understands the dog, or thinks he does, until he finally complains he can’t understand Dennis. Of course, he promptly gives the dog the ability to talk, then to reason, which only gets a continuous plea for a treat. He finally gives the dog a treat, then muses that he thought he has made Dennis a reasoning creature. The pet promptly counters, “Reasoning creatures still have desires,” which he promptly connects with Neil’s dilemma. There’s an extra twist as the dog refers to the woman with what is after all the proper term for females of his own kind, drawing further argument from Dennis until Catherine rings the bell. What’s impressive is that this all fits within maybe 3 minutes. For all the complaining I would usually do, this is genuinely representative of the film’s better moments… but they are still not nearly enough.

In closing, I come back both to the rating and the classification. As already noted, this is another movie I have gone easy on just by not giving the lowest rating. The better parts of the film were already enough to talk me out of that. Having uncovered its full history, what I was left with was a sense of true tragedy, for Jones even more than Williams. (There’s a lot more there, both heroic and depressing, that I haven’t touched.) It would be easy to be beguiled by the tantalizing “what ifs”, a film either made when the script was timely and the director was still of unquestionably sound mind, or put in the hands of someone who could update it appropriately. It might have been great. Then again, it might have merely been forgettable. However you look at it, it’s an exceptionally sad end to several great careers. That, for me, is enough to call it a day and look for a happier tale to tell.

No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown 8: The one with a Citroen HY

 

 

Title: High Tension aka Switchblade Romance

What Year?: 2002 (copyright)/ 2003 (French release)/ 2005 (US theatrical release)

Classification: Improbable Experiment/ Mashup

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

 

In the course of my movie reviews, one thing I’ve realized increasingly is that I’ve really been doing this almost as long as I’ve been writing in online formats, just with more fits and starts than usual. I have also had to admit to myself that almost everything I did before starting my reviews on this blog was unusable for the purposes of what I’m doing now. As a result, I have on occasion done a “re-review” of movies I had covered a long time ago. This time around, I have one I reviewed (kind of) that stayed with me, not in a good way, and I’m back for the rematch. Here is High Tension, a movie that single-handedly wrecks itself in the last 20 minutes.

Our story begins, after an ominous framing in a mental hospital, with two college girls Alexia and Marie on a road trip to visit Alex’s family in the French countryside. In the meantime, we get our first look at a grungy serial killer in a van that looks like it’s made entirely of aluminum siding, just finishing with the remains of his most recent victim. Things are getting awkward at the farmhouse, as it becomes clear that Marie wants to be more than a friend with Alex, then the killer arrives. In short order, he murders Alex’s parents and little brother and carries her off in the van from Hell. Marie manages to escape the massacre and climb aboard. Their only chance is for Marie to turn the tables on the creep, but the real problem is… he doesn’t actually exist??!!

High Tension was a 2003 independent French horror film directed by Alexandre Aja and cowritten with Gregory Levasseur. The film starred Cecile De France as Marie and Maiwenn as Alexia, with the late Philippe Nahon as the villain. It was released in France, then shown internationally. A significantly censored version with English dubbing was released in the United States by Lionsgate in 2005. Both versions were controversial for violence/ gore and the twist ending in which (spoiler, they deserve it) Marie is portrayed as schizophrenic and the actual killer. Roger Ebert stated, “(The) plot has a hole that is not only large enough to drive a truck through, but in fact does have a truck driven through it.” Ebert and others also complained of poor English dubbing on the Lionsgate cut. Maiwenn went on to direct several films. Nahon died in 2020, with over 200 film and TV credits. The film is available on disc and digital platforms.

For my experiences, my real frame of reference for this one is my long, rocky road through mental health self-advocacy. This has figured somewhat regularly in my movie reviews, and what I keep coming back to is that movies that try to portray mental illness are very bad at getting it right. The usual, superficial route characteristic of 1970s horror (see Picture Mommy Dead for an early and decent example) is to use a bunch of jarring images to dress up a story of little or no further substance. The somewhat more honest approach is to set up the hallucination/ delusion angle within an otherwise linear plot and narrative style, like The Cemetery Man and The Hand. As I keep ranting, the films that actually succeed at capturing mental breakdown, for better or worse, are the ones that set aside any pretense of logic and coherence and do weird for its own sake, like The Day Time Ended and Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. In this context, the present film has stood in my mind as what happens when the mental illness angle is used as pure plot contrivance by people who just don’t care.

With that laid down, I will be the first to admit that there’s a lot of good here, including the makings of a thoughtful dissection of the “rescue” wish-fulfillment fantasy. What’s most impressive is that it remains subversively unclassifiable, part slasher and the other part almost post-apocalyptic, in that respect resembling nothing less than the masterpiece Duel. On that vein, there is the absolutely unforgettable Citroen HY van, which I was literally blogging about before I got to the movie. This gets my vote as the ugliest, most brutal vehicle ever put on the road in numbers, and it’s telling that the story never pretends to question its reality (because nobody could ever imagine an HY...). What makes it work are the touches of personality, from the ominous photos on the rearview mirror to the incongruous business signage, which should be easy to trace unless, of course, the lawful owner already got dead. To me, what “works” is the damn van as the real villain, either driving its owners to madness and mayhem or attracting those already predisposed to it. In my “what if” machine, the perfect ending I picture is that Marie whacks the absolutely real bad guy, takes his van and drives off into the sunset with Alex riding shotgun, possibly with her chains still on. If the actual movie was anywhere near this clever, I would praise it highly enough to put it in my “good” movie feature.

Alas, as I’ve been ranting all along, what we got instead is very possibly the laziest, shoddiest, most gimmick-first-questions-never ending on record. The obvious problem is that there is absolutely nothing in the preceding events to suggest the characters and events are anything but real. Indeed, the hyper-graphic violence and effects go a long way to dispel any sense of unreality even if you’re looking for it, in notable contrast to the likes of Dead Alive. On top of that, the tactics and physical abilities of the pictured male killer and Marie shouldn’t really be interchangeable (an issue dealt with cleverly and without sexism in Freaky). What gets insulting for an advocate like me is that there is nothing here that obviously is hallucinatory, which is one thing even lazy-Seventies horror usually got right. Then the deepest offense is that the posited revelations still don’t fit what we saw any better than scenarios you could piece together at random. Just for example, maybe Alex killed her family, staged the abduction as her own getaway, and dragged Marie into it as a schizo who would believe in a frameup herself. And this is still arbitrarily assuming that all the characters besides the bad guy actually exist and are actually dead if we saw them die. This way lays not even the sane person’s idea of madness, but only a lazy writer’s bid for extra running time.

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with the one that’s most different from the rest of the film. I’ll mention at this point that this is the only scene I watched with the English-dub cut, which turned out to have this part still mostly in French. At the fifty-minute mark, the van is low on gas, so the party pulls into a station. We get some of our better looks at Nahon, who seems quite happy to look like a scuzzy creep you’d actually expect to see on the news. Marie darts inside, and tells the clerk to call the police. She then hides, just as the killer enters. In what should be an intriguing bit of detail, the villain speaks to the attendant with every appearance of familiarity, addressing him as Jimmy. The clerk is visibly confused but doesn’t yet seem convinced that his customer is guilty of wrongdoing. Nahon doesn’t seem to notice, turning his back to the counter as he peruses the merchandise. He rambles casually in the best character-actor tradition, briefly asking the clerk if he has ever had a girl in the store. Meanwhile, the clerk grows more awkward, and at one point we clearly him glance between Nahon and Marie, with both of them in the frame. Finally, Nahon asks to buy some liquor from a locked cabinet, and the clerk gives only a mild protest before coming out to help him. And this is precisely where I call absolute coprolite. What happens only makes sense if Nahon’s character is a real person who has a history with the clerk, regardless of what’s “revealed” later, and the movie up to at least this point must have been written and even shot taking this for granted. That leaves this scene as the most frustrating artifact of a film without the idiotic “twist” and vastly better for it.

In closing, I will freely admit that this is another film that I am treating more harshly than films that are certainly worse. For me, personal “hate” is not just allowable but the fundamental criteria for my judgment, and this is exactly the kind of film that makes me actively mad. I suppose it’s really not any worse in its portrayal of schizophrenia and mental illness than other films a lot closer to the “mainstream”. On the other hand, it came out exactly when movies like A Beautiful Mind were starting to recognize the disorder as something more than wacky multiple personalities. My final complaint is that those behind this film were a peculiarly wrong choice to take on the subject. It would take true surrealists to do this right, whereas what we got is what you can expect from competent people who do not have it in them and never will. The lesson is to know one’s limitations, and above all leave well enough alone. Be you, do what you can do well, and leave the rest to someone else. With that, I’m done.

No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown! The one where a boy from Mars is almost killed by his girlfriend

 

Title: The Space Between Us

What Year?: 2017

Classification: Mashup

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

With this review, I’m going into a new phase of this feature, which I have reflected by changing the numbering. I decided it was time for a reboot, and from here on in, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy. I am going for no less than a lineup of the actual worsts, and my key criterion is that they are all going to be the worst of something, be it genres, trends, or more specific subniches. What will further set these apart is that many if not most are going to be from well within the current millennium, thus representing some of the most hated and ridiculed developments of modern cinema. There was no better choice to start with than a good old alleged teen romance, a genre that hovers just above self-parody to begin with, and I had one in mind that is definitely as egregious an example as you can get. I present The Space Between Us, and it’s so dumb I literally assumed there had to be a YA novel behind it until my investigations proved otherwise.

Our story begins with an expedition to colonize Mars, sponsored by a Musk/ Bezos analog, with a spunky lady astronaut as commander. The mission runs into a hitch when it turns out she came down with a baby before leaving Earth. Alas, she dies in childbirth, and for various contradictory and equally illogical reasons, the tycoon and the space program suits cover it up. Skip forward, and we meet her son, a 16-year-old boy named Gardner, raised in secrecy from everyone but the dozens and hundreds of experts keeping him alive. The scientists are debating whether they can bring him back to Earth for normal human contact, notwithstanding completely justified predictions that the Terran environment will kill him. Meanwhile, Gardner has made a friend, a girl named Tulsa who has no idea who he is. On his return to Earth, Gardner escapes to meet up with Tulsa, who freely helps him stay ahead of his guardians and doctors. The chase becomes a quest for love and acceptance as he searches for his real father- and is there any chance they won’t hook up?

The Space Between Us was a 2017 film directed by Peter Chelsom from a script by Allen Loeb. The film was developed by Relativity Media, reportedly from a story proposed in 1999. The film starred Asa Butterfield and Britt Robertson, with Gary Oldman as the billionaire Nathaniel Shepherd. It was filmed beginning in late 2015, with a release by STX Entertainment planned for 2016. After several postponements, it was released in February 17. It received mixed to unfavorable reviews and was a commercial failure, earning $16 million against a $30M budget.

For my experiences, I skipped ahead straight to my big rant, the pointless conspiracy-theory angle, which would make even less sense if they were trying to fool their backing governments. (Though, there are suspiciously detailed analyses of things official sources insist have never happened in space…) What somewhat interested me right off the bat is how much more fascinating the story would be without it. If Gardner was known to the public, he would be a celebrity just for existing (and a fundraising pinata), and his life would probably be even more miserable than what we see. He wouldn’t just be living in the bubble with cameras and sensors everywhere. His entire life from infancy to early adulthood would be on video and possibly on the internet. On top of that, he would have little chance of interacting with someone who didn’t have an angle, from journalists to conspiracy theorists trying to prove that he didn’t exist. The one thing that would absolutely make sense is that he would prefer to hide his identity from someone he had a real connection with.

Moving forward, the thing that stands out is that the science here isn’t “that” bad, especially considering that it came from “mainstream” creators. (See my rant under When Worlds Collide...) It may be on the arm-waving level, but it still offers sensible answers to important questions we probably won’t really figure out until and unless the events portrayed become reality. Just as importantly, the film rarely if ever contradicts or ignores a previously established point for simple story convenience, though by the end, its solutions would be just as likely to kill the non-Terran anyway. The real problem is that there’s little if any effort to show how any changes on Earth. The state of technology is not just unchanged but in some cases seemingly out of date (not even counting the biplane), almost more like an alternate-universe 1999 than our own future. (The wonky tech actually kind of mitigates the unacknowledged problem of lightspeed lag, which wouldn’t be that big an issue for old-school email.) The most curious plot hole is that we never hear any of the Earthbound civilians talk about the Mars colony spontaneously; in fact, Tulsa doesn’t even acknowledge it when Gardner insists he is from there. This would suggest that the public is already growing skeptical of the venture, perhaps to the point of spinning theories that the whole thing is fake, or else her character in particular is oblivious to it… and as we’ll see in a moment, she does not need another strike against her.

That leaves the romance angle, and this is where I maintain the movie is truly in “worst” territory. The easy shot out of the gate is that Ms. Robertson would have been 25 at the start of filming, except she doesn’t really look so far off that it becomes distracting. What doesn’t help is that her character is at best an increasingly generic spunky-princess type, and at worst a miscreant with a man-child fetish. All of those issues still fall far short of the dysfunctionality of their relationship, which is a perfect storm of ableism and reverse chauvinism. Gardner absolutely cannot handle himself on Earth, physically, socially or emotionally, and Tulsa certainly knows this. Factor in her gray-area morals and vastly greater experience, and they are as compatible as Frosty the Snowman and the Human Torch.  But they are supposed to be in love, and society and the media still accept a male defying authority to prove he is independent and manly even if his mental age is “call SVU now” and he could easily get himself literally dead. The bottom line, the only more incompatible couple I can think of in all my reviews would be the lesbians from Prey (which would definitely be in this lineup if I hadn’t gotten to it long ago), and they were at least supposed to be messed up. And somewhere in the night, an Evil Possum is screaming…

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with the one I rewound the most. Just a little into the movie, we get a view of the outside of the colony that definitely looks expensive. Then we come to Gardner and a robot called I think Centauri, who does indeed look like a human torso crossed with a tracked chassis. There’s some good dialogue between the pair that I can’t quite recount, in which the robot sets off the usual arguments about AI by insisting its feelings are hurt. Meanwhile, Gardner watches a movie that looks to be from the 1950s or so as if it was his best source for what things are like on Earth, while he complains that he only ever meets scientists. It all builds up to what is clearly only his latest mischief, in which the disabled and indignant bot is left behind. It’s a very effective introduction to the character, his background and his world, and it’s far more interesting than any of his subsequent adventures.

In closing, I’m back to the rating. This was another movie I actually brought up a rating. It is also, however, another movie where this was not really a verdict in the film’s favor. On a certain level, if this movie really deserved the lowest rating, I probably wouldn’t even have bothered to watch it. I will even admit that it manages a real charm, in stretches. In the proverbial light of day, however, the one thing that stayed my hand is that even I can tell that this is anything but unique. And that gets to one more rant that was a major reason I covered it at all: When people do “worst” movies lists, the emphasis is always on genre films, but I don’t buy for a moment that this is because SF/ fantasy/ horror movies are uniquely prone to badness. I posit that the real difference is that these attract the kind of fandom that remembers and preserves the bad along with the good. You can see the difference especially in a film like this, a crossover that failed in its own time and was quickly and conveniently forgotten by the respectable mainstream, but hardcore genre completists like me haven’t let it slip into the night. This is indeed bad, not because it dragged in sci fi but because its mainstream influences were at least as formulaic, and we will not forget it. With that, I’m calling it good enough, because things can still get a lot worse.

Super Movies! The one with a killer robot vs. a baseball bat

 

Title: Hardware aka MARK 13

What Year?: 1990

Classification: Improbable Experiment

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I’ve been doing a Halloween lineup, with some of the best and worst movies I have ever considered at all. I have also been debating the future of this feature in particular, which has finally been closing in on the kind of numbers where I have considered retiring a feature. This brought me to one particular movie that I have had backlogged for a long time, in part because I never quite decided where it belonged. My very belated decision was that it belonged here, and conversely, that I needed to cover this one before I could count this feature complete. With that, I present Hardware, one of the strangest movies I have ever encountered, and one I still can’t say if I consider bad, good or just over my head.

Our story begins with a masked wanderer returning from a desert wasteland to a very cyberpunk city. We learn he is a soldier named Mo, who collects various debris as a sideline. His latest find is a robotic skull that he decides to keep as a gift to his lady friend Jill, an artist who makes sculpture from scrap. She’s happy to take it for her latest work, but it turns out there are problems. First, the creepiest of an impressive rogues’ gallery of disreputable characters has bugged her apartment. Second, the skull is actually a functioning prototype of an advanced combat robot. In short order, the bot manages to summon or reassemble its remaining parts and restore itself to functionality. The machine stalks the lady through her apartment, seemingly prolonging the cat-and-mouse antics while efficiently eliminating any males who try to enter or intervene. It all comes down to a showdown between a damaged bot and the lady. Can she prevail, or has technology finally outmatched the wooden baseball bat?

Hardware was a 1990 British/ American sci fi film written and directed by Richard Stanley, funded by executive producers Harvey Weinstein. Similarities to a 1980 story from the comic 2000 AD led to a copyright infringement suit by Fleetway Comics, which ended with the comic being acknowledged as the basis for the film in later releases. The film starred Stacey Travis as Jill and Dylan McDermott as Mo, with William Hootkins, best known as Porkins in the original Star Wars,  as a voyeur known as Wineberg. The film earned an estimated $5.7 million in a limited US theatrical release, against a budget of $1.5M. Richard Stanley became inactive after the failure of 1996’s Island of Dr. Moreau, which he was originally chosen to direct from his own script. In 2017, Stanley confirmed that Travis had been a victim of harassment and retaliatory blackballing by Harvey Weinstein. The movie went on to be a “cult” film, despite (if not because of) negative contemporary reviews and legal issues that limited its availability on home video. Its most significant authorized disc release was by Severin Films in 2009.

For my experiences, I first caught wind of this one from one or two very favorable reviews. On further investigation, I was able to obtain it for a decent price by ordering from Europe (see also Allegro Non Troppo and Zombi/ Dawn of the Dead). By happenstance, I watched it for the first time with a friend. By the end, I was ready to apologize, except my friend apparently liked it well enough. At that point, it went to the “maybe” pile. I considered it regularly, both for this and other features, but I didn’t try another viewing until this review. After that, I was very close to throwing it in a quickly growing feature on “worst” movies, not because of my opinion of its quality but for its wild and willful disregard for narrative convention and coherence. On very close consideration, I concluded that this would simply be giving the wrong impression, so I reverted to my existing plan to cover it here. One more thing I will get out of the way off the bat is that this is the most unpleasantly scandal-plagued movie I have encountered after Brainstorm, and the rematch got even more uncomfortable when I more carefully considered the character of “Wineberg”. The only thing I will add on this vein is that Ms. Travis did have a decent career after this movie, mainly in TV roles, proving that scum can’t keep people down entirely.

Moving to the movie itself, what truly settled its place here is that it does indeed look very much like a comic book, perhaps more than any movie I have covered outside of The Punisher, Creepshow and maybe Lady Snowblood. This shows in any number of bold, jarring visuals (including a surprising amount of religious imagery), and also in a deceptive attention to detail. The ultimate result is that the movie’s world is for long stretches at least as interesting as the story and characters. The desert landscapes, filmed in Morocco, are bleak and desolate, yet purer than the grimy, crowded cityscape. There’s extra entertainment in the in-universe TV and radio broadcasts, highlighted by Iggy Pop as “Angry Bob”. What’s less fortunate is that there’s still not much here that you couldn’t have found in a late 1980s/ early ‘90s comic book. Then the biggest problem of all is that if this was a comic, it could easily be knocked out in 10 or 20 pages, where the movie keeps straining to turn a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode’s worth of good material into 94 minutes of running time.

Then the centerpiece is the lady and the robot, and they are truly equal. Jill/ Travis is spunky yet nuanced, without needing to intimidate or abuse men. What’s most impressive is that she truly feels at home in an apartment full of gadgets and junk, further suggesting that the TV format was always best for the actress and perhaps the director as well. As for the robot, what’s both most intriguing and increasingly frustrating is that it doesn’t really “look” like anything. A point in the thing’s favor is that there’s some ambiguity how much of what we see is original specs, damaged components or bits and pieces assimilated from Jill’s junk pile. That sets off the thought in my mind that this could have been better if the thing actually turned her own power tools against her. When the pair match wits, there’s plenty of very believable tension further aided by an unmistakable sense of malign intelligence and possible sadism from the machine. The one part where one must suspend disbelief or write this off is the ludicrous final battle, which honestly, seriously sees Jill armed only with a bat. The weapon is so obviously ineffective that she would surely be better off trying to stab what’s left into an eye or one of the visible joints, but the storyboarding follows the absurd premise through right to the end.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and what I’m going with is the demise of Wein Wineberg. After Jill’s first encounter with the bot, she very grudgingly accepts the creep’s help. They quickly realize that the machine has somehow disappeared. Eventually, Wineberg thinks to open the blinds. Even though Jill has specifically said the bot couldn’t have left the apartment, its glowing eyes are looking straight back at him from the other side of the blinds. What follows is easily the most gruesome and prolonged kill of the movie, and I can’t avoid taking it as a sure sign that the filmmaker was already fed up with the Hollywood “mainstream”.

In closing, I come back to the rating, which is one more reason I chose to keep this one in this feature. At the proverbial end of the day, I simply don’t like this movie. On the other hand, I certainly can’t say it’s “bad”, and I certainly respect those who do like it. Ultimately, I’m not going to judge any further, especially after giving a good review to Dr. Moreau, which I still consider among the very best I’ve reviewed at all. (If it comes to that, the very best are probably here in this feature.) If my forewarnings haven’t turned you off, and if you can find this damn thing, by all means give it a look. It deserves that much, and even if you’re disappointed, you certainly won’t forget it.

Crypto Corner: Microchip Madness???

 

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

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

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

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

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

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