Fiction: The Space Guys Adventure, Part 12!

 It's time for the nominal start of the week, so of course I have another Space Guys installment that's pretty much all gratuitous world-building. By the way, these are all real place names. As usual, the table of contents is at the end.

The voyage went on as Jupiter grew larger in the porthole. Jason struggled less with his own engagement than with the sudden marriage of Anastasia and Donald. Within a week, they could be seen openly displaying their affection in the recreation area around the captain’s cabin. Much of that admittedly consisted of Anastasia talking while he pawed at her. Alek made a point of teasing him. “See, he is a man’s man,” she said. “He grabs and takes. Why do you no do that to me? Am I not no good enough woman for you?”

Jason ignored her and joined the group. They passed a computer game console, consisting of a circular flat panel screen the size and configuration of a game table with two sets of controls on opposite sides. Currently, Jax and Yukio, the Edonian engineer, were using it to play Go. Surprisingly, Jax was in the process of winning. By Anastasia was playing one of the electromechanical games, a rudimentary simulator where the player controlled a descending model lander. When Donald sidled up behind her, she finally swore and hissed at him.

Jason chose an electromechanical target game, based on King Kong. Through a vision block, he could see a miniature ape atop a stylized spire, holding a wildly out-of-scale woman. The spire and the figures rotated as the crosshairs moved back and forth, in a fair simulation of a circling aircraft. Alex leaned in to look. The window was wide enough for one or two onlookers to see what was happening, but little of what illusion there was carried over when viewed from the side. He waited for the mechanical ape to set down the woman, then fired. He got the required number of hits on the second try, then allowed Alek to look as the flailing ape dropped out of sight. He then allowed her to take his free turn. Within bare moments, there was a crude but effective wail as she fired early, causing the ape to drop the woman and end the game. He suppressed a flinch when he found Moxon leaning against the next cabinet. “Say,” he said, “can I try?”

They took turns through three rounds each. He outscored Moxon twice. The officer took it in evident good humor. By then, Alek had started into boasting about their partnership. “I am an enlightened man, and you know, he is a very enlightened man,” she said. “That is why we are waiting to get married. He takes care of me, I take care of him, we don’t need to rush.”

That got a scowl from Anastasia. “Oh, please,” she said. “You two are so traditional the Motherworld press think you are already married.”

Jason managed to cut in. “Well, we’ve both been wanting to ask,” he said. “You getting married was, well, fast. I’ve known you a long time, I never thought you were the marrying kind. There’s definitely no way you would do it just to stay out of trouble.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Anastasia said. “We were seeing each other. We just weren’t exclusive. There wasn’t anyone else I was going long-term for.”

Don put an arm around her. “Hey, it’s not like I’m the compromise candidate,” he said. “I’m smart, I’m cool, I’m fun. I can make her laugh. I can make her do more than laugh.” He reached down to her waist. She firmly moved his hand back to her shoulder.

By then, Jax had won his game. As he shook hands with the Edonian, Moxon sidled in. “I can play the next game,” he said.

“Nah,” Jax said. “I want to try the geography game again.” He punched a control, and a map of Gaia appeared. Moxon leaned over with interest.

“I can tell you about geography,” he said. Nobody opposed him as he took the Edonian’s seat, though there were glances of concern when he raised his trench knife.

The game consisted of prompts to select a country. Jax moved the crosshairs around the map with a pair of knobs. Moxon simply jabbed the screen with the still-sheathed knife. “Here’s where you farmboys are from,” he said, tapping the middle of the North American continent. “Good old US of A. Now part of the  Pan-Atlantic Union, of course. The closest thing there is to a capitol is down here; Mexico City. Chances are your parents left through the Merida spaceport here.” He tapped the Yucatan Peninsula to the east.

Jax moved the crosshairs to the islands of England across the Atlantic. “Aren’t they in the Union?” Jason said.

“Actually, no,” Moxon said. Jax nodded. “You could say they’re a member in all but name, but officially, they’re a neutral state. They backed out because of Ireland, among other things.” He tapped the island to the west. “They did join the Union, free and clear, but the damage was done.”

They went through France and more Union countries on the continent, then the central states of Deutschland. Moxon nodded toward the captain. “Deutschland tried to get it all in the Last War,” he said. “You know how that turned out. After the Great Peace, all the armies that fought against them withdrew on the condition that they would remain neutral in a war between the other powers. Now, it’s a matter of pride that they don’t have an army. Of course, if they ever need one, there will already be another Great War going.”

He traced the vast territory of the Federation, stretching from Slovakia to Upper Korea, plus satellites as far-flung as Cuba and Lower East Indochina. “The Federation was the Soviet Union, of course,” he said. “After the Reforms, they became the Trans-Eurasian Federation of Socialist Republics. Their Republics got a choice between staying with equal representation in the Party or becoming satellite states, and the satellites were allowed to stay or agree to neutrality. Most of them stayed.”

He jabbed at New Edo and Shen and the allied lands of Lower Korea and Upper East Indochina. “Then, of course, there’s the Alliance of Heaven, really, that’s their name,” he said. “Right before the end of the War, the Emperor of Old Tokyo made a peace treaty with the Leader of the Ruling Party of Shenzhou. Only back then, the Party wasn’t ruling anything, except the lands on the border with Russka. The Emperor said it was atonement for the wrongs of the war. It was really just lighting a fire in the attic while they ran out the back door. The damnedest thing was, they followed through with it.”

They came back to Dalmatia, which drew a chuckle from Moxon. “Dalmatia exists because the Hrvatskis took the wrong side in the Last War,” he said. “When the Jugoslav Union reformed, the southern part was carved out as a new Republic.” He traced an erratic line across the peninsula. “The Adriatic Federation bit was aspirational. They hoped they could get Greece, even Italy. All they got was Albania and Romania. The rest mostly went to the Alignment.” He outlined a swath of territory that went from Greece through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, plus the outliers of Siam and Israel.

The officer waved vaguely at the converging island chains of Indo-Malaya. “The Indo-Malay Federation was another start-up that didn’t get anywhere, though they at least got a lot of nothing to show for it. It’s a whole bunch of little islands full of people who speak almost the same language, pray to practically the same gods and all hate each other. No offense.” He looked in the direction of Aisi. “They finally got to act important when somebody convinced them to stick their noses in West Indochina.” He jabbed at a comma-like swath on the inner edge of the eastern peninsula.

He pointed to the swath between Iran and Siam that was Greater Hindustan, and the belt of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa across the oceans to the south. “This is the Indo-Oceanian Federation,” he said. “It’s the other reason England didn’t get into the Union. There was a deal to let the colonies in the Subcontinent go their own way, and straight to Hell for all anyone cared. But England convinced the non-Hindu provinces to accept peacekeepers from the other colonies, which was how the Federation started. I spent a lot of time there. In the Second Intervention, I saved a temple of the Jains in Karachi. The priests made me a Brahmin.”

Jax spoke up. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I know that one. It was 27 years ago. How the Hell old are you?”

Moxon turned his head and smiled. “How old do I look?” Jax said no more.

Moxon leaned back. “So that’s good old Gaia,” he said. “It’s a nice enough place, really. We have world peace, peace enough anyway. That beats the alternative. Just in case, we have the UN and the Strato-Corps. You could say we’re the world’s fire department, putting out little fires before they get big. You know, there was a time I did that, too.” As he spoke, he drove the blade through a partition.

As the game wound down, Donald happily took over the console. He started a game called Interceptor that was clearly intended to simulate a missile exchange. Each incoming projectile was represented by a curving line that could be blocked with another. The trick was that  there was a lag between the lines on the screen and the input from the controls that grew as the game went on. Alek joined in, laughing as she stopped one attack after another and drove her own offensive home. In the midst of it, Jason and Anastasia exchanged glances. They both made their way to the rear, where the ludicrous prefabricated bathroom filled the rear escape pod. She stretched out in the tub. He sat on top of the lowered lid of the toilet.  She said without turning, “It was your fault, you know.”

“What do you mean?” Jason said. There was already a note of wounded innocence in his voice.

“I had to marry Don,” Anastasia said. “After what happened with Vasily and Jackie, I got called in to see the captain. He laid out everything. Sure, it was for what I did, and maybe I deserved it. But it was still because of you and the little supergenius!”

“I don’t understand,” Jason said, quite honestly. “We didn’t do anything wrong, at least by what goes back home. Even what you did wouldn’t be a big deal. What does Command on Gaia care?”

Anastasia started to snarl, but moderated into a sigh. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “Remember those silly old shows that always had a man and woman in separate beds even if they were supposed to be married? The Federation State networks still won’t show a man and woman in one bed unless it’s designated for `health and education’. Or did you notice all the times they talk about how the Union outgrew segregation? There are Union stations that wouldn’t air interviews with Jill Lightower without hiding that she’s a morena. Now just try to imagine what it’s like dealing with sponsors in Outer Hindustan and the Arab League. So can you guess the one thing that’s got everyone up in arms? That Shen reporter filmed you and Alek in bed with her top off, while your partition was wide open!”

“What?” Jason said. “We always… wait… oh. Jax must have forgotten about it. Well, what are they going to do about it? The ship has sailed, literally.”

“They can send us home,” Anastasia said. “All of us. That’s why we aren’t going full speed. Of course, the official explanation is that it lets a rescue ship meet up with us if we had an accident or a medical emergency. But as far as Gaia Command is concerned, we aren’t just an unproven experiment, we’re a liability. When they see us living life our own way, they don’t want to see people who don’t know what the rules are supposed to be. They see superhumans who think we’re too good for their morality. If we won’t follow their rules, who’s to say we won’t stop following their orders? They wouldn’t send back the actual supergenius, oh no, they need her. They might let you stay if it kept her happy. But the rest of us… totally replaceable.”

She sighed for real. “The captain told me, it is essential to the program that the public sees a Martian in a stable domestic relationship,” she said. “He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to.”

Jason shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That’s not you. They might as well tell a full-blooded wolf to sit, roll over and fetch.”

Anastasia sighed again. This time, she smiled. “I had thought about it, really,” she said. “Even a woman like me thinks about settling down sooner or later. I was never getting there with Jackie. I should have cut Vasily off already. But Donald… I suppose he could have gotten here on his own eventually. Probably would have. He’s that kind of person.”

“Does he know?” Jason asked pointedly.

“Of course,” Ana said. “Well, he knows enough. He still thinks that makes him Number One, at everything. That’s why he treats me the way he does. It’s fine, really. Trying to change him wouldn’t be any better than trying to change me. If anybody could dig deep enough to do it, I wouldn’t want what would be left.”

She turned her head to meet Jason’s steady gaze. “Damn,” he said. “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

“Well, you’re an idiot,” she said, without hiding a blush. They were still sitting in silence when there came a banging at the door.

“Jason!” Alek said. “I know you’re in there! Ana, I know you’re in there too! Are you cheating with my fiancée?”

Jason and Anastasia looked at each other. “No,” Ana said with a lilting accent.

There was a moment of silence. “Well, why not?” Jason got up to leave.

Table of contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!

Part 8: The launch!

Part 9: The girl talk!

Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!

Part 11: The Space Nazis!!!

The Kong File 2: The one with zombie Kong and Linda Hamilton

 

 

Title: King Kong Lives aka King Kong 2

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Weird Sequel

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

 

With this review, I’m continuing my Kong lineup. As often happens, I have had the first and last entries settled in my mind all along, yet the middle installment has required further thought. That in turn required me to look through a fair amount of material that I, even I, had not gotten around to watch. I finally gave one particular film a try, with a solid alternate already in hand. When I was done, I knew that it was the one I had to do, so of course, I waited until the last moment to try writing a review. I present King Kong Lives, the sequel to the first Kong remake, because that always goes over well!

Our story begins at the climax of the previous film, as Kong takes a swan dive off a certain building that became a whole other set of baggage. But it turns out that a big company has hired a lady scientist with the tech to revive Kong as a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, because in this kind of movie, corporations never make a mistake that they can’t repeat with exponentially worse results the second time around. Meanwhile, an adventure manages to capture a female of whatever the Hell this species is. The Kongette (there’s no way this crew was coming up with the name on their own) provides a source for a transfusion that fully revives the original. Once Kong is up and awake, he pines for the female in what is definitely not a Platonic way. When the sponsors try to keep the pair apart against their own interests, the star-crossed lovers break free with no significant assistance from the lady scientist who is still being treated as the lead. With company bounty hunters and the military out for Kong, this Romeo and Juliet story just might end in tragedy!

King Kong Lives was a 1986 film by Dino DeLaurentiis (see Flash Gordon, Conan The Destroyer, etc, etc.), produced as a sequel to the 1976 remake of King Kong.  The film was directed by John Guillermin from a script by Ron Shusett (see Dead and Buried) and Steven Pressfield. The Kong suits and other effects were created by the late Carlo Rambaldi (see… Twitch of The Death Nerve?). Linda Hamilton of Terminator starred as Dr. Franklin, with Peter Elliott making a credited appearance as Kong. A tie-in video game was released only in Japan, under the alternate title King Kong 2. While the film earned $48 million worldwide against an $18M budget, it earned only $4M in the US and was reported as a failure for the De Laurentiis organization. A legal confrontation arose when Siskel and Ebert were warned not to broadcast clips of the film to national audiences, leading Siskel to comment that the De Laurentiis Group “couldn’t find a single scene that it wanted you to see”.  The film has a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes (see Mac And Me, Terrorvision). It is currently available for digital purchase and rental, including free streaming from the Shout! Factory platform.

For my experiences, my one tangential encounter with this one is that I can recall sighting it on the video stores. What really came to my mind with this review was my own reappraisal of Dino De Laurentiis. I grew up on second-hand accounts that treated the filmmaker as a butt of jokes, albeit often in a semblance of good-natured humor. I went along with it to the point of making him the basis of a (likeable!) comic-relief character in my fiction. It was only when I started doing my own reviews that I started to come to terms with Dino as a significant and, at least in intention, serious filmmaker. What I found was that many other people have been making the same journey. What became ominously clear was that the present film has been left out of the De Laurentiis renaissance. Once I watched this movie, the impression I came out with was in many ways an “honest” effort, without the pretensions that built up around De Laurentiis’ most polarizing film. The corollary is, it is absolutely bonkers in ways I have spent the last few days trying to think of ways to convey.

Moving forward, the central and counterintuitive reality of this film and to some extent De Laurentiis’ work as a whole is that there is very little that is intentionally or at least obviously trying to be funny. This is something that I have for my own part come to see as part of the character of the Italian cinema he came out of. To be sure, there are actual gags, the funniest being the total annihilation of a very ‘80s sportscar. Yet, these are not really part of the De Laurentiis brand of surrealism. If anything, there are moments that feel all the more odd for being played straight. The quite lengthy resurrection of the first act is especially telling. It’s every bit as strange as it sounds in cold blood. At the same time, it’s the closest we get to anything resembling realism; there is a clinical feel here that conveys a further sense of real effort. (Alas, this is also the only point where Hamilton is anything but wasted.) The strange tone continues with Kong’s first escape attempt, where the guards and military vehicles descend into Wile E. Coyote slapstick that barely requires a response from the ape. Once the apes meet up, any humor very quickly drains away, generally to the film’s detriment. This shows especially in Kong’s battle with the military and the following birth of his son. There’s raw power in the ape’s Pyrrhic victory, but the new-born ape is just one more moment that’s weird without being interesting, all the more so as it is clearly just a grown human in a regular gorilla suit without magnification.

That leads straight to by far the biggest problem: The effects here are absolutely, inexplicably and inexcusably awful.  There were already plenty of problems with the 1976 remake, which in hindsight was just a little too early for practical effects to match the fine art of stop-motion. Here, at the height of the 1980s effects revolution, everything looks cheap, rushed, poorly thought-out or all of the above. The worst and most persistent problems come from the direction and camerawork, which repeatedly fail to provide either a scale to impress us or a context to know what if anything is going on. But I also cannot avoid a certain frustration with Rambaldi, all the more so after all the completely deserved praise I have given his work. This was the guy who turned H.R. Giger’s concepts into the Alien suit. (See Forbidden World and Deep Space for what could go wrong when people tried to replicate it…) The people who in his league during his lifetime could probably be counted on one hand. But this movie proves his tendency to be either very, very good or bafflingly bad. The apes here don’t match his so-so E.T. rig, never mind the Alien or Dagoth suits. It takes a lot to make me disappointed with a genuine effects hero, and I am well and truly mad.

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with the one that really got my attention. As the finale approaches, Kong is being hunted by a band of company-backed bounty hunters. These aren’t just incompetents, but drunken, obnoxious louts who would presumably be even more unpleasant if there were women around. Surprisingly, they manage to trap Kong with a man-made avalanche that buries him up to the shoulders. It’s a perfect opportunity to throw a few of the gas bombs that have been established as Kong’s weakness in every incarnation, so of course, they laugh, take pictures and fire guns into the air while the ape snarls in indignation. They poke the ape with sticks and torches over the objections of one of their own, until Kong bursts free, burying the majority under their own rocks. There’s an unusually impressive shot as Kong pursues the 2 survivors, actually moving with something close to an actual gorilla’s knuckle walk. When the goons try to climb to safety, he grabs one and literally breaks him in half. He triggers another rockslide to bring down the other, whom he catches and swallows with no visible gore. We only see Kong chew, swallow, and after a moment, pull the ruffian’s hat from between his teeth. It’s a strange moment in a very strange film, but one of the last that really lives up to his potential.

In closing, all I can say is that after watching this, I have no problem with calling it the worst Kong movie. That comes with a few qualifiers. I’m not going to try to count foreign knockoffs, loosely inspired “tributes” and actual parodies. (I claim responsibility for the worst parody, even if it doesn’t technically exist.) I’m also not really considering what makes a film “technically” bad, a distinction that definitely goes to the 1960s incarnations of the character. (I’m definitely getting to that…) But on the Venn diagram of muddled story, poor effects and production values and pure wasted potential, this one hits the exact center of total failure. What’s really of note is that for all its failings, it’s still entertaining enough to be counted as underrated. The real lesson is just how elemental the appeal of the character and story have always been. If a franchise can remain relevant after 90 years, it can survive a lot worse than this. With that, I am ready to call it a night.

Featured Creature: The one that sank James Cameron

 

 

Title: The Abyss

What Year?: 1989

Classification: Improbable Experiment/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

When I started doing movie reviews, one thing that I considered very early is that I have seen the status and perception of a number of movies change, sometimes faster than I can account for what happened. This has had some strange effects. Films that were once “underrated” have risen to greater heights. On the more depressing side, movies I first encountered as unquestioned “classics” have sunk into borderline obscurity. This has played a non-trivial role in what movies I choose to review based on my further skewed priorities. Some movies I might once have considered have gone above my radar, while others have come back onto it. With this review, I’m covering the biggest and most personal example, an old favorite that helped get me into 1980s genre films. I present The Abyss, the ultimate underwater science fiction movie (see Leviathan), and the fact that it has retained that title for over 30 years should tell you how that went over.

Our story begins with a nuclear submarine that sinks itself chasing a mysterious underwater object. In the aftermath, we meet Bud, an engineer/ oil man in charge of a deep-sea habitat, and his estranged spouse Lindsay, a liberal-minded career woman who helped build it. They’re called on to ferry a military team to search for survivors of the wreck in waters near Cuba, which will be more or less important depending on which version of the film you’re watching. It soon becomes apparent that the team and its tough-as-nails commander are more concerned with securing nukes than search and rescue. Then the crew begin seeing strange lights underwater, while literal and political storms brew on the surface. When a hurricane cuts them off from the surface, they find themselves alone with an undersea alien colony- and a commander with the bends and a live atomic bomb!

The Abyss was a 1989 film by James Cameron (see… Galaxy of Terror?), produced by 20^th Century Fox. The film starred Ed Harris as Bud and Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Lindsay, with Michael Biehn as Lt. Coffey. Extensive effects were provided by ILM, including a CGI water tentacle. The soundtrack was composed by Alan Silvestri (see the Predator soundtracks review). The production was reportedly affected by on-set safety issues, budget overruns and tensions between the director and the cast. The film was released without a partially filmed sequence in which the extraterrestrials produce a global tsunami. A novelization was written by Orson Scott Card after the author was approached by Cameron, with the original ending and further narration from the aliens’ perspective. The film won an Oscar for special effects. Fox backed a campaign to nominate Biehn for Best Supporting Actor, but no evidence has emerged whether this received further consideration from the Academy. The Special Edition, with the original ending and new CGI effects, was given a limited theatrical release in 1993. Later home video releases sometimes favored the Special Edition over the theatrical cut. As of late 2022, the film has not been released on Blu Ray and is not available on digital platforms in the US.

For my experiences, this is one where it’s easiest to lay down my cards up front: This is by far James Cameron’s best film, and in many ways, it is the best genre film of the 1980s and even the ‘80s-‘90s, especially outside the “franchise” category. What has been increasingly strange to me is that in the timeframe between when it was released and when I dug into the Cameron library, there was no immediate or foreseeable need to argue the point. Sure, there would have been people who disagreed with me, but in any serious discussion, it could be expected to receive at least a respectful mention alongside the likes of Aliens (see my post on the novel while you're at it) and the first two Terminator films. If anything, it had an edge as Cameron’s “prestige” entry, the one that put him on a mainstream footing. Yet, in the intervening years, it is the film that has slipped through the cracks. For the present review, I watched both versions with an eye to accounting for why, and I am still left at a loss.

Moving forward, what stands out starkly in hindsight is that this is neither an ‘80s or a ‘90s movie, but a 1950s movie that happens to have modern effects and production values. (See also, unavoidably, E.T.) All the major plot points in either version harken back to the B-movie era, albeit very successful and sophisticated examples like The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Outer Limits TV series. (I must once again put in a marginally good word for Plan 9…) The finale of the Special Edition in particular is pretty much the “Architects of Fear” scenario, with all its obvious and arguable flaws. What keeps the present film relevant and interesting is that most of these issues are acknowledged on its own terms. Finding an advanced alien species already living on Earth would certainly divert the human nation-states from their own quarrels for a while, with or without a demonstration of force sufficient to wipe out industrial civilization. However, we have already seen vividly how a truly paranoid military mind reacts to the unknown, so we are not required to share the optimism of the characters or the filmmaker. If it comes to that, much the same can be said of the central romance. It’s all well and good that they have reconciled enough to work together in a crisis, but whether they would or should stay together is another matter.

The real pros and possible cons come with the effects and Biehn’s performance. The visual effects are top notch, to put it mildly. Together with Cameron’s direction, they do add a good deal of polish that would be missing in a recounting in cold blood, especially the bumper-boat duel of ludicrously non-threatening subs. If there is a downside, it is that the advanced CGI didn’t age nearly as well as the practical/ miniature effects, an issue that shows all the more with the Special Edition tsunami. All of this easily takes a back seat to Biehn’s incredibly, perhaps absurdly, intense performance. He’s not “better” than he was in his earlier Cameron roles. The real difference is that he finally has a character complex and conflicted enough to make full use of both his charismatic screen presence and the “dark” implications that go with it. What’s easily missed is that he is the one character whose reactions are truly proportionate to the situation. A high point and easy “one scene” contender is his terrified response to the severed water pseudopod, which continues to improve rather embarrassingly on both the scene and the effect. It all crystallizes in his utterly terrifying demise. In my “head canon”, I see it as a return to sanity and perhaps a moment of remorse, far too late.

That brings me to the “one scene”, and I’m going with one that continues to fascinate me far beyond its importance within the film. As the deep-sea habitat goes cross-country, the wackiest of the crew is caught in the sub bay with his pet rat. When a jolt sends a sub swinging, he has to make a dive to safety. Then he looks back and sees the rat, still in a plastic bag. It’s the shot of the rodent that has stayed with me all this time. Of course, it’s a typical, obvious Hollywood bid to make us sympathize with the animal while actual humans are buying it without further comment. But it’s also a perfect metaphor for everyone’s predicament, dependent on the thinnest of protection against an environment where they were never meant be anything but dead. What follows is, more than usual, predictable enough that no recounting is needed. The strength of the film and the filmmaker is that we aren’t required to agree with the character’s (dumb) decisions to stay engaged and invested in what happens.

In closing, I come back to why the film hasn’t fared much better. I have in no way changed my opinions on this film, and I absolutely blame its current state at least in part on quite typical mismanagement of intellectual properties that should be literally illegal. (How to fix that is a whole other trail of rants…) With maturity, however, I will admit it as a cautionary tale of what happens when genre films meet the mainstream, especially in light of Cameron’s subsequent career. It was and is very, very good, enough to blow away his fans and impress many more. At the same time, it marked the start of more critical appraisals of his strengths and limitations that were increasingly proven valid. Terminator 2 was good, perhaps as good as The Abyss, but it was not breaking new ground. True Lies was simply dumb fun. Then there was Titanic, which I trashed Gone With The Wind as a proxy for, and for the intelligent genre viewer, it has been all downhill from there. If there’s a moral, it’s that being the best isn’t everything. With that, I can end this as a fond memory. To better things ahead…

Image credit Goodreads.

Fiction: The Space Guys adventure, Part 7!

 I was debating whether to post at all this week, I decided I could fill out an off week, which means more of the Space Guys. Here's the chapter I've really had the most fun with, featuring alternate history pop culture. Again, I have a table of contents at the end.

Jason and Alek were smiling and laughing as they returned to his cabin. Jax looked up from a card game with Sarip. His eyes locked on a box Jason was carrying. “What’s this?” he asked.

“I just met with Dad at Deimos base,” Jason said. “He and the folks put together a box of our things. The captain cleared it.”

Jason had grown accustomed enough not to shudder as Moxon approached. “Actually, he sent me to inspect the contents,” he said. “It’s regulations. Strictly a formality, of course.”

Jason set it down and opened it. Right on top were 3 small stuffed toys, a Sparky the Space Squirrel doll, based on an earlier and more stylized version of the character, a weedy birdlike creature known as Tweel the Martian and a well-loved gorilla. His eyes flicked to Moxon, half-expecting him to destroy Sparky on sight. In fact, his lip merely curled in amusement. Beneath that was a mesh bag of what looked like tin soldiers; in fact, it was a circus set, with the clowns, acrobats and animals made from sheet steel. The rest was records, both audio and video, and a collection of microform books. Alek picked up Tweel. “Ooh, I love Tweel,” she said. “I read all the Weinbaum stories.”

She looked through the movies. “Sparky the Space Squirrel on Venus, Sparky On The Moons Of Jupiter… I’m sure we have these in the ship library,” she said. She furrowed her eyebrows at a set. “King Kong, Son of Kong, The Return of Kong, Kong Unchained, Queen Kong, Wrath of Kong… You have the whole set?”

“Everybody loves Kong,” Jax said. He was looking through the audio records. “Okay, we got Spike Jones, Duke Ellington, Elvis Presley… whatever happened to him?”

Alek had reached the books. Each one was a cardboard folio that held a sheaf of strips printed with pages the size of small postage stamps, meant to be loaded in a hand-held magnifier which someone had included three of. The outsides of the folios bore vivid and colorful artwork. The one in her hand showed a tracked vehicle the size of a light naval craft, built around an equally enormous cannon. The text read, Last Stand of the Landcruisers by Martin Caidin. “History?” she said. She picked up another. It showed a man with a broad-brimmed hat facing a bat-faced, hunchbacked ghoul in what might have been either a crypt or a sewer. The title read, Solomon Kane In The Catacombs, by L. Sprague De Campe. She set it down and picked up another. It showed a bare-chested barbarian fighting what looked like a carnivorous stegosaurus. Its title read, The Adventures of Conan by Robert E. Howard. A smaller caption read, “From the creator of Solomon Kane.”

“The stories are not as good as Conan, but I like Kane better,” she said. She picked through more of the books. One showed a biplane in a dogfight with a dragon. The title read, Dragons Over Verdun by Leigh Brackett. Another showed soldiers firing desperately from the ruins of a factory. It bore the title Last Stand At Leningrad and the byline Cyril Kornbluth.  A third showed another barbarian staring into a magic mirror at a city of graceful spires. The text declared, The Wizard of Otherworld by Philip K. Dick. “All this fantasy,” she said after looking through several more titles. “Is this what they read on Mars?”

Jason shrugged. “We all have our tastes, same as everybody,” he said. “But yeah, we usually go for fantasy over the space stories. It’s about people living with nature, not technology.” He held up a single book with a picture of a rocket descending on a village of tentacled aliens. “This is just kids’ stuff.”

“Hey, it’s what got us where we are,” Jax said. He indignantly took away the book. “Hey, show her your trick.”

Alek looked at Jason. “What is trick?” she said.

Jason gave a defensive shrug. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “It’s just… I can read the cards without the magnifier.”

Alek looked at one of the strips from the Solomon Kane folio. The print was just large enough for a keen eye to see it as separate words and characters rather than lines and blocks. “Show me,” she said.

“Fine,” Jason said. He held up the strip. “`Solomon Kane was a Puritan at heart. But his heart could not contain his lust to wander, nor the rage that drove him to avenge the evils he had witnessed…’”

He gave the card back to Alek. She loaded it into a viewer, which was compact enough to hold up by a small handle like an opera glass. “You read it right,” she said. She looked at Jax. “Can you do it? Can other Martians do it?”

This time, Jax squirmed defensively. “Maybe,” he said. “I know other people who can. Most of them can’t get through more than a few words. I’ve seen Jason read two pages. They all say the real problem is staying focused…”

Alek shook her head. “I wouldn’t have thought a human could do it,” she said succinctly.

“Let me see,” Moxon said. “Hand me the Landcruiser book.” Alek gave it to him. “`The Landkreuzer 1500 was the largest land vehicle ever used in combat. It might never have existed if not for its gun, an 800mm cannon intended to demolish the fortifications of France…” He gave his usual smile. “See? No big deal.”

There was an awkward silence. Jason finally broke it with another question. “What do people really like, back on Gaia?” he asked. “What do they watch, read, whatever?”

Alek pondered. “I don’t go to many movies,” she said. “And I mostly read scientific papers, or old books like these.” She held up the Conan folio.

Moxon spoke up. “I go to lots of movies,” he said. “I see them in all kinds of places, too. So, fantasy’s popular, you know, stories about Hercules and King Arthur and Kane. The real money is in war movies, leastways on the studio side. They’re usually about the Second Great War, what a lot of people will call the Last War. A lot of them have been coming out of the Federation They get big budgets, the big stars will line up to appear in them, and enough people will come out to see them to earn their money back. It’s really the same as fantasy movies, just with more prestige. They all give people heroes, adventures, battles, and other places and times, so nobody worries about the here and now.”

He leaned against a bulkhead. “If you ask me, though,” he continued, “the biggest thing is horror movies. A lot of it has been coming out of Edo and Indo-Malaya. The fans call it `real horror’. The critics call it tenement pornography. You Martians probably wouldn’t go for it.  One of the last ones I saw was about a gangster. He goes around beating up people, making ladies of the night give him the goods for free, but he loves his girl. Then another gangster kills her. So he goes to a witch, then she gives him a medallion that lets him turn into a leopard, or leastways, a cross between a leopard and a man. He uses it to start murdering the other guy’s gang, except when he finally gets to the boss, it turns out he has his own amulet that turns him into a tiger. They fight, he kills the boss but he gets hurt and dies. So yeah, not your thing.”

“I see that one,” Alek said. “It was called Man-Cat. They make two more.”

Moxon just laughed. “So maybe I haven’t been seeing as many movies as I used to,” he said. With that, he moved to excuse himself.

“Wait,” Jax said. “Do you know what really happened, in the Last War?”

Moxon looked back, with just a hint of a smile. “It was really before my time,” he said. “It’s all in the books, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure,” Jax said. He remained silent as Moxon left.

“Funny,” Alek said. “How do you do that trick reading the cards? And how do he do it too?”

Jason looked at Jax, who shook his head. “We all have our talents,” he said. Then they were all silent for a while.

 

The day of the launch quickly approached. The only thing that caught them off guard was the announcement of a wedding, which proved to be between two of the engineering crew. There was a ceremony and an informal reception in the captain’s cabin. Alek and Jason came slightly late. The Malays weren’t there, nor to his relief was Moxon, but Jax and Dr. Cahill were sitting with Harrison at the captain’s table, and Raeder was on the couch leading three Edonians in an ale house song. Alek hung from his arm as they entered. “There they are,” Alek said. She pointed to a pair in the kitchen area.

8 out of the 12 engineering crew was there, and it was evident that Alek knew most of them. The newly married couple were Anne Baxter and David Carlson. Their peers included one other married couple, an Edonian man named Yukio and a Shen woman named Chyou, and a woman from the Federation named Natasha. The rest, present or not, were all men, mostly well over 30. Alek pointed out the nominal chief, a short man named Potts, and the youngest of them, an American named Donald Johnson, a student of a super genius who had perfected fusion, at the moment trying to talk to Anastasia. Fortunately, she stayed on the opposite side of the passage from Alek.

When Alek introduced Jason to the pair, he casually asked if they had known each other before the mission. Anne had immediately laughed. “No, we met when we got here,” she said. “We did a shift together in the reactor room, we got to talking, then we decided to get engaged. It just made sense.”

“It’s an 8-hour shift,” David added. “The way it really works is, one of us is in the reactor room in a radiation suit, one of us is on the other side of the door, and two more are on the other side monitoring the output to the fusion vessel. That’s really because of how heavy our gear is. After four hours, we’re supposed to take it off.”

“So you talked to each other through a door?” Jason said.

“Yeah,” Anne said. She pressed against her groom. “It was very romantic. We completely connected.”

“Like Pyramus and Thisbe,” Alek said with a bemused glance at Jason.

By then, Johnson had come over. Jason asked the question, “So just one person controls the power to the whole ship?”

The engineers all laughed at that. “Oh, no, the reactor systems are completely automated,” David said. "It’s a fission-fusion system, so it’s really two reactors. We only service the fission component. All we can do is turn it off.”

“Even that’s not really how it sounds,” Donald said. "The set up is, we have a bank of instruments and a few controls in the reactor room, plus a sort of peephole to inspect the reaction chamber directly. We aren’t even supposed to use it unless the reactor is shut down. The controls are two buttons, one set in the reactor room and a redundant pair in the outer chamber. One executes an emergency shutdown. The other continues operations. If three hours go by without someone pushing the second button, the shutdown is executed automatically.”

Jason pondered that for a moment. “So it’s a dead man switch, right?” he said. That drew stern silence from the engineers. “And you’re just canaries in a coal mine, aren’t you?”

“Well, you can look at it like that,” David said. “I say, if we can go at any time, live life to the fullest. Seize the day!” He gave his bride a long, passionate kiss.

As they left, Jason turned to Alek. “What do you think?” he said. “Do you want to get married? Soon, I mean?”

She was silent for a moment. “No,” she said. “I have told you, I am an enlightened woman. Rushing to get married would make me look ashamed of having a man. Besides, we need to do it right. First, you propose; I know we have understanding, but it is not the same. Then we marry. So, maybe… 6 months?”

“I can live with that,” Jason said.

Alek put an arm around his waist. “Of course, we are making love…”

Table of contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

The Franchise File 2: The one with Gremlins in an arcology skyscraper

 

 

Title: Gremlins 2: The New Batch

What Year?: 1990

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

As I write this, it’s Halloween, and I haven’t done nearly as much as I usually would with movies on or off the blog. I still have time for one more shot, and there is something I’ve been waiting for. It’s another case of a 1990s sequel to a 1980s movie (see Predator 2), one which never seems to have been either well-regarded or particularly notorious. To me, however, it has always been the most interesting and in many ways the best. I present Gremlins 2, a movie about monsters in an arc scraper, and that’s just the start of the fun.

Our story begins with a developer trying to buy the mysterious shop of the original film, where a certain creature called Gizmo has settled back into a peaceful life watching TV. When the old shopkeeper dies, a skyscraper soon rises on the grounds of the old property. It’s not an ordinary building, but an AI-controlled artificial ecology with a range of businesses, including a genetics lab where Gizmo is held prisoner. When his old friend Billy is hired by the developer Mr. Clamp, the do-gooder helps the creature escape. Before they can complete their getaway, the Mogwai gets splashed with water, causing him to spontaneously reproduce a group of mean, warped offspring. Soon, the spawn transform into scaly Gremlins intent on mayhem. When they get into the lab’s projects, they mutate further, into the likes of a flying gargoyle, a giant spider and an intelligent Brain ready to act as leader and spokesman in their conquest of the world. It’s up to Billy and Gizmo to save the day- with a little help from Dick Miller!

Gremlins 2 was a 1990 film by Warner Bros and Amblin Entertainment, a direct sequel to the 1984 film Gremlins (see also Critters). The film was again directed by Joe Dante (see InnerSpace), with writer Chis Haas replacing Christopher Columbus. The film starred Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates, returning as Billy and Kate, with John Glover as Daniel Clamp. Other cast included Robert Picardo (Dead Heat), Christopher Lee (Horror Express) and Dick Miller (Night of the Creeps, Terminator), the last returning as Mr. Putterman despite the character’s implied death in the first film. Effects were created by Rick Baker (see King Kong 1976). The soundtrack was composed by Jerry Goldsmith (see Deep Rising, Link, etc, etc.). A novelization was written by David Bischoff, with a significantly different ending. An NES game was released by Sunsoft. The movie was a box office disappointment, earning under $42 million against a budget of up to $50M. It is currently available for streaming on multiple platforms.

For my experiences, was a film I was aware of at an early age but didn’t see firsthand until adulthood, which I suppose contributed to my feelings about it. After I did see it, it quickly came in very high on my list of movies that people would probably expect me to like far more than I do. I don’t by any means dislike it, but I find it to have a strange vibe that probably would have failed to connect with me as a 1980s kid or an adult. Meanwhile, I was interested enough in the sequel to watch it at about the same time as the original. It immediately impressed me as a sequel that went in different and creative directions. Beyond that, it fit my tastes better than the first film ever did, in no small part because it really is more of a “straight” monster movie. Whether that makes it “better” is exactly what I have been asking myself going into this review.

Moving forward, the obvious upgrades are the arcscraper environment and the ensemble supporting cast. On both fronts, there are things to nitpick. The arcology angle isn’t that developed, but as a playground for the Gremlins, it’s as fleshed out as it needs to be. (I'll admit I pretty much ripped this off for the Eurypterids adventure.) In certain respects, the modesty is a plus; it’s especially noteworthy that the building isn’t played up as bigger than anything actually in existence then or now. There’s more to criticize in the uneven use of the cast, especially Lee as Gizmo’s captor. To me, the character feels like a “twist villain” in reverse, shoehorned into the beginning instead of the end. His high point comes in the faceoff with the Brain, alas never followed up with redemption or comeuppance in the finale. On the flip side, there are delights I couldn’t shoehorn into my cast list, including Keye Luke, whom I shouted out in Dead Heat, as Gizmo’s original owner and Robert Prosky as Grandpa Fred, a sort of cross between April O’Neal and John McClain. Glover handily steals the movie as the semi-sympathetic Clamp, even if his real-life counterparts are no longer funny. (It gets a lot more awkward in the deleted scenes…) The real highlight is Miller in a fairly substantial role. (Well, the Gremlins don’t kill him with a gun he just sold them…)

Then there are the creatures, and this is where the back and forth comes in between the two films. The Gremlins aren’t quite as menacing as they were in the original, though that means a more even tone for the technological mayhem, and the most dangerous of the lot feels like he was written to be far more prominent. On the other hand, the mutants are mostly an improvement, except for the female (who judging from the book must have been toned down from earlier versions of the script). Many high points come from the Brain, voiced by the late Tony Randall of The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao; “one scene” honorable mention is definitely in order for his psychotic “interview” with Fred. (“Was that civilized?...”) For me, it’s Gizmo who comes up a little short, perhaps more so than before. What I could never buy into was the many pop culture references with the Gremlins, if anything ramped up here. I have never found it more worthwhile than the underexplored questions raised when the concept is considered straight. It would have been especially intriguing to see an exploration of the real relationship between Gizmo and his (???) offspring. Do they turn on him because he is not like him? Is he vulnerable simply because he feels enough parental love that he doesn’t want to fight back? Or is this all as “natural” as black widows eating their mates and unborn sharks devouring their siblings? (Yeah, that happens…)

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with an early moment. Gizmo is in the lab, being examined by a pair who could be either twins or clones. In fact, that’s Don and Dan Stanton, the twin brothers who appeared as the ill-fated guard and the T1000 in Terminator 2. When Lee’s Dr. Catheter (I did not want to print that) comes in for a tour, they let Gizmo out. The pair then turn on music, and bob along as Gizmo does a dance. It all feels as natural as his behavior left to his own devices in the first movie. However, he slowly gets closer to the edge of the table, until he suddenly makes a break for it. He barely builds up speed before Lee catches him. We get a perfect closeup of Lee as he holds up Gizmo for inspection. It’s a great moment, and perhaps enough from a great actor.

In closing, I come as usual to the rating, and this is one I could have rated even higher than I have. I just couldn’t quite talk myself into giving this the highest rating. On the whole, I would probably have given the original movie no less and no more, which I will admit is the fairest assessment of their quality. There are many ways in which the present film improves on its predecessor, but the real reason it does as well as it does is because of how many good ideas the original film offered to work with. My verdict on the franchise is that this is a case of “good enough” being just fine. These may never have been great movies, but they are memorable enough to endure as classics. That’s enough for me to end the Halloween season on a high note.

Image credit GoodReads. 

The Classics File: The one that made Bela Lugosi

 

 

Title: Dracula

What Year?: 1931

Classification: Prototype

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

 

As I write this, I’m closing on fifty reviews for my No Good Very Bad Movies feature, and not far from 300 reviews total. It crossed my mind that the one thing I haven’t dealt with is perhaps the one kind of movie I hate most, the “overrated” movie, and this interested me enough to consider why. The most obvious consideration is that the most obvious suspects are the kinds of films I don’t usually deal with, say, romantic comedies and historical dramas. What really stands out to me is that there really is a measure of justice here. Genre critics and fans like me will dig up horrible movies from long before we were alive, but “mainstream” pop culture memory has the depth and longevity of astroturf. I personally have seen many blockbuster films that I was subjected to seemingly disappear from public consciousness in 10 years or even 5. The remnant that remains are the overrated classics, and these vex me enough for one last tilt at the windmill. To kick things off, I present Dracula, the cornerstone of a whole genre that has never satisfied me.

Our story begins with an outsider approaching the castle of an aristocrat named Dracula, a crumbling ruin that for some reason has a possum infestation. The count is ready to look for a new place in the big city, and he has brought our nominal protagonist on board as a real estate agent. The count soon arrives in merry England, bringing a mysterious plague with him. The cast of noblemen soon realize that Dracula is a vampire, an undead fiend that must drain the blood and health of the living to survive. To save British morals and possibly civilization, they must destroy the revenant- but a gentleman’s beloved is already in his thrall!

Dracula was a 1931 horror/ drama film from Universal, based on the novel of the same name by Bram Stoker. The film was directed by Tod Browning, known for horror/ surrealist silent films such as London After Midnight, and starred Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi in his breakthrough role. The film was an immediate success, and together with Frankenstein became the foundation of the “Universal Monsters” franchise. It also launched Lugosi into other high-profile films such as 1932’s White Zombie. Browning followed the film with Freaks, his most well-regarded and controversial work. The director subsequently declined due to conflicts with studio management and several box office failures, while Lugosi suffered increasingly from typecasting in low-budget horror and parodies of his earlier work. Lugosi died in 1956, due in part to substance abuse. Browning died in 1962.

For my experiences, a central reality I have already commented on is that I grew up with the Universal Monsters films without really experiencing them first-hand. (Ironically, the one I definitely remember seeing in my youth is Abbott And Costello Meets Frankenstein.) That left me in an especially odd position with Dracula. Of course, I knew of the film and character. I can remember reading an apparently faithful comic-and-cassette adaptation of the novel. I also became familiar with the tragic biography of Lugosi, and eventually found my way to Nosferatu. Most significantly, I became very familiar with “real” folklore about the undead. But until the viewing for this review, I had literally never seen the actual film, in no small part because I already knew that it had very little to do with anything people had actually believed in. I finally fit in a viewing one morning before work, and came out even more underwhelmed than I expected.

Moving forward, the literal elephant in the room here is the reason I usually don’t review “high profile” movies: This is a definitive example of a film that is almost inseparable from its own influence. It’s all the more unfortunate that it has been parodied often enough for a substantial number of people to know the parodies far better than the original. (The “bleh bleh bleh” running gag in the Hotel Transylvania franchise is actually a pretty good “meta” illustration of the problem.) For 1980s kids like me, it’s like growing up with a Weird Al Yankovic song and then finding the original he was making fun of. Things get even trickier with Lugosi, who has long since been reduced to a Rorschach test for critics; some will see a demigod before his tragic fall where others just see a ham who was always overrated. On that particular point, I feel I can be a voice of reason. I will be the first to say, Lugosi was a gifted and versatile actor. This, however. is absolutely not his best work (though certainly not his worst either…). Given that he got in at least a decade of “respectable” work between this film and his actual slide into low-budget typecasting in the early to mid-1940s, the whole idea that this was some irreproducible peak was always a backhanded slight to his actual talent. The actors who really can’t improve on their first major role are the ones who end up washed up long, long before he did.

After all that, I still haven’t really talked about the movie, and I freely admit that I’m not sure if I can. This is a film that truly feels like a prototype. All the elements of great gothic horror are here, surely by Browning’s hand: The spooky castle, the shadowy crypts, the inexplicably unsafe staircase (wait, was Death Becomes Her making fun of this?), the ethereal zoned-out vampiresses. They just don’t quite come together. Then sometimes they don’t work at all, egregiously the bats, which look at least as cheap and silly as the alleged effects in an actual Ed Wood movie. (Hell, Abbott And Costello looked like it had real bats.) What I find inexplicably lacking is any sense of tension, which in turn comes down to the lack of an engaging hero. For most of the movie, Harker and Van Helsing (I honestly never tried to sort out which is which) do little more than narrate Dracula’s misdeeds. When they do finally do something, their plan amounts to hitting Dracula when he can’t fight back. Only once does Dracula pit his full hypnotic powers against a would-be slayer, in a truly great scene that might justify the movie’s reputation if it wasn’t inconsequential to the plot. My final beef is that all of these issues were already present in the book, yet Stoker’s tale made it interesting and dramatic even in the Radio Shack adaptation.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and I can honestly point to the moment this movie lost me. Very early on, we are given a view of the interior of Dracula’s castle, and it’s all well and good. We soon get to the crypt, and this is where things get wonky. First up, a rodent-like creature emerges from a coffin which is in fact clearly a possum, something a number of commentators confirmed. So sure, this could just be a stand-in for a very big rat; I discussed the surprising difficulties of filming live rodents myself when I reviewed the Willard remake (see also Of Unknown Origin). But then we see what are very obviously armadillos, a creature which is like the possum found only in the Americas and also is so unthreatening that is literally toothless. The strange thing is that I had seen these harmless creatures hyped as somehow dangerous before in Ingagi, so I decided to see if I could figure something out. Apparently, armadillos are something of a pest in the areas where they live, with a further disconcerting habit of digging up carrion and fresh graves either for meat or just in pursuit of insects already attracted by such things. So why did Browning see fit to put them on-screen here, as he apparently did in a number of his films? Did he expect audiences to accept them as dangerous based on dim rumors and simple unfamiliarity? Or are they simply here as a strange animal that few people at the time would recognize? I just don’t get it, and that is my refrain for much of what follows.

In closing, what I come back to is what “overrated” really means. It’s easy to joke about films that deserve to be forgotten or entirely lost, but after seeing how many good films have suffered that very fate, I cannot wish it even on the most terrible movies I’ve ever seen. On a philosophical level, it’s in the normal course of things that some films receive more praise and profit than they deserve. The “overrated” films that are a real problem are the ones that distract from ones that are as good if not better, and this is definitely a case in point. I haven’t been doing this review to tell anyone that this movie is “bad” or good. That is a judgment only the individual viewer can make, especially for a film this far removed from its own time. What I have said and will continue to say is that there are films that are better, like Nosferatu, White Zombie, even From Dusk Till Dawn in its own way. (Why have I still reviewed only one of those movies???) By all means, give it a look, and be glad we all have that privilege. But don’t let it stop you from looking at other movies. With that, I for one have said my piece.