Adaptation Insanity: The one that was the first video game movie

 

 

Title: Super Mario Bros

What Year?: 1993

Classification: Improbable Experiment

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

 

As I write this, it’s the end of a weekend, and I have once again been debating between several movies to review. This time around, however, I knew I wanted to get in a second entry in my newest feature before another one went by, and the one at the top of the list is pretty much the reason it exists at all. As a further twist, I swear I was ready to do this before the para-franchise blew up pop culture (and inspired me to write an actual novel in six weeks…). Without further ado, I present Super Mario Bros, the live-action version, and very possibly the reason it took three decades to get another one.

Our story begins with an introduction to an alternate universe where dinosaurs survived, and a baby left on an orphanage’s doorstep. We then jump forward and meet the brothers Mario and Luigi, whose last name is revealed to be Mario, two struggling New York plumbers. In the course of their work, Luigi has a meet-cute with a woman named Daisy, who leads the brothers to a portal to another dimension. They discover a soft-cyberpunk universe where dinosaurs evolved into sentient humanoids, which coexist with another race evolved from fungi. A conflict is in progress between the dino leader King Koopa and the loyalists of the Mushroom King, who has devolved into a filmy encrusting organism vastly more intriguing than anything else here. Of course, Koopa’s plans include taking Daisy hostage. It’s up to the brothers to save the day in the mildest possible way, and if you’re wondering what this has to do with the game besides the name, you poor bastards…

Super Mario Bros was a 1993 science fantasy film by Hollywood Pictures, based on the video game series by Nintendo. It was the first live-action theatrical film to be based on a video game. (I know, you can argue over The Last Starfighter...) The production reportedly went through a troubled development and further conflicts over intended audience and possible rating. The film went into production with Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel as directors. The cast was led by the late Bob Hoskins as Mario and Dennis Hopper (d. 2010) as King Koopa, with John Leguizamo as Luigi and Samantha Mathis as Daisy. Lance Henriksen appeared very briefly as the restored King. The score was composed by Alan Silvestri (see Mac And Me, Predator 2, etc, etc, etc). The film was a commercial failure, earning $38.9 million against a budget of up to $48M, and received mixed to unfavorable reviews. Hoskins claimed that he had been repeatedly injured and endangered during filming. The film was released on VHS in 1994 and several times on DVD, but fell out of print in the US after 2010. It is not currently available for authorized digital streaming in the US.

For my experiences, what stands out about this one is that I can very clearly remember following reactions to it when it came out, and I can attest that at the time, it really wasn’t that big a deal. Plenty of people were saying it was bad, plenty more was said about how much money was lost (in hindsight before there was really a frame of reference for the cost of post-1980s movies), but if one went by contemporary reactions, it was easy to conclude that it was nothing more or less than a typical early 1990s action movie. Needless to say, the fact that I am talking about it now is the surest proof that this was the one thing it was not. The crowning irony is, everything I have to say now is from three viewings over the last 5 years or so, and my own reaction is and always was that it wasn’t that big a deal either way. (Hey, I knowingly watched Inseminoid more than once, my brain is broken…)

Moving forward, what I have to say on the established vein is that this really is as close as it could have been to a “mainstream” Nineties movie. In those terms, it holds the line at average and regularly rises to decent or genuinely impressive. The story is solid and simple, with enough wild cards for real surprises. The cast is genuinely good, with Hopkins and Hopper pulling their weight and Leguizamo and Mathis being actually cute. (I realized in the course of my parody novel that I must have made up the Luigi/ Daisy pairing independent of anything I would have known about.) As a bonus, the villains and heroes are both reasonably competent, to the point that Koopa thinks to use his de-evolution machine to power up his minions. What really makes the film memorable is the quite well-realized grunge dystopia, which manages the cyberpunk feel while the genre was really still coming into its own in the live-action medium. The result is some hit-and-miss gags (a bit with an egg in a stroller is just weird) balanced against a world that actually works well enough for the bystanders to remain focused on getting on with their lives.

And if you were sensing a big qualifier, this is the kind of movie that will put “Not bad, but-!” on my tombstone. (It’s that or, “Don’t watch Shanks.”) The real problems with the movie tend to come in when it tries to reference the games, which tends to make even less sense if you actually know what they are referencing. The most obvious offense is the ludicrous tiny-headed design of the Goombas and the completely unnamed and unexplained creatures that appear to be Koopa troopers. (An extra distraction comes from the unnervingly inhuman masked worker drones toward the end, which feel like they wandered in from a Konami game.) Even worse are the moments when the movie tries to shift to a slapstick tone that someone presumably thought would appeal to kids, always telegraphed by wonky music that sounds like the very recognizable Silvestri (see my Predator 2 soundtrack post, again) riffing on himself. An extra rant is in order for that damn fungus, which is genuinely developed into a very intriguing concept of decentralized intelligence, but still gets used mostly for gags. The very brief appearance of the legendary Henriksen (I kind of forgot I actually reviewed Terminator) feels like an unintentionally fitting epitaph for the creature and the film.

Now I’m up to the “one scene”, there is truly one that will stay with you whether you like it or not, and it is the elevator sequence. (See The Lift???) As we build toward the finale, the brothers must sneak into an elevator to infiltrate King Koopa’s lair. When the Goombas and Koopas start to board, the heroes simply hide behind the bizarrely proportioned creatures. Just when it becomes clear that this could be a problem, Luigi notices that the elevator music is playing “Somewhere My Love” (aka the theme from the 1960s-scandalous film Dr. Zhivago). Our protagonists try nudging two of the creatures enough to turn their awkward shuffling into something like a dance. It quickly spreads, until the lot of them are dancing and grunting or humming to the music as the brothers climb out the top of the elevator like they could have at the beginning. The touch that makes the scene is that the creatures are still dancing when the doors open on their evident superior, who calls them to attention. It’s weird, random and unnecessary, and for the brief time it lasts, it’s exactly what a movie like this needs.

In closing, what I find myself coming to is what 1980s-‘90s video games really meant to kids like me. As I ranted when I was reviewing the cartoon, to us, even the cartoony fantasies of the later Mario games were something we took seriously. It’s a testament to their strength that they have held up longer and better than the vast majority of the romances and dramas that were supposed to be our window on the “adult” world. With that context, I can at least appreciate what this movie was trying to do. After years of being talked down to in watered-down cartoons (have I mentioned I saw the Battletoads pilot?), seeing our heroes as adults in a functional society was exactly what we were waiting for. At the same time, it is quite clear that it failed, and probably would have even without the external pressure to be “kid-friendly”. The only really good options here were an over-the-top romp like Flash Gordon or a full deconstruction like Hancock, but the Hollywood “mainstream” was simply not ready for either when it came to video games. What we got instead, as laid out, was a decent movie knocking on the door of either good or “so bad it’s good”. With that, I can offer my respects and move on. Punch it, Bishop!

Adaptation Insanity: The one where the scariest thing is Dan Aykroyd

 

 

Title: Twilight Zone The Movie

What Year?: 1983

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

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

 

As I write this, I’ve been continuing to think over what I want to do with my blog and writing in general. In the process, I recently found myself with a string of movies that could all have suited my purposes. These included a movie I had thought about for a very long time, which I decided was enough to kick off a feature I had considered before as a spinoff to my Super Movies feature. This will be a look at movies based on other properties, which as a further twist will focus on things besides books and comics. Our first entry for consideration will be a film so notorious it could literally be its own category. I present Twilight Zone: The Movie, and yeah, I know all about the backstory.

Our story begins with a driver and a friendly hitchhiker singing TV themes and talking about a certain famous series, until the encounter turns lethal. We then see an unfolding anthology that starts with a middle-aged racist who finds himself transported back in time as the minorities he hates. We then meet the denizens of a retirement home who regain their youth with a game of kick the can, only to discover a price that won’t be a clear downside. Things are looking up as we move on to a school teacher who is invited home by a quirky little boy who proves to be a godlike superhuman with a captive “family”. Finally, we meet a fussy intellectual on a plane who sees a mysterious creature sabotaging the engines, but can’t convince anyone else of the threat. It’s all kinds of pretty good, I guess- but can anything be scarier than Dan Aykroyd?

The Twilight Zone: The Movie was a 1983 dark fantasy/ horror anthology film released by Warner Bros, based on the TV series created by the late Rod Serling. The film was produced by John Landis (An American Werewolf In London) and Steven Spielberg (Duel, ET), who directed the first two segments, “Time Out” and “Kick The Can”. Additional segments based on the original TZ episodes “It’s A Good Life” and “Nightmare At 20,000 Feet” were directed by Joe Dante (InnerSpace, Gremlins 2) and George Miller respectively. Frequent TZ contributor Richard Matheson (see… Jaws 3?) received writing credits for 3 out of 4 sequences. The soundtrack was scored by Jerry Goldsmith (see Link, Deep Rising, etc, etc, etc), whose early work included the TZ episode “The Invaders”. The cast included Vic Morrow (see Message From Space... wait, my first review?), Kathleen Quinlan and John Lithgow (Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai), with Burgess Meredith (Batman, The Manitou) as the narrator and Dan Aykroyd as the Hitchhiker/ Monster in a prologue sequence. The film became notorious for an accident that resulted in the deaths of Morrow and two child extras. It was a moderate commercial success, earning $42 million against a $10M budget, but subsequently suffered from controversy and limited availability on home video. Among series fans and genre critics, it was poorly received except for Dante’s segment. As of early 2023, it is available for digital purchase and rental.

For my experiences, I will say right off the bat that my usual format and length was out the window from the start. As far as the present film, what really stands out in hindsight is that I literally had no awareness of it until at least the middling 1990s, and still didn't watch it until around 2017. The astonishing part of that is that I was an absolute TZ junkie virtually from the time I had regular access to television at all. I would watch the original series, I would watch the ‘80s revival, I would read the tie-in books, I would narrate episodes to innocent bystanders. All of which is just to say, for me to have known nothing about this film means somebody really screwed up. The most obvious reasons, I must also say at the outset, are ones I won’t go into. I have reviewed movies with body counts before (see Brainstorm, which still wasn’t as uncomfortable as Hardware), and the only thing that really works is to keep it out of the picture. In those terms, my diagnosis is that this was always on track to be sleek, expensive and completely forgettable, which is not what it deserves.

Moving forward, I really couldn’t avoid a paragraph on the opening segment(s). The prologue is, if anything, underrated, especially in light of Dan Aykroyd’s performance. At face value, the role isn’t even against type, yet the actor becomes subtly unsettling well before the end, enough to ponder what might have been if he had gone further into roles outside comedy. We then get the embarrassingly good modernization of the TZ opening, with Meredith swinging for the fences. Finally, we get to Morrow’s segment, which I feel I am committing heresy by endorsing probably the second strongest in the entire movie. We get a strong set-up through the introduction to a very unsympathetic character who (in arguable contrast to the antiheroes of “Judgment Night” or “Death’s Head Revisited”) is never so monstrous that he can’t be identified with people a viewer might meet. What follows is a reasonably satisfying series of vignettes that never needed any other ending than its chilling final sequence. The “problem” is that this never quite reaches the level of true irony, unless you count the jerk’s surprisingly plausible ability to stay alive as long as he does, and there really isn’t a lot that could have been done differently. To me, the one good option would be to put him through the slights and resentment even “model” minorities in “modern” society face, perhaps by a “body swap” with the individual he's really mad at, but then, that would require political subtlety in an ‘80s movie.

The other segment I had to write up on its own is “It’s A Good Life”, based on both the TZ episode and the short story by Jerome Bixby. This is the one segment that is at least as good as it’s usually made out to be. I would go so far as to make favorable comparisons to the original series episode (one of the ones I can remember retelling). The most intriguing part is that this “remake” is even bolder than The Thing in reconceiving the source material as well as its “classic” adaptation. (The short story is still far more horrific…) Here, the child god-demon is content to hold power over a single house, resulting in a claustrophobic focus and significant ambiguities that certainly “work”. It’s never clear if this version of the character is less powerful, less ambitious or simply mature enough to preserve a line of contact with the “real” world. His meeting with the protagonist teacher is similarly debatable. It makes sense that she would succeed in connecting where others have failed, but it’s very possible that the miserable captives we meet in the house thought the same at some point. As events proceed, the cinematography and effects convey a sense of unravelling reality as much as Anthony’s power, augmented by the prominent cartoons. The materialized creatures truly feel like toons brought to life, still not as unnerving as the on-screen monster that dispatches the “sister” sent into its domain. Of course, there are many things I considered for the “one scene”, which will be from here. My own favorite is the would-be magician’s reluctant rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick, followed by the deceptively drawn-out reveal of Anthony’s real sibling.

That still leaves two whole segments, including Spielberg’s contribution. That is quite justly Ground Zero for the hate this movie usually gets, to the point that I am hard-pressed to say anything save that yes, it is that bad. My only dissent is that I don’t buy the suggested narrative that he was thrown off by the legendary troubles of the production. On the contrary, I find it typical of the sentimental, allegedly kid-friendly material that he was either being saddled with or bringing on himself before Jurassic Park forced the “system” to take him seriously again. Then there is the finale, which tends to get a measure of goodwill that I have yet to muster. For me, Lithgow simply does not work in the role. I also have to say, I find the gremlin strangely ineffective. Much of the time, you really can’t see the damn thing, and when you can, its wonky design borders on comical rather than threatening (yes, even compared to the suit they put Nick Cravat in…). The only thing that his improved my opinion after several viewings is the surreal camerawork, which at its best achieves a “comic book” feel akin to Creepshow. I can put in an extra good word for John Dennis Johnston as the quite sympathetic pilot, who really comes close to being in the right even with the gremlin.

Now I still have the “one scene”, and I finally went with the opening of the best segment. The teacher comes into a diner, where Anthony is playing Tempest (see… Night of the Comet?). The proprietor behind the counter is none other than everyone’s favorite cameo actor, Dick Miller (Night of the Creeps, Terminator, etc). He’s as entertaining as ever with more meat than usual as he charms the lady, throwing out multiple franchise references in the process. Meanwhile, an adult male patron becomes disgruntled at interference on a TV screen. In a curious bit of foreshadowing, he accuses Anthony of causing the static. The situation only escalates when the proprietor dismisses him. Finally, the patron takes matters into his own hands. As often happens, what follows is less interesting than the buildup. Does this mean that the townspeople suspect that Anthony is different? If so, does this also mean that Anthony’s abilities are weakened or largely nullified away from the house? Either way, why hasn’t anyone come to look for people who must be missing? Perhaps his powers are still effective enough to make people disregard the matter, or perhaps that is where some of the captives came from. As usual, no more will be said about it, which just makes it more interesting.

In closing, I would usually be defending the rating. This is one where there is simply too much baggage for me to venture a rating. As a whole, it’s better than people have wanted to give it credit for. The downside is, there are also things that are actually worse. All in all, that’s a pretty accurate representation of the series it’s based on. You can take it or leave it, but it’s time we stopped ignoring it. With that, I can find a little peace.

Image credit The Legendary VHS (Tumblr).

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.

The Classics File 3: The one Hollywood wants to unmovie

 

 

Title: Gone With The Wind

What Year?: 1939

Classification: Mashup

Rating: Disqualified!

 

With this review, I am at the end of the last lineup I had planned for my No Good Very Bad Movies feature. That brought me to the reason I did this at all, a movie that I have meant to take on for a very long time. It’s a film that has itself gone through a complicated arc, from a blockbuster to unquestioned classic to a problematic “product of its time” to an artifact the mainstream would rather bury in the memory sandbox. I for one have been looking forward to giving it what it deserves. I speak, of course, of Gone With The Wind, and oh dear Logos (which is an actual name of God in the actual Bible), this damn thing is 233 minutes??!!

Our story begins with a text crawl and a lovely montage praising the Antebellum South, minus the slave auctions, whippings and rampant poverty. We then meet seemingly the most hopelessly degenerate specimen of an impressive bunch of hypocrites, inbreds and general-purpose idiots, a tart named Scarlett O’Hara whose ambitions begin and end with marrying a guy named Ashley who has clearly declared his intent to marry another woman. Meanwhile, the inconvenient Civil War starts, occasionally distracting from her antics as she goes through a marriage to a promptly killed soldier and a series of encounters with a smuggler named Rhett Butler. With the help of her servant Mammy, Scarlett keeps control of her family plantation, while Rhett inexplicably works away at her resistance. Soon enough, the pair are married with a kid, but tragedy strikes. It all comes down to a choice between the man she wanted and the man she got- and 83-year-old spoiler, they both throw her overboard!

Gone With The Wind was a 1939 drama/ historical romance from MGM, based on the 1936 novel of the same name by Margaret Mitchell. The film was produced by David O. Selznick, known for RKO’s King Kong, who reportedly acquired the rights to the novel a month after its publication. The eventual film was directed by Victor Fleming from a script by Sydney Howard. Clark Gable and Vivian Lee were cast as Rhett and Scarlett, when the former was 40 and the latter was 26. Other cast included Leslie Howard (see Petrified Forest) as Ashley, Olivia De Havilland as Melanie, and Hattie McDaniel as Mammy. A score was composed by Max Steiner, returning from Kong. The film was an immediate success, earning a box office estimated at over $390 million against a $3.85M budget. McDaniel won an Oscar for Supporting Actress, the first Academy Award given to an African-American. Gable continued to act until his death in 1960, prior to the release of his final film The Misfits. Leigh became otherwise best known for stage and screen appearances with her spouse Laurence Olivier. Mitchell died in a traffic fatality in 1949, without publishing another major work of fiction. She became posthumously known as a collector and proponent of erotica. The film remains available on digital platforms including HBO Max.

For my experiences, what I feel a need to comment on is the Disqualified category, which I created for this feature specifically for films I would not or could not watch in full. It might sound like this means a film so bad I literally quit, but that’s really not how these things work. For me, actually bailing on a movie is usually an early and potentially respectful decision (see The Plague Dogs). The ones to figure in this feature have been the ones I knew I was not going to get through, and even then, I have usually gotten through far more than I expected. With this movie in particular, there was simply no way I was even going to try to watch the whole thing in one go. I settled for watching it in two parts on consecutive days, with the intention of liberal fast-forwards. In the end, I probably only shaved a few minutes off its mindboggling running time. My final verdict is that it only belongs here because it’s the only feature where I have given myself the right parameters to comment.

Moving forward, I went into this with some fairly distinct memories of watching it on VHS, and many more of seeing it referenced and parodied. What has kept me vaguely and morbidly fascinated is that its reputation is completely belied by any recounting in cold blood. If the “point” of this story was to show that Rhett and Scarlett were not just evil racists but immoral, contemptible, irredeemable, completely horrible yet utterly banal human beings, there isn’t a single story point that would change. What is even more baffling is that for all the glowing revisionism of the text crawls, the Confederacy is put in an even less favorable light. It’s genuinely moving to see the devastation of war, which makes the later first act far more engaging than anything before or sense. But to the truly neutral eye, it remains quite clear from the film’s own accounts that virtually all responsibility lies on the slave owners, specifically portrayed to be as stupid and absent-mindedly cruel as the Abolitionists could have imagined. One more rant this sets off, it is also clear on impartial analysis that the plight of the poor white conscripts who made up the bulk of the Confederate Army was even more immaterial to the Lost Cause mythology than that of the slaves.

With that out of the way, I have more than enough to proceed just on how intolerable I find Scarlett/ Leigh in particular. This is a chicken/ egg paradox that vexes me enough that I really couldn’t claim to give this film a proper rating if I had intended to. The character as written feels permanently arrested as a spoiled 15-year-old, repeatedly proven unwilling and unable to learn from any of her adversities. As the hours pass, the clearly capable Leigh somehow transforms this creature into something even more transcendently uncharismatic and unlikeable than she was before. To give just one example, when she is weeping at becoming a widow, Leigh’s delivery seems to emphasize that she really is in all likelihood more upset by “wearing black” than anything else. Where Gable gives enough depth to wish his character a better fate and a better cause, his counterpart seems to dig for ways to make the viewer want her to die. And I know it’s a subjective judgment, but I find Leigh to be one of the most unaccountably irritating screen presences I have encountered, to the point that I’m sure I used at least half my allotted skip time when I got tired of her voice. To give some frame of reference, I find her worse than the rich girls we were supposed to hate in Heathers (which I regularly considered for this feature). Indeed, the one character/ actor combination I can think of that I could compare is Ken Marshall in Krull, and I actually like that one.

That leaves me with the “one scene”, and I’m going with one that’s quite early. Right after Scarlett receives news of secession, we find Rhett and Ashley among a gathering of Southern gentlemen enthusiastically declaring their prowess. When Ashley proves less than enthusiastic, the rest appeal to Rhett. He matter-of-factly points out that the Union has more weapons, factories and ships than the Confederacy ever will. He finishes by commenting, “All we’ve got is cotton, slaves… and arrogance.” Of course, the gentlemen are outraged, without offering any comment to foreshadow that these were indeed the foremost among many reasons the South foreseeably would not and could not win the war. As commendable as it would seem, this is the part that leaves me actually angry. The Lost Cause fairy tale was not just biased historiography but toxic nonsense that did real and ongoing harm, and the people who willingly cast Noble Johnson in King Kong should have known that better than anyone. I have said as long as I have been writing reviews that there is such a thing as immorally bad. In those terms, the only thing worse than propaganda for an evil cause is propaganda from those who don’t even believe in it.

In closing, I find I come back to Ingagi, an actually censored film that by any standard deserved it. I have deemed it unnecessary to comment that this film has grown controversial enough to draw arguments over censorship. In reality, the strongest efforts of the film’s detractors aren’t remotely comparable to the general unmovie-ing of Ingagi, yet I find a common denominator in the implicit embarrassment of the “mainstream” media, first and foremost at the simple fact that they were successful. To me, taking on this film wasn’t about its politics or its history. It’s about calling the powers that have always been to account for every bloated blockbuster that has been promoted, praised and then conveniently forgotten by seemingly everyone but me. You can forget your mistakes, or pretend you have, but I won’t. With that, I can say that this feature has brought me closure. Who’s next?

The 1970s File: The one you can't watch

 

 

Title: Him

What Year?: 1974

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I’m way behind on a range of things, including not starting my scheduled weekend review until after 9 PM on Sunday. After these hilarious setbacks, I decided it was time to do something new. It’s all part of a project I had pondered long before I created this blog, which previously figured here way back with (dear Logos) Ingagi. I speak of my “unmovie” file, the movies that were censored, suppressed, or flat-out lost to the void. I still haven’t decided just what I’m doing with this vast body of material, but with a 1970s lineup already in play, I decided it was time to cover the most infamous example of all. Here is Him, the original actual gay Jesus movie, and the real mystery is why there are people looking for it.

Our story begins, by the most reliable reconstructions, with a man having moderately indecent fun with a cat. We then transition to our protagonist, a young man of apparently Catholic upbringing and affiliation who is obsessed with Jesus. This is not just the usual religious fervor, but a fully carnal obsession. He will wander his way through modern life while continuing to either fight or nourish his fantasies of very worldly relations with the Son of God. And that is really about all we know, and did we need to know anything else?

Him was a 1974 LGBT erotic film by the artist Gustav Von Will, who starred as Jesus, and a director identified as Ed D. Louie. The film is believed to have been produced by and for the 55^th Street Playhouse, an independent theater that had been associated with Andy Warhol. It is believed to have shown for several months at the Playhouse, and was later shown at theaters as far away as San Francisco. The film received mixed to favorable reviews from underground magazines including Screw. The film was featured in the 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards by Michael and Harry Medved, as part of a critical survey of offensive and “un-erotic” trends in adult films. If the Medveds’ account was based on first-hand knowledge, as implied if not explicitly affirmed, they may have been the last to view or locate a print of the film, which disappeared from all subsequent records. By the 2000s, skeptics including critics of Michael Medved questioned or denied whether the film had existed, based in part on the Medveds’ admission to have included a fictional film in the book. Contemporary records, including advertisements and reviews, repeatedly confirmed the authenticity of the film, while the admitted fabrication was confirmed to be unrelated. In 2010, a partner of Von Will released a photo said to be from the film. Von Will died of complications from HIV/ AIDS in 1991.

For my experiences, I suppose this one is a major reason I got interested in “lost” films. I read about it in the Medveds’ book, and remained intrigued by their challenge to identify the film they made up without really seriously considering that this could be the one. I was taken rather off-guard when I found the trail of controversy around the film and its existence, but I rode the thread all the way down. (See the troopers at Snopes, Lost Media Wiki and To Obscurity And Beyond for the real legwork.) Later, I even made it a running gag here in the adventures of Percy the robot cop. (I was further inspired to come up with the worst adult film in the multiverse...) In the midst of it all, I have come back to the question, why should we really care about this film? I will be the first to admit, I wouldn’t watch this movie if they did find it. But even I must admit a certain Quixotic draw. Someone cared enough to make this damn thing, even if it was for the patrons of an adult theater. If the thread of memory and evidence is thin enough for the newcomers to deny it even existed, I certainly care enough to see them proven wrong (or right!).

The counterpoint in all this is something I have ranted all along (see my video on my worst movie list): Among the actual “worst” films ever made, the true bottom of the barrel are the ones that are just plain gone, especially from the silent era through the 1930s. What we can know about this film gives an unfortunately plausible picture of what they would really have been like. In a further irony, it bridges the most predicable categories of offenders: Amateur erotica, political propaganda and religious media, already as paradoxically interdependent as the heads of a hydra fighting themselves. What’s further apparent is that the survival prospects of such things are poor even without the frequent role of official persecution. Indeed, the single most curious footnote in this strange saga is that the only public outcry plausibly connected with it came long, long after the film had gone to its fate. For the 1970s, the idea of portraying Jesus as gay was seemingly either under the radar or over it, if only because run-of-the-mill Puritans were still able to ignore the LGBT community in day-to-day operations.

It’s at this point when one might genuinely wish not for the film, which surely speaks for itself even unseen, but for some account of what those responsible really wanted. What makes it mindboggling enough to remember is that it clearly aimed for something higher than immediate gratification. (Well, in addition to that…) Was the aim to be as extreme, and on a certain level silly, as they could be for an already “fringe” audience? Were they hoping to shock or outrage any religious conservatives who wandered in, as the Medveds  eventually did? Did they actually see this is a symbolic reconciliation of gay rights with Christianity? Or was the extent of their ambitions to shake a fist at mainstream morality, and perhaps provoke its defenders into acknowledging that other paths existed? Even here, the answers one could imagine are all too likely to be more interesting than the reality. Such is the allure of lost media, that even an entry as inauspicious as this invites one to find something more than what it in all likelihood was.

With that, I’m wrapping this up. (A “one scene” is obviously out.) It’s just one trail among many in the world of lost films. For now, I deem it enough to represent the whole. My final verdict is, we can at least be glad to live in a society where people who want to make a 1970s gay-Jesus porno were free to do it. I will even go so far as to say that what they did was almost certainly more worthy of survival than the likes of Ingagi. That brings me to one last unwarranted philosophical moment courtesy of Gandalf: “Many that die deserve death; can you give it to them?” This is why we need media preservation, because even if what is preserved is pure coprolite, it will make the good stand out all the more. So go watch something good, or maybe create something you would rather destroy than show to anyone but you. If you want to be you, be you!

No Good Very Bad Movies Special: The one with Bigfoot

 

 

Title: Night of the Demon

What Year?: 1980 (copyright)/ 1983 (VHS release)

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

While I’ve been considering the further course of this feature, I have tried out a few videos based on content I covered here. What that brought me to is a question I have frequently considered: Is there a point where a film is so incompetent that it no longer counts at the movie? As I have routinely said, this is why I can tolerate many/ most films at the actually incompetent end of the spectrum, especially from before about 1970 when a US theatrical release usually meant a minimum standard of mediocrity. Even at that stage, however, there was still a residuum of movies from people who either didn’t know what they were doing or really wanted to do something else. We already saw the fruits of this odd transitional period with Death Bed and The Crater Lake Monster. Now I have one more that technically came out in the 1980s. Here is Night of the Demon, a Bigfoot movie that’s on about the same level as the film of Bigfoot.

Our story begins with a grievously scarred man under psychiatric examination. Then we skip to a series of grisly lovers’ lane murder where the offender is the famed cryptid, alternating with college lecture on the mysterious primate Bigfoot. Soon enough, the professor gathers a group of students for an expedition to solve the mystery, without actually bringing guns. The party’s members quickly find themselves menaced by a mysterious creature, which doesn’t stop them from recounting more bloody, supposedly real murders that are all shown in enough detail to muddle how many of the students have been picked off in the present. But the real horror begins when they discover some wandering cultists and neurotic redneck girl with a dark secret: She once had a child with the monster, much to the indignation of her now-departed father. While the baby is no more, the “demon” is returning for his mate, and anyone in the way is cryptid food!

Night of the Demon was an independent film by director James Wasson and producer Jim Ball. The movie was reportedly filmed in 1979 and given very limited showings in a substantially different form, after which Ball added numerous sequences of violence/ gore and other explicit content. The film’s cast included TV/ character actor Michael Cutt as the professor and Melanie Graham in her only known film role as Wanda, the would-be mate of the Bigfoot. In 1983, the film in its current form was released directly to VHS in the US and elsewhere. In the UK, it received notoriety as a “video nasty”. Wasson directed a limited number of additional films in the 1980s, including several adult films. The film received multiple releases on VHS through the 1990s. Some later releases may be direct transfers from tapes. It was released on DVD in 2004 and on Blu Ray in 2021. As of mid-2022, it is available for digital purchase and rental.

For my experiences, I first caught wind of this from Brandon’s Cult Movies, and rented it for the viewing that led to this review when an upcoming reviewing was announced. I didn’t necessarily go in with the intention of doing my own review, though putting down a little bit of money for it certainly pushed me in that direction. What really got this rolling was the decidedly poor quality of the digital rental (definitely far inferior to the footage used for Mr. Tenold’s video). From the first moments, this was the kind of adapt-to-kaka experience that makes an impression all on its own (see Horror Express, Time Machine 1978, etc). It quickly became further apparent that this was exactly the kind of movie I had planned to cover with this feature and especially under the “Guinnocent” rating category, before I ended up going in other directions. I decided it was worth a slot while I sorted things out, so I started this review at the latest possible time.

Moving in, I cannot underemphasize just how far this falls short of any standard of professional quality. I suppose it still meets certain minimum standards that can’t necessarily be taken for granted (thanks, Creepers): The camerawork is acceptable and at times creative, the acting is more or less tolerable, and the concept and story at least rise above actual racism baked in by the likes of Ingagi. This is still hovering between amateurish and outright painful, and the frequent flashbacks (which are technically all within a flashback…) go a long way toward muddling a movie that is already short on coherence. The real question is if this is at least getting into “so bad it’s good” or at least psychedelically weird territory. Even on these terms, the movie is middling at best. Its most entertaining moments by far are from Graham, who definitely deserved a real career after coming out of this. She has a perfect deadpan delivery that can rise to snark and genuine anger, but this Southern Gothic style never quite fits the setting or themes of the movie. Then the obvious failure is the Bigfoot, ultimately shown as little more than a guy with a blaxploitation wig (okay, they didn’t quite sidestep the racism), which doesn’t even provide the intentionally comic quality of the likes of the beachball alien of Dark Star. Yet again, I must further protest that surrealism and “graphic”/ realistic gore do not mix.

Even with these complaints set down as self-evident, I spent the time between the viewing and this review trying to pin down just why this one felt wrong to me. The fundamental and still fairly obvious problem is that there is no sense of atmosphere here. This is partly because of otherwise bold decisions, particularly the numerous attack sequences that occur in broad daylight. These and certain other issues can be further allowed as due to limitations in both the original equipment and the quality of available copies. On a still deeper level, however, this is simply done the wrong way round, and it shows especially in the build-up. To begin with, despite the prominent role of gossip and campfire tales, the movie never really admits ambiguity whether or not Bigfoot is “real”. As a result, there’s no semblance of doubt that we will see the real thing, nor the building psychological-horror discomfort that could have paid off even if the creature never showed at all. On a closely related note, there’s no sense of legwork in the revelations that drive the story; things that should be hinted by chance and then hastily denied are instead repeated as casually as sports scores. And the real bottom line is that most of the film is focused on not just the least interesting characters, but the ones who don’t have any reason to be here at all.

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with a kill that seems to turn up in every video about the movie. While I can’t fully discuss its exact context this long after a single viewing, I certainly had no trouble reconstructing the scene itself. Somewhere around the middle, we find a guy chopping wood on what appears to be a completely cloudless sunny day. He sets down the axe for a moment. Of course, when he turns back, Bigfoot is there, but the closeup is on the axe. He promptly takes a hit where his shoulder meets his neck. What stuck in my mind is the closeup of him grimacing in pain or general annoyance, in which he is clearly gripping the end of the axe handle with both hands. Somehow, the axe is removed, and we get another closeup of a wound comparable to what could be inflicted by a broken beer bottle. Just as priceless is his expression, which just looks confused. Then, of course, the camera zooms in on the axe as it falls again. Now, what really stood out when I thought about this is that there’s nothing to establish the details of the environment. This could be 10 feet from a road or in the middle of the deepest woods, factors that could explain both how Bigfoot caught the victim by surprise and why he attacked in the first place. But this is the kind of movie that doesn’t ask questions, which is how you get a scene like this.

In closing, all I really have to say about the rating is to repeat that this is indeed exactly what I had in mind when I came up with the “Guinnocent” rating. What really happened was that I had to change course for my own sanity, from actual garbage to the genuinely unconventional. This one was a reminder why I made that choice. Yes, there’s fun to be had just in pointing and laughing at what it does wrong, which ultimately just proves that it was never “that bad”. But by my refrain, once you get to this level, what you can say about one can be said about 10 or 100. The ones that remain worth analyzing are those with enough creativity to say something in a unique way. In that light, this movie is middle of the road, not as inept or obnoxious as some, but still well behind the likes of Plan 9, Dark Star or even Death Bed. It’s a fun place to visit, not so much to remain in long enough to fill out a feature. I am once again happy to move on.

No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown Finale: The one based on the worst Shakespeare play

 

 

Title: Titus

What Year?: 1999 (copyright)/ 2000 (US release)

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: Disqualified!!!

 

In the course of this feature, one thing that’s taken me by surprise is that there have only been a couple movies I disqualified, defined in advance as films I would not give a viewing by my own “rules”, and then for different reasons than might be expected. There was the Gobots movie, which simply wasn’t available at a price I would pay, and Creepers (now subject of one of my videos), which pushed my patience enough that I skipped through a significant part of it. Most tellingly, there have been a few movies on my radar that I know I wouldn’t watch in full for reasons that don’t necessarily reflect their quality. With the present review, I come to the most notable example, a film that was never my thing yet still interested me. Here is Titus, the big-budget Hollywood production of the most infamous play in history.

Our story begins with a boy playing soldiers, which soon is interrupted by apparently real destruction. We then jump to the armies of Rome, who for some reason have guns and motorcycles that we see occasionally, and the general Titus, who returns with a captured barbarian queen Tamora. To avenge the death of his own son, of which he boasts over 20, he kills Tamora’s firstborn without dealing with her or two more sons who we will see definitely shouldn’t be left to their own devices. Complications come when the new emperor sets his mind on marrying Titus’s daughter Lavinia, a scheme the general goes along with so enthusiastically that he kills one of his remaining sons for standing up for her current fiancée. By the time Titus has sorted things out, the emperor instead chooses Tamora as his bride. She quickly schemes with her sons and her servant Aaron to ruin Titus’s family. It’s all just the beginning of a saga of murder, retribution, violation and mutilation, and revenge is a dish you definitely should not accept from the guy who played Hannibal Lecter!

Titus was a 1999 film written and directed by Julie Taymor, based on the play Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare. It was the first cinematic adaptation of the work, an early work believed to have been popular with contemporary audiences but later condemned as the worst of Shakespeare’s plays to survive. The film starred Anthony Hopkins as Titus and Jessica Lange (see 1976 King Kong) as Tamora, with Laura Fraser as Lavinia and Harry Lennix as the Moor Aaron. The film was accepted for distribution by Fox Searchlight; however, the film received significant cuts and a delayed release after the MPAA gave it an NC-17 rating. An R-rated version of the film was given a limited US theatrical release in early 2000, following screenings at 2 theaters in December 1999. The film was an unquestioned commercial failure, earning a box office of under $3 million against a reported $18M budget despite favorable reviews. It was released on home video, both in the R-rated and “unrated” cuts. It was reported unavailable for streaming through at least early 2020. As of mid-2022, it is offered on the Roku platform.

For my experiences, I grew up going to the local Shakespeare company, so inevitably, I knew of Titus Andronicus at a fairly early age. In my further recollections, there was a revival and partial rehabilitation of the play within the Shakespearean community in the 1990s. It was indeed a perfect expression of the growing “so bad it’s good” aesthetic. Where scholars had once sought for justification to deny whether Shakespeare even wrote the damn thing, the new wave freely played up its gory absurdities. Regretfully, I never saw any of these performances myself, but I heard more than enough to be intrigued when word of a genuine Hollywood treatment came out. Of course, the rest of the story is that the movie itself was never really allowed to arrive, for reasons that were probably justified for the “mainstream” of the time. For my part, I honestly wasn’t interested enough to run it down until I started this feature, which was when I became fully aware of the extent to which it has been censored and suppressed. I finally went in enough to pay a modest sum for the DVD, then sat on it long enough to round out the “countdown”. I have to say, my immediate reaction was that I had not missed out.

Moving in, the most difficult thing about a project like this is judging how much is a matter of the adaptation or built-in from the source material. Titus himself is a pretty clear example of the latter. As a matter of plot, he’s pretty much a bystander in his own story, which correspondingly limits Hopkins’ performance. Worse, his treatment of his own family is so atrocious that he’s less sympathetic to any modern sensibility than outright villains like Shylock or Macbeth. The collateral damage is that we rarely get a sense of Hopkins having fun with this, until he dons the chef’s outfit for the finale. (I can’t believe that this is not a reference to his most famous performance…) Strangely, we don’t get a lot from Lange as Tamora, either. The real interest comes from the strange triad of the Moor and the Goth’s sons. The princes are interchangeably feral, ultimately no more evil than high school jocks with more opportunity for mayhem. In Aaron, on the other hand, we have self-aware sociopathy on the level of Iago, with even more racial baggage. The most surreal part is that they actually function together after a fashion, despite if not because of Aaron’s mindboggling confession.

Meanwhile, the bigger problems that become evident are in its inconsistencies. This is most obvious with the intentional anachronisms, which are exactly the kind of thing you get from mainstream filmmakers trying to adopt genre concepts. The “right” ways to do this are to stick to one real or assumed period and setting, like Battle Beyond The Stars, or create a developed and consistent world where quasi-historical and modern/ futuristic tech coexist for logical reasons, like Krull or Wizards. Here, what we have is just a mess, even compared to Wizards' motley mixed media. (Dear Logos, you know we’re in trouble when I use Ralph Bakshi as a “good” example.) There’s a kind of momentum when the emperor-to-be and his cronies ride through town on cars and motorcycles accompanied by 1920s jazz/ swing, which tellingly all fit within a Weimar setting and “look”. But the bulk of the film stays with the Roman trappings, making the anachronisms merely minor affectations. I absolutely link this to the film’s wild tonal whiplash. You can see the outlines of a “so bad it’s good” tale here, but it’s repeatedly disrupted by the graphic content and especially the hyper-realistic effects. Needless to say, this is especially true of the assault on Lavinia, which is so uncomfortable in dialogue alone that I preemptively skipped well before I felt I had “seen” anything. Having done so, I can say all the more confidently that the horrific aftermath serves the story as well as anything that could have been shown directly.

That leaves the “one scene”, and for all the strangeness in the adaptation, the most truly surreal moment is straight from the Bard. In the third act (the disc menus apparently follow the play well enough), Titus and the family have dinner, already minus a number of body parts. When Lavinia refuses to eat, her father consoles her, demonstrating that he can understand her gestures. It’s interrupted by an exclamation from his grandson, who explains that he has killed a fly. Hopkins gives a high point of his performance as the mad general goes into an inexplicable rage, declaring that the boy has killed an “innocent” who “with his pretty buzzing came to make merry with us”, and further laments for the fly’s grieving family. (I checked all of this against the original text.) The boy counters that it was “a black, ill-favored fly”, and makes a further comparison to a certain character. Titus promptly commends the boy for his deed, even striking at the bug. It’s all silly enough that Lavinia joins in the laughter. Finally he muses, "We are not yet brought so low that we cannot between us kill a fly..." It’s a weird scene that’s really as dark as anything else if you think about it, yet it’s as entertaining as a story this bonkers should be all the way through.

In conclusion, this is one where I truly feel out of things to say. The one thing I find fit to add is that the 1990s were a period as full of strange experimentation as any other decade. The present movie was a fitting end to the decade, century and millennia, as an effort that would surely have been quite different if it was made at all 10 years before or 10 years after. The culminating irony is the clear effort of the mainstream studio system to sweep it from the public mind, as academia once tried to discount and dismiss the play itself. It’s an imperfect effort, still fitting for its source, and I will be the first to say that the one thing it doesn’t deserve is to be forgotten. With that, I can bring my own chapter to a close. “I have done thy mother!”

Fiction: The return of Chelsea the social worker!

 It's time for the mid-week post, and I'm still writing up gratuitous backstory for Chelsea the social worker. This is the opening chapter in a story that goes way downhill from here, also featuring a location I had in mind for the Arcostate universe. By the way, if it seems like I do a lot with whirlwind romances, I suppose a major reason is that anything changing seems fast to me. So, here goes...

It had been a Friday night, after a day dealing with the murder of one of her clients. Chelsea had exited the central administrative center and made her way to the Bert I. Gordon Arts And Heritage Center, otherwise known as the BIG. It was in the shape of a star with two dozen points, almost but not quite filled in by another set of arms. The majority of its interior was set up as part café, part shopping plaza and part museum, with tables, serving counters, and numerous posters and exhibits all dedicated to the movies of the glorious Century of Progress. She was looking at an immaculately preserved puppet of King Kong when she glimpsed him on the other side of the case. He was a handsome man with red hair and blue-green eyes, dressed in a Valley of Gwangi T-shirt and a sky-blue jacket. One glance made her shiver. She gazed back at him. He smiled and circled around, and by then, she had already decided his fate.

“Hi, I’m Shad,” he said. “I’ve seen you around the office. We talked once…”

She absolutely didn’t remember seeing him before, but she felt a sense of familiarity that she didn’t question. Even without it, she would have nodded just as eagerly. “Well, I stand out,” she said. “It’s the hair.” She ran a finger through her hair. Every lock was blue-gray, with shading that went from steely gunmetal to something close to platinum blonde.

“They say the same thing about me,” he said.

She looked deeper into his eyes. “How about we get a few things out of the way,” she said. “Do you want to go on a date with me?”

“Ah… sure,” he said. “I’d love to.”

They ordered a dessert to share and sat down at a table. Chelsea saw and quickly wrangled a pair of coworkers named Kloe and Diane, the latter the one person she considered a close friend. Diane promptly mentioned that Kloe had just completed a petition for a domestic partner, which got thinly veiled disbelief from Chelsea. Things grew more  awkward as Diane kept giving both of them pointed glances. They made small talk neither of  them would ever remember, except for an off-hand comment about the center’s main attraction, the Victory Theater. 

“You know the story about it, right?” Shad said.

“No,” Chelsea had lied.

“They opened 72 years ago, to celebrate the victory against the Invaders,” he said. “Since then, they’ve been open 24 hours, 7 days a week. In that time, they say they’ve never shown a movie to an empty house… and they’ve never shown the same movie twice.”

“Really,” Diane said. “How do they do that? That’s like, 12 movies a day, for over 70 years… 300,000, at least…”

“A bit more,” Shad said with a grin. “They get their stock directly from Customs and Immigration. They have access to whole archives, with films that were lost or never made in other timelines. I hear they have first dibs on every new film that’s discovered, once they’re cleared for Moral Contraband, of course. There’s lots of films that are classics now that first showed right here… just once.”

Not long after, the coworkers excused themselves. Chelsea traded one last glance with Diane as they disappeared. “If you don’t mind my asking,” Shad said, “is there something with you and Kloe?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Chelsea said. “It’s just, she’s not what you’d think of as the marrying kind. In fact, she’s one of our physical therapeutics… instructors.”

It took just a moment for the truth to dawn on Shad. “I thought that was a rumor,” he said.

“Well, we don’t exactly advertise it, even within the Department,” Chelsea said. “It’s not quite what you might think. They usually get assigned to help clients who are already partnered, and then usually to deal with physical disabilities, psychological trauma, that kind of thing. They do good work.”

She took another look into Shad’s eyes. “If you don’t mind my asking, have you ever petitioned for a state assignment?” she said. He just looked back at her uneasily. “Don’t worry, I won’t talk, half my case work is applications. Lots of people in the Department do it, same as anyone. Not the ones you’d expect, either…”

“I have a petition,” Shad said. “It’s been a while; I haven’t been sure whether I want to keep it open. How about you… if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Nope, never,” she said. “Really, they’ve been leaning on me to do it, just for PR. The clients aren’t supposed to know, but people still talk. Thing is, I already had a partner, once. It was good, but it didn’t last; it couldn’t have. If I get out there again, it’ll be different. Like, less talk, more therapy, maybe a few pretty babies.” She laughed.

“Listen, I have another question for you,” she said. “How’d you like this date to end in some therapy?”

“Ah, that does lay things out,” he said. He looked in the direction of a booth that showed cartoons. As they ducked inside, he said, “Yes. I mean, we can see where it goes. Does… just hypothetically… matter if I’ve had therapy before?”

She looked at him more thoughtfully. “Now that you mention it, I thought I’d be able to tell by now,” she said. “In some ways, you act like it, in other ways, you don’t. You act shy, but you’re still confident about yourself. That’s different.”

For the first and last time, Shad looked hesitant. “So you can usually tell?”

She gave him a look that was just a little puzzled. “Come on, it’s what we do for work,” she said. “It almost always shows, especially if a guy knows we know. But not you. Not even now.”

“That… makes sense,” Shad said. “So. Do… do you, well, want to go to a movie first?”

“We can see where it goes,” she said.

 

They would never remember who first suggested staying for a double feature that started at midnight. The theater auditorium would have held about 600 in a 120 degree fan, a fact which had often been commented on when many times that number had claimed to have gone to the first showing of certain beloved films. For the reduced crowd, only an upper tier of the theater was open, which was clearly intended to allow closer supervision. There were still only a fraction of the seats filled, allowing a dozen or so couples like themselves to fan out. On the main floor, mechs of various shapes could be seen performing cleaning and maintenance. They scored seats on a bank that jutted out from one edge, for some sense of privacy.

The double feature, like most, consisted of one long film and a shorter one, buffered by a cartoon. The first proved to be a mythological tale in a foreign language that seemed to be a strange, truncated version of Hamlet, in which the prince’s father was openly overthrown and murdered by an underling who married his queen. “It’s the story of Orestes,” Shad explained to her. “From the Greek myths. If anything, Shakespeare ripped it off.”

As it turned out, the prince killed the usurper well before the halfway mark. That was  when he was first haunted by the grisly Furies, portrayed with a combination of threadbare makeup and jerky stop-motion. Still, Shad and Chelsea pressed together as the leering specters terrorized the prince. The court soon fled his presence, except his mother and his sister Elektra, but he stabbed his sister as she tried to stop him from falling on his sword. Finally, he confronted his mother, who revealed that he was not the son of the old king, but the usurper he had killed. Then she threw herself from the castle tower. As Orestes stared up at the gloating Furies, he shouted, “If the gods will not forgive men’s ignorance, then the gods are not gods!” Even as he spoke, the spirits disappeared in an instant, and the final frame faded to black.

The intermediate feature proved to be a cartoon with two characters named Bucky and Pepito. It went for 15 minutes, and even that length was clearly assembled from several short. The pair were two boys in the Southwest desert, one of whom had his face constantly covered by a sombrero. In the midst of the supposedly lovable boys’ misadventures, Shad took Chelsea’s hand. She promptly placed it on her bare knee. She giggled as they kissed.  “There’s something I should tell you,” she said. “I’m quiet, I mean freak-guys-out quiet. My ex used to say, I’m quiet as a shark. Remember that, later; there’s still going to be a later. You can talk to me, but please don’t try to make me talk, because I just don’t.”

That was when an arachnoid mech suddenly clambered over the railing. “Please observe State guidelines for appropriate public behavior,” it said in a low hum. “We thought you would like to know, there is a private Health And Therapeutics facility very close to the Center.”

It was enough for them to withdraw by mutual agreement, in time for the second feature. It was a monster movie, set in perhaps 1970. It showed a child who made a prank call, then started to make another when the dial tone grew louder. The child dropped the phone in fear as a strange, scaly monster burst from the earpiece, again portrayed with stop-motion. As it unfolded, Chelsea glanced sidelong at Shad.

She took his left hand in her right, clasping openly and innocently on the rest between their seats. He quickly laid his jacket across her lap. For a moment, the mech reappeared in the corner of Shad’s vision, but withdrew. He quickly learned just how quiet she could be. The monster had cornered the child, when she gave his hand a squeeze. That was when a second, larger monster emerge, and take what proved to be its wayward offspring home.

They emerged from the center at 3:40 AM. Any exhaustion had long since given way to euphoria. He carried a replica of the King Kong puppet. “Listen,” he said, “there’s one more thing I need to know… have you done this before?” She gave him a look that was coldly neutral. In her mind, his fate remained unchanged, but the paths to it became much more likely to be painful. “What I mean is,” he said quickly, “is this what you’d do with any guy? What you’d want to do again?”

She nodded. In her mind, she decided he would suffer only a little. “That’s fair,” she said. “You deserve to know, if we’re going to do this. So… The fact is, I haven’t done anything in a while. In fact, hardly ever, since I was partnered. If this goes how I think it will, I won’t need to do it again. As long as you’re still in.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Shad said. “It wouldn’t have. But lady… you are the freakiest chick I ever met.” Then he kissed her.