No Good Very Bad Movies 15: The one with diesel punk zombies

 

Title: Frankenstein’s Army

What Year?: 2013

Classification: Mashup/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

In the course of this feature, something I have thought about on and off is working in a zombie movie, a genre I already mined out with The Revenant Review. There’s no question, the lion’s share of the worst movies I’ve ever seen have been zombie movies, and in almost all cases, I avoided them. I had a long list of titles I usually made a point not to mention, including one that would definitely have this spot if I was ready to commit to watching any part of it again. The thing about these movies is that most o them didn’t really take the zombie concept anywhere, and many of them are still entertaining after a fashion. Zombie movies are like pizza, even a ”bad” one can still hit the spot. While investigating further material, I came across one that is genuinely different, with some of the strangest revenants on record and an odd approach to the narrative notwithstanding the fact that it drew directly on one of the most overused and unwelcome trend of the current millennium. I present Frankenstein’s Army, which I happened to watch for this review at 4:30 AM on one of the nights when I know I’m not getting to sleep.

Our story begins with Soviet soldiers advancing into Germany, documented by a largely unseen man with a camera that happens to record in color. After some standard looting and atrocities, they catch wind of a signal from another unit under attack.  As they investigate, they begin discovering strange remains that appear to combine human, animal and machine, which unhelpful locals warn them have been attacking both sides. Soon, they begin encountering the hybrids alive and fully functional. The group is quickly picked off in combat with the lumbering, nearly invulnerable retro-tech cyborgs. To stay alive, they must be as ruthless as their inhuman enemies. But our cameraman is more than he seems, with a mission of his own, and the lair of creator of the horrors still lies ahead!

Frankenstein’s Army was a 2013 film directed by Richard Raaphorst from his own story and concepts. The film was based on an earlier unproduced project titled “Worst Case Scenario”, which would have featured several creature designs used in the finished film. The film was shot in Raaphorst’s homeland of the Czech Republic. The multinational cast included Karel Roden as Dr. Frankenstein, Joshua Sasse as Sergei and Alexander Mercury as the “point of view” character Dmitri, with Romanian Cristina Catalina as the eventually transformed nurse Eva. Extensive effects for the undead, referred to in the credits and publicity material as “zombots”, were created mainly with prosthetics and practical effects by a team that included Lord of the Rings veteran Carola Broekhoff. The film received a limited theatrical release, followed by release on disc and streaming. It received mixed to positive reviews from genre critics and fans, with a number of critics noting problems with its “found footage” setup including the fact that the production far exceeded World War 2-era film equipment. The film is available for free streaming on several platforms.

For my experiences, this is another film I watched on my epic rides to work. It stood out to me as a particularly late example of the found footage genre/ conceit, which I had experienced mainly through Cloverfield and Romero’s Diary of the Dead. My strongest impression of the whole iffy trend is that Romero’s entry offered the only approach that makes it workable and convincing: Everyone involved is supposed to be part of an experienced crew with equipment they know how to use. By comparison, the present film is first and foremost the one that just said to Hell with it all, and I remain ambivalent about the results. It would have been fascinating to have a horror movie that simulated the technology and “look” of actual wartime films. What we get instead makes me suspect that the real inspiration was first-person shooter video games. Given that frame of reference, the film at least follows its own “rules”; The camera angles follow natural lines of sight, the lingering detail shots are fitted into the pauses when nobody is trying to kill the cameraman, and there isn’t even much of the “shaky cam” artifice wrongly taken for realism.  It may not be particularly “good”, yet it’s still not so tiresome as to distract from the events.

And that brings us to the obvious hook, the biomechanoid undead. They aren’t that unique, but they are unquestionably at least as well-done as anything one could compare them to (see Splinter, if anything). The better points come from the simple fact that you can generally figure out what they’re made from, as well as the fact that the camerawork doesn’t willfully obscure them. The overall look is that of body horror twisted all the way into pure abstract art, with enough examples that this could easily become a nearly endless list. It’s admittedly problematic to take them as a threat. We see literally first-hand that they are surprisingly stealthy and almost impossible to kill, but their biggest real advantage is the confined, ambush-friendly environment. The counterpoint is that there is clearly a law of averages in effect, with some clearly less successful creations and others that don’t appear intended to fight at all. The latter are easily among the most unsettling, especially the eerie “character zombie” nurse, who seems to hum as she does her work. The most fascinating to me is the “mace” zombie, which reappears several times without ever doing more than crawl along. It’s not clear if it’s damaged in battle or outright defective. Still, it does make its way back to the lair, whether to be repaired, upgraded or merely recycled.

The con side here is that the visual horrors far exceed anything we get from the story or characters. Now, this is where critics can be a little unfair. The characters are not likable by any means, to a certain extent perpetuating wartime stereotypes and propaganda, but this is after all a war movie as well as a horror movie. On consideration, they are at least well-defined, usually well-acted, and a lot better developed than they really need to be. The real affront to the sensibilities is their matter-of-fact disposal, culminating in the fate of Sasse’s charismatic character as a guinea pig in an experiment that would give Megavolt serious reservations. (See Wild, Wild Planet while you’re at it.) Where balance drops off is the extremely thin story, to the point I would probably have disqualified it from the Revenant Review (and I cleared The Video Dead!). The journey is no more or less than a guided tour of a meat grinder, with little sign of the deeper allegory and tragedy that a mature anti-war narrative might bring to the table. It doesn’t help that the otherwise chilling villain’s backstory is a mess of contradictions, still less that he has to keep handling the camera himself to continue the found-footage conceit.

Now for the “one scene”, I was inclined to go with the appearance of the nurse, which gets honorable mention. (And what the Hell did they do with her eyes?) The one I decided on, however, was one I might have disregarded if I hadn’t seen it discussed on a page for the movie. As we enter the final act, Dimitri and the camera wander the doctor’s lair alone, into the largest and most ominous chamber. Our point of view approaches a rickety-looking cart in the middle of it all. Only then do we see that one of the bodies is a still-living man. He actually looks into the camera, though it’s never clear if he’s really aware anyone is there. Even more unsettlingly, he begins to laugh. That’s when the figure approaches, and he begins to talk, argue and plead in German, without the benefit of any subtitles (itself a conceit I was making fun of with the “authentic” Serbo-Croatian in my Exotroopers series). He continues to talk as he is pushed to his fate. Just why he bothers is one more thing not at all clear; perhaps he recognizes a former comrade, perhaps he is addressing God or the universe in general. His talking becomes a steady cry, never quite a formulaic scream. It’s very unnerving, yet oddly intimate, and really a fair example of why the movie at least sometimes works.

In closing, I have less to say about the rating than the trend the movie represents. In hindsight, “found footage” as a device had been in use since the 1970s at least, as evidenced by sequences from Dark Star, The Hidden and for that matter Aliens. The obvious difference is that these films all used “first person” segments to supplement more orthodox camerawork and storytelling, which was the most realistic assessment of the strengths and limitations of the concept. As with many unwelcome “trends”, the problems only started when the latest “new wave” filmmakers expanded it from one tool in a toolbox to a central element of their narrative style. Inevitably, for every example that worked on its own terms, there were more that failed and in some cases diminished otherwise worthwhile projects. The present film stands out as one of the ones that didn’t entirely succeed, but went in a different enough direction that it can’t be readily discounted as a failure either. It’s films like this that I had in mind when I started this feature, and for that, it belongs here. With that, I’m done for another day.

No Good Very Bad Movies 14: The one that invented the disaster movie

 

Title: When Worlds Collide

What Year?: 1951

Classification: Prototype

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

 

In my reflections in the course of my reviews, one recurring theme that has crossed my mind is how much the whole idea of the “worst” movies was based on 1950s cinema. I suppose this is a major reason I have dealt only sparingly with movies from that period. On a deeper level, however, movies from that time simply don’t connect with me nearly as well as I’m sure people would expect. And that is what brought me to the present selection, a film that was a big-budget, near-mainstream offering in its own time, but now more forgotten than many of the notorious B-movies of the time including a few that probably ripped it off. Here is When Worlds Collide, the great-grandfather of disaster movies that ended up more like a cousin twice removed.

Our story begins with a shot of an illuminated Bible verse that looks like a press release from Westboro Baptist. We then get a sequence of astronomers watching the skies with increasing alarm. Soon, they deliver their news to the UN: A  pair of rogue planets have invaded the solar system, one on a collision course with Earth. All the human race can do is build a space ark to colonize the second rogue planet, which might be habitable. Meanwhile, we meet the main and least interesting characters, Joyce, the daughter of a scientist planning the evacuation, her boyfriend Tony, and David, a hotshot pilot that the lady is immediately infatuated with. The scientists manage to begin construction of the ark, with help from a crippled businessman who demands passage as a condition of his support. The rest of the potential colonists are chosen by lottery from a pool that doesn’t seem to include a single person who isn’t attractive and white. As doomsday approaches, humanity must choose between pooling together or tearing itself apart, but the focus remains on the pilot who can’t quite decide whether to die or get the girl and save his skin. Oh, and is there air on that new planet??? They don’t know!!!

When Worlds Collide was a 1951 science fiction drama produced by Hungarian-born George Pal, based on a 1933 novel by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer. An adaptation was reportedly first considered by Cecil B. Demille. The film was directed by Rudolph Mate, known for the 1932 horror/ surrealist film Vampyr, and starred Richard Derr and Barbara Rush, with John Hoyt as the businessman Stanton. It represented one the first “big budget” science fiction films, with a pre-inflation budget of  $936,000, roughly equal to The African Queen released the same year.  The film was a potential disappointment at the time of release, earning $1.6 million, though it went on to be an undisputed if controversial classic. Philip Strick notably critiqued its social commentary as “a rather decorous affair”, while praising its effects as “classics of destruction”. Peter Nichols described it less flatteringly as “a likeable, rather silly film”.

For my experiences, this is a film I heard of a long, long time ago, but was very slow to seek out. As already alluded above, my real frame of reference in this review has been why I don’t really “like” 1950s sci fi. Of course, there are films from the decade that are among my all-time favorites, and a few that I absolutely despise. By and large, however, the whole period just leaves me nose-blind. There’s just not enough difference between the supposed classics and the infamous turkeys for me to get invested. I am left especially cold by the ridicule piled on the many entries that were simply and obviously made by people who obviously didn’t know how to make a movie. As a mature viewer and reviewer, I simply invoke Commander Worf, that there is no honor in attacking the weak. Meanwhile, I’ve grown to be vaguely annoyed by the blind eye turned to the flaws of the “classics”, and the extent to which they both accepted and perpetuated the illogical errors and self-dated conceits that held genre films back for years and decades to come. It all drove me to the point of thinking of covering just one representative example, and this one came right to the top, especially after I reviewed its knockoff Warning From Space.

With that out of the way, the most baffling thing about a film like this is just how much must have been unknown for this to make any amount of sense. At face value, these are mitigating circumstances. After all, this was a time when there was still at least an optimistic case for multicellular animal life on Mars and Venus; a body from outside the solar system would have been in literally unknown territory. But there are many more areas where even arm-waving clearly place the movie’s scenario in doubt, to the point that I had this movie specifically in mind when I went easy on Pinocchio In Outer Space. (I wasn’t even aware that many synopses describe a star approaching Earth, which apparently is at least at odds with the original novel.) What you can’t get around is that the “heroes” freely send Earth’s last hope straight to a body that they admit they know nothing about. The final “happy ending”, which I watched in cold blood a month or two before the present review, is so mindbogglingly absurd that I immediately wondered if it was an inspiration for the classic line in Galaxy Quest. This is how you get a mainstream, big-budget film with worse science than a Disney-knockoff cartoon.

All the scientific complaints still don’t get to the heart of what’s good and bad in the movie. On the pro side, it has to be given credit for being honest with its scenario, which is honestly the main thing that stopped me from giving it the lowest rating. There’s no super science or last-ditch daring-do here. Earth is doomed, and the vast majority of humanity are going to go with it. The obvious faults are the total lack of racial diversity (just as well considering what racial stereotypes were like at the time) and the very limited size of the crew. The deeper problem is that Hollywood wasn’t ready to ask or answer the film’s own questions. The fairest thing to be said is that in the years since, the genre has rarely if ever offered an answer that wasn’t set by the artist’s politics. Here, the answer is heroic self-sacrifice and implied Judeo-Christian piety (really handled with more subtlety than Pal’s War of the Worlds). It’s easy to ridicule the Cold War era optimism, especially given how close they were to making their own apocalypse. But then, a generation of  “gritty” post-apocalypses where most of the populace start looting over a few random zombie attacks haven’t done any better at giving a realistic picture or human nature. There are stories that show that people don’t become angels or monsters at the flip of a switch, but they have so far failed to take root in the studio system.

Now, it’s time for the “one scene”. After more melodrama with the lottery, the scientists are absorbed enough in an argument that they take little notice of a distraught man who returns his “winning” number rather than be separated from his beloved, something they could easily have headed off by making the lottery for couples. Then Stanton’s employee and personal servant enters, and seeing the number, declares it his own and draws a gun to reinforce his point. There’s a fine bit of monologuing as he expands on his hatred for his boss and just how happy he would be to see him dead. Naturally, the scientists try to reason with him, seemingly almost oblivious to the situation and his increasingly obvious psychotic streak. Then two shots ring out, and the real surprise is who fired them. It’s one of the better moments keeping the movie afloat, with an extra touch of seemingly calculated anticlimax, and one more reason I can’t quite hate it.

In closing, what I find myself coming back to is whether there has ever been a “worst” decade of movies. What strikes me is that it’s the odd decades that stand out,  and with them, you can trace certain flavors unique to each one. Most of the movies I’ve reviewed that annoy me the most have been from the 1970s (see Silent Running and ZPG), when there was a large infusion of truly stupid films from filmmakers too competent to be excused. By comparison, the 1950s were an all-time low for pure amateurism, at least after the 1930s (see Ingagi) when sound film was new enough that nobody really knew what the Hell they were doing. The really difference is that even “bad” ‘50s movies can rise to the level of amusing and even thoughtful, as I illustrated with my review of Plan 9 From Outer Space. In that context, the present film is perhaps the most fitting example of its time, with some good, some bad, and a lot that’s too dated to stir up strong feelings either way. Take it or leave it, it’s a snapshot of its era. And with that, I’m wrapping this up. We’ll meet again…

The Anthology Anthology: Horror/ sci fi mashup anthologies

 

I decided it was time for something new on this blog, and as usual, that means something I've already done but didn't give its own feature before. This will be a feature dedicated to anthologies, previously covered with my post on the amazingly inappropriate Hitchcock kids' anthology (itself part of a larger collection likely to reappear if this goes on much longer), especially the sci fi, horror and generally messed up ones I knew and sometimes loved from the school and public libraries. For this installment, I have two, part of a somewhat larger set I built up, and they are as interesting as they are not so much good.

For the backstory, the present selections are from a vast series of anthologies by one Helen Hoke, a prolific and apparently otherwise respected author and publisher of children's books. In the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Ms. Hoke took credit for somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 of these things (you can try to count them at ISFDB) under the general description of horror. I remember these things infesting the libraries into the 1990s and 2000s, usually clustered in the kids' section. Like the Crestwood House Monsters series, we never saw these on sale, and once they started disappearing from the library shelves, the difficulty and corresponding price of getting them went up very quickly, though not yet to anywhere near the level of those little orange volumes. It was in one of these that I read "The Ski Lift", a story suspiciously similar to the plot of Frozen (not the Disney movie). We won't be seeing that one this time, but that should tell you all you need to know about how appropriate these are for kids. 

What's noteworthy in hindsight is that these are grab bags even by anthology standards, especially in overall quality. Any given one will predictably include some genuine classics of Victorian/ Gothic fiction, some underrated selections from the mid-century pulps, and a helping of "modern" selections that you would have to harrow Copyright Hell to find anywhere else. Like Weird Tales of old, there is no attempt at genre consistency. There is supernatural horror, science fiction, borderline dark fantasy, and the odd "straight" mystery/ thriller story. In the centerpiece of this post, tastefully titled Creepies, Creepies, Creepies, it happens that no less than six of the twelve selections are within the sci fi category.

The best piece of this anthology, and a good contender for best in my entire set, is "The Dancing Partner", a steampunk-flavored written by Jerome K. Jerome in 1893. The author was best known as a humorist, which puts him in the league of switch hitters like Guy DeMaupassant and W.W Jacobs. It's an intriguing bit of proto sci fi and a grisly early entry in the "killer robot" genre. It's all about a dancing automaton created by an eccentric toymaker as a companion for his daughter and her friends. It proves to be a formidable, very non-anthropomorphic bot with a retrospective steampunk flavor. Things go well at first as a girl named Annette joins the mechanical man on the ballroom floor, and there's enough subtlety that it's never clear how soon or how fast things go wrong. There's just a slow transition from cheerful admiration to unease to horror as the machine dances with the increasingly unresponsive young lady. I reread it for this post, and what most intrigued me was a passage that could sum up both genre conventions and real-time armchair analysis in more recent times: "Those who are not present think how stupid must have been those who were; those who are reflect afterwards how simple it would have been to do this, that or the other, if only they had thought of it at the time."

Other sci fi entries here include William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice In the Night", another Victorian-era tale, a Gernsback-vintage tale "Carlton's Father" by Eric Ambrose about immortality gone awry, and Clifford Simak's atypical invasion story "Skirmish". On the modern end, there's "The Meshes of Doom", scavenged like "The Ski Lift" from the Pan Book of Horror Stories series, a halfway decent killer plant story that cops out as psychological horror. The most curious is "The Animators" by the moderately prolific Sydney Bounds, a straight-up zombie story set on Mars from 1975 that became the basis of The Last Days On Mars. The strange thing is that the modern zombie mythos was notable for emerging straight from low-budget cinema and only much later finding a footing in printed fiction. Yet, this stands as an early outlier, after Night of the Living Dead but still before Dawn of the Dead really solidified the formula. It reads like a comic book short, with a bare minimum of character development and not even that much gore. The most interested element is the almost unlikable protagonist, explicitly the lone military man among scientists who bristle at his strict discipline, exactly the kind of dynamic that wouldn't and couldn't happen on an actual space expedition. By comparison, the undead are almost undescribed apart from the unintimidating Patient Zero, who climbs out of his dusty grave after being stripped of his space suit. For once, the undead prove at least as smart as the opposition, and get the upper hand in time for a predictable unhappy ending.

For the remainder of the stories, the most interesting is a crime piece "The Bitter Years" from Dana Lyon, a crime novelist who wrote mainly in French. It's a concise, polished piece with a little too much emphasis on the ironic ending. I personally would find it more interesting if a murderess left a man moldering with no sign of remorse, as the real kind do quite frequently. Also of interest is "The Natterjack" by Mary Danby, who apparently printed it under her own editing gig for the Fontana horror series, as near as I can make out a perverse twist on the "frog to prince" fairy tale archetype. Then there are a few more "classics" from Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft, plus a Cthulhu Mythos-adjacent entry from Robert Bloch.

For the other half of our selection, titled Spirits, Spooks and Other Sinister Creatures and graced with a cover that would make a kiddie-Halloween NES game blush, I'm going to have to be brief, and there's not nearly as much to talk about. The mix is shifted toward the "classics" end with Perceval Londons 1908 tale "Thurnley Abbey", and more from Saki, E.F. Benson and H. Rider Haggard. The last of whom contributes perhaps the worthiest entry, "Only A Dream", which adds the weightier themes of grief and guilt to already effective Gothic horror. On a similar classy vein is "Lodging For The Night" by Joan Aiken, who went from a Pan contributor to a respectable career, which I'm not sure I've read. On the science fiction side, there's "Mouse" by the criminally underrated Fredric Brown, a strange combination of invasion and possession, and perhaps "The Third Level" by Jack Finney. Also qualifying are "A Most unusual Murder", a time-travel tale with a side of true-crime toxic fandom by Bloch, and "Not Snow Nor Rain" by Miriam Allen Deford, another story I don't think I've gotten around to reading from a member of the original circle of Charles Fort. There's a few more on the actual kiddie vein, the most interesting of which is a short called "The Monster Of Poot Holler"; whose titular creature is described as "Thin as baling wire... (l)ong as a full grown tree".  Because there's no way a killer alien that can disguise itself as an extension cord will traumatize the kids...

And while I'm at it, a few illustrations, starting with the one for the Jerome piece!

And the space zombie story; he somehow looks heroic.

And the Lyon murder tale!

With that meandering look, I'm ready to call it a day. All in all, these anthologies stand first and foremost as what it was like growing up before the internet, ebooks, and generally having anything that isn't nailed down in copyright law at your fingertips. It was a simpler time, perhaps a gentler time, but then so much worse. Just as I am doing this, I am forcefully reminded that I used to scour these and similar books  to photocopy stories for my own files. Now, I have more than I could have dreamed of in my ebook libraries, including material from the same libraries, much of which I still haven't read. The old appeal definitely had a lot to do with the challenge. Still, I'd rather have the stories available both to me and everyone else a download away, and I hope to do my part to keep people aware of what actually good 1960s/ 1970s horror was like before the death of the public domain sends it to the grave. That's all for now, more to come!

Fantasy Zone: The one with a kid and stop motion demons

 

Title: The Gate

What Year?: 1987

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

I’m back with the second entry in a new feature, and the thought that’s been on my mind for a long time is that there are a lot of films that make me think “fantasy” that most people wouldn’t. The context for my way of thinking is that I grew up reading stuff from the pulp era, when magazines like Weird Tales and Unknown could publish the predecessors of everything from sword-and-sorcery to supernatural horror to science fiction, often from the same writers. What really revitalized horror and to a certain extent fantasy from the 1970s onward was new variations that blurred or bent lines that had really only emerged in the intervening decades, especially in the “urban” subsets of both genres. Horror was no longer centered on shenanigans in spooky mansions, and fantasy was no longer limited to swordsmen and wizards in pseudo-Medieval invented worlds. I offer the present selection as an example of the old made new brought to cinema, as a new angle on a film that those who would come here will likely be familiar with already. Here is The Gate, a film with demons, rock and roll, and surprisingly, no sex to speak or.

Our story begins with a spooky, moody shot of a kid returning home and finding himself alone in a rising storm. It turns out to be a dream, but on waking, he discovers that a tree in his back yard has fallen over, and his beloved dog has just died. We then meet his sister, whom he calls Al, and his friend Terry, who talks frequently about death and the occult with the air of someone who definitely isn’t afraid to pull things out of his posterior. Unsettling events continue to crop up, and Terry freely suggests that a portal to the netherworld has opened, literally based on a booklet included with a rock and roll album. When the parents leave the kids alone, things get spookier, as dozens of rodent-sized demon creatures pour out of the pit. As the final act draws near, the little group are captured by the unseen forces of evil, until the kid is left alone against a colossal monster that’s either the leader of the demons or the amalgamation of all of them together. His only hope is to find the perfect totem of light and life, before the portal brings Hell on Earth!

The Gate was a 1987 horror film directed by Tibor Takacs from a script by Michael Nankin. The film was produced by the Canadian company Alliance Entertainment, with filming mainly at a residence in Toronto, Canada. The film starred Stephen Dorff as Glen and Christa Denton as Al, with Louis Tripp as Terry and Scot Denton (apparently unrelated…) as the father. The film’s effects were provided by a crew led by William Randall Cook, known for Ghostbusters among other films. The demons/ creatures were created with a combination of stop-motion and suited actors. The film was an immediate if moderate success, earning $13.5 million against a $6M budget, and went on to enduring popularity on home video. The film received a sequel in 1990, with Takacs, Cook and Tripp all returning. Stephen Dorff went on to appear in Blade. The Gate has remained readily available, including free streaming in recent years.

For my experiences, this is another of many 1980s “cult” movies I didn’t see until college in the 2000s. I had considered reviewing it back when I started Space 1979 (see my Critters review), but never saw a way to reviewing it until I started Features Creature, which this feature is a spinoff to. Even then, I still went back and forth, particularly on the question of genre. It will be evident that I am very inclusive with what I consider fantasy versus horror, and there are a lot of works usually considered horror that I tend to view as “dark”, surrealist or urban fantasy. A few representative examples outside film are Lovecraft’s “Dreams In The Witch House”, King’s Rose Madder, and for that matter my own misbegotten tales of Carlos Wrzniewski. To me, tone alone makes a world of difference. Horror is characteristically pessimistic, full of passive, flawed or wholly unlikable characters as well as grim scenarios. Fantasy is about dynamic characters who resist heroically whatever the odds and ultimate outcome. In those terms, this movie is a definitive cinematic example, transforming the trappings of horror into a surprisingly poignant and ultimately hopeful story.

With that laid down, what I have long since admitted after many a viewing is that this is a cult movie people remember as much better than it is. It has a slow start, to put it mildly, with a lot of unnecessary asides along with a good amount of character development. Even as the supernatural events get in gear, there’s plenty of random supposed shocks that usually just annoy me. What’s easiest to forget is that there are a number of characters besides the main trio who remain long after any useful purpose had been fulfilled. Then when they do finally and mercifully leave, it just begs the question why the characters we care about don’t follow their example and get the Hell out (which per the lore might have been less of an issue with the original, possibly darker script). Still, these issues are standard for genre films then and now, often far worse in films with far higher budgets and profiles than this, and only prove that the film is part of its time.

On the other side, the strongest points of the film are the kids, the demons and the interplay between them. With the main characters, it will suffice to say that they are for once both likeable and well-acted by the genuinely young. There’s extra fun from Terry, handily generating loads of exposition that we certainly aren’t obliged to take at face value. There’s a good laugh in his casual remark, “You’ve got demons,” and an extra layer of sacrilege in his comment, “They’re older than the Bible.” There’s further room to wonder if his credulous belief is somehow feeding the enemy, especially as the group try to exorcize the evil presence with his input. The demons themselves appear surprisingly late yet immediately dominate. They’re eerie, agile little things brought to life with some of the latest and finest stop-motion animation, like an upgrade of the homunculi Harryhausen brought to life for the Sinbad movies. In their creepiest moments, they do little more than stare, and their appearance and not-quite-glassy eyes are utterly unnerving. What’s most unusual, and a major reason I favor putting the movie in the fantasy column, is that there’s never any serious doubt of their physical reality. It’s somewhat ambiguous whether they are individual entities, as we see a piece of one dissolve into worn-like pieces and later see them combine into the zombie-like workman. Yet, unlike certain other entities, they never simply appear or disappear, and when they attack, they grab, bite and are struck and thrown around in turn. The true masterpiece is the final monster, whose true nature I find ambiguous, which in its finest moment simply casts the kid aside before returning when he chooses his weapon.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and my personal favorite is early and random even by this movie’s standards. A bit past the 20-minute mark, we get are one sample of the rock and roll album, not music but a narration from a gleefully grim narrator. Terry wraps himself in a blanket as an improvised hood or shroud as he lip syncs the words. It’s a Lovecraftian creation myth, telling of the demons of primal chaos, pushed grudgingly aside by the creation of the world we know. Of course, they are ready to return, as the speaker declares with a flourish, and “reclaim what is theirs!” It’s good, bonkers fun, disconcertingly in line with the proto-Semitic myths that we now know underlay the Old Testament, and it tells us just as much as we need to know about an artifact that will figure large in the events ahead.

In closing, I come as usual to the rating, and this is one where I am genuinely conflicted. It might seem like I’m saying this movie is overrated, and in a sense I am. However, I am doing this to counter the danger of expectations, which aren’t going to do any favors. On a certain level, the film’s flaws only weigh it down because its beloved status makes it easy to be unpleasantly surprised, especially as either a newcomer or an old fan coming back to it after a long time. The film’s real strength is that it builds from an awkward start into something different and far improved, complete with an affirmation of faith, friendship and family values. That’s more than enough to keep it on my good side, as both a unique movie and a good one. And with that, I’m done, and happy.

Image credit VHS Collector.

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Generic Dinobot unboxing!

 

To start the new year, I've been sticking with a plan to slow things down while I decide how much I might want to shake things up. In that spirit, I decided to do a post for this, my longest-running regular feature (see the patchisaur post, from even before I was doing movie reviews), on a weekday instead of the weekend slot it has long since settled into. I'm doing this in part because I just acquired something that wouldn't make for as long a post as many I've made under the Legion banner, and I needed an unboxing to give it its due. Here's a few pics of the item in its glorious, terrible packaging, photographed with my camera phone.

This is a little line I have sighted independently at a couple different places over the last few months. You can  see on the box that there are four of them, of which I'm sure I've seen at least 3. What may not be entirely clear is that the labels are hilariously mixed up. The name of the Ankylosaur, present here, has its name under a T Rex, whose name is given to a ceratopsian. Less explicably, the actual ankylosaur pic is labeled "Dragon King Kong", while a spinosaur is dubbed "The Dragon and The Spirit".  Note that there's already two names visible for the line, "Dinosaur World" and "Dragon Knight", of which the former might well be the name of some wider line that has yet to emerge on my radar. All in all, it looks like an unremarkable example of a knockoff/ generic line that isn't that much like anything else, beyond giving another retread of the venerable "dinobot" concept. But what's on the inside? First, here's a couple more pics of the box, because the "real" collectors always love packaging and I love to make them cry.

Now here's the open box and interior packaging, which can get interesting. The big surprise was a floral background that wasn't visible at all from the outside. We now know that plant life in the Mesozoic wasn't as different as we once thought, but I doubt it included sunflowers...

Now, we have the dino. It looks pretty nice, stylized and a little old-school, almost like something from Lego. Now for transformation, the first thing that stands out is that the back piece comes off as a shield. It's a design choice that's cropped up now and then for a very long time, which can be convenient for the designer and the collector, though to quote Toy Galaxy, you will lose the shield.

This brought me to the really ugly surprise: To complete the transformation, you also have to remove the tail. That's no great loss, considering how convoluted dinobot robot modes already get, but it's very difficult to put back, and not immediately obvious if you broke it outright. An extra detail is that the head (helmet???) you see on the box has to go on top of the one on the figure. Here's the bot mode with and without the attachments. I kind of like it with the "small" head; it's odd and kind of goofy, but at least it doesn't look like a direct copy of Optimus Prime.

"I have no hips, and I must dance."

And for an extra pic, here's the bot with a dino I picked up at the same shop. It's a soft-rubber brackiosaur with a sound gadget, also definitely old-school. (Depictions with a resonance-chamber thingy still haven't caught on.) You don't really see that many brachiosaus, so I bought it for more than I'd usually pay. Still a long way from the worst in my collection; I'm looking at you, bigmouths.

With that, I'm wrapping this up. If anything, I offer this as a snapshot of what dino collecting is like. It's a field of wide variety and wildly varying quality. Outside of Marx and Jurassic Park, there isn't the market ecosystem and unifying community you get if you're collecting a brand or franchise. For those who are really into this, it means that every item is potentially one-of-a-kind, and every encounter an opportunity that may not be repeated. Sometimes, you find something good; sometimes you get junk; but you rarely buy something you regret paying for. And with that, I'm done for another day. That's all for now, more to come!

No Good Very Bad Movies 13: The one that's NOT a Disney movie

 

Title: Frozen

What Year?: 2010

Classification: Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/3)

 

I’m back with the first review of a new year, and I decided it was time for another installment of the Very Bad. It’s crossed my mind that, for anyone following this blog impartially, what’s here as opposed to my other features might seem just random. In making these calls, there’s three considerations that usually push a movie over the edge. One is certainly egregiously low quality, particularly in terms of production values. Another is notoriety, deserved or otherwise. The third and most intangible yet often decisive factor is pure strangeness (see Phenomena), especially on the level that makes a movie not just weird in itself but very difficult to classify. With this review, I have a movie that definitely falls within the latter two categories, a film that is either a modern cult classic or a critical bomb depending on your sources, and is even more problematic in terms of genre. Here is Frozen, a film that’s part thriller, part horror and part monster movie, and you better believe it came out before the Disney movie.

Our story begins with a guy, his girlfriend and his old buddy at an alleged New England ski resort, contemplating life and commitment. After a lot of griping about who is the third wheel, the trio cajole one of the staff into letting them on the ski lift as the staff are trying to shut down. Naturally, the lift is turned off for the full week, leaving the klutzes stranded high in the air with a snow storm incoming and a pack of wolves below. Our group must choose between biding their time or taking near-suicidal chances to escape, and it’s already clear this lot is bad at assessing risks and probability. Will any of them survive the night- and do we really want them to?

Frozen was a 2010 horror/ survival film written and directed by Adam Green. The plot of the film was highly similar to a 1969 short story “The Ski Lift” by one Diane Buttenshaw, published in the 10^th volume of the controversial Pan Book of Horror Stories series. The film starred Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers. While the script and dialogue portray a New England location, filming took place at Snowbasin in northern Utah, with many shots and scenes filmed with both the actors and crew on a ski lift. Scenes featuring wolves were filmed with trained animals, which one reviewer reportedly criticized as poor CGI. The film received many negative reviews and further criticism regarding the realism of its scenario, but has remained well-regarded among horror fans. Aspects of the movie were tested on Mythbusters, including a 2008 episode predating the film. The movie remains available on disc and streaming.

For my experiences, I have been collecting my thoughts ahead of the viewing or review, which included a quick reread of the short story, a savage little thing I remembered and eventually hunted down through its sole reprinting. With regard to the infamous coincidental title, the one thing that I found interesting is what might have been if the release dates and resulting situation had been reversed. (Oh, and by the way, I like Hans, while he's a real character!) What really caught my attention, long before I watched the movie, was the very striking similarities with the story, which can sufficiently described as marginally readable, then mainly for its compact prose and matter-of-fact brutality. I have been more suspicious about this than I normally would be, but what’s really of note is that the underlying idea clearly had an independent life that might long predate even the story. It’s worth further note that the story’s rationale is a real or imagined love triangle where the female party is absent except as a lure for the lunkheads.

Moving on to the movie itself, it is part of a trend I find particularly annoying: Rather than just making  bad decisions in an already difficult situation, like going into the cursed house on a stormy night or picking up a hitchhiker in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, the protagonists willfully go into obvious and avoidable danger in cold blood. In my judgment, this only ever really worked when played as very dark comedy (about the spirit of the story) or an archetypal Greek tragedy. In those terms, this movie is a case of too much and not enough; the characters are too likable to laugh at their fate, but not dignified enough to evoke true hubris. What keeps it more effective than it has a right to be is a scenario that covers most of the objections. For my nitpicking, my only real objection is that this would have worked much better set in the 1970s or earlier, when the legal as well as technological landscape was different enough that incidents like what we see might well have happened. (Amusingly, in the story, the protagonists are ingenuitive enough to climb onto the ski lift entirely unassisted.) I have also been tempted to “head cannon” the setting as where this was actually shot, which is in my back yard comparatively speaking t and still way out there even by our standards.

With all that out of the way, the film’s obvious strengths lie in its utterly grueling scenario and execution, which I find almost pointless to try to convey. The easy complaint is that would have been better as a short or an episode of an old-school anthology show, and further comparison with the short story definitely bears out the point. Given the risk taken, however, there’s no arguing with the result. There’s a lot of dead-air dialogue, amusingly arguing over many of the same Macgyver solutions brought up by reviewers, but there’s also poignance, vulnerability and growing despair. It’s all framed in the contrast between the intimate framing of the chair and frequent shots of the vast, bleak landscape. In the midst of the crushing indifference of nature, even the wolves are a brief, somewhat offkey intrusion, acting more like the clean-up crew than actively malevolent villains. The real problem is that the final act goes a long way to second-guess its premise and atmosphere, all hinging on a series of developments improbable enough that one could easily second-guess again and take it as a dying hallucination. Still, it works on its own terms, still stopping well short of a clear-cut happy ending.

Now, I originally made another skip to the “one scene”. In the final act, the girl manages to survive a fall from the ski lift, and manages to make her way along, alternately walking, crawling or just sliding along. One of the guys is unaccounted for, and we know the token carnivores are still around. This is another point of nitpicking, where my charitable reading is that they could be either actual wolves, coyotes, or some hybridized, feralized canid mix, of which the latter are more unpredictable and often flatly more aggressive. With this allowance, their behavior up to this point has been quite believable, especially if the lodge tourists and staff have treated them with the carelessness and insensitivity already in evidence. As she makes her way along, she sees blood in the snow, and we see gruesome proof of the fate of another character. Then her eye meet that of a single canine. It doesn’t attack, or even bare its teeth, but only gives a low growl and stares. I have said occasionally (see my Green Slime review from way back) that the most unnerving thing a “monster” can do is ignore potential prey, and this is my definitive case and point. It all passes in a moment, yet it’s as terrifying as anything we have seen in a harrowing film.

In closing, I still feel like I need to explain why I am covering this movie here. As already outlined, my deciding factor was jus how unusual and unclassifiable it really is; by comparison, I definitely decided against including it in Featured Creature or my other “genre” features. At the same time, it is definitely an example of an already problematic film that faired badly with the “mainstream”, on the whole probably an indication simply of the extent to which the filmmakers and distributors overestimated its potential. Fortunately, in the kind of circles where it was ever going to have a chance, it succeeded and still endures as a low-key, offbeat gem, and I for one quite freely concede that this is the reputation it always deserved. And with that, I’m done for another day.

Fantasy Zone: The one with Muppet genocide

 

Title: The Dark Crystal

What Year?: 1978 (preproduction)/ 1982 (release)

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

With this review, I’m starting yet another feature, this time simply because I have a movie and no better idea where to put it. It is a follow-up to a review I just did for Featured Creature, and the feature will in turn be to a certain extent a continuation of that feature. What sets this on a new direction is that I will be looking at both a genre and a time, specifically the fantasy genre and its de facto golden age of the early to mid-1980s. Out of that boomlet, already well-represented in my reviews, there is truly one film more egregious than all others, one which would be notorious if it hadn’t become well-regarded enough to be influential and outright loved. I present The Dark Crystal, a fantasy film so unusual I’ve debated whether to count it as live-action.

Our story begins with an introduction to a magical fantasy world divided between the opportunistic Skekses and introspective Mystics. When the leaders of both sides die, the Mystics send out their servant/ mascot Jen, possibly the only survivor of a humanoid race called the Gelflings, on a quest to end the Skekses’ rule and bring balance to the world. Of course, the Skekses send out their insectoid soldiers to find the last of the Gelflings. Meanwhile, Jen meets a a female Gelfling named Kira and a witch who reveals the secret of the Skekses’ power, a shard from a mystic power source called the Dark Crystal. To heal their world, the Gelflings must repair the crystal by restoring the shard, but first, they must make their way to the heart of the stronghold of the Skekses. It’s a perilous journey through a wonderous land, and in the end, the Gelflings must pay the ultimate price!

The Dark Crystal was the first feature film by Jim Henson Productions outside the Muppets franchise, with Henson and Frank Oz (see… American Werewolf In London?) sharing credit as director. The film was reportedly made over at least 4 years, based on a story conceived by Henson as early as 1975. The movie was possibly the first non-animated fantasy film to have no human characters, and as such relied heavily on animatronics. The creatures were designed by Brian Froud and Wendy Midener, who married during production. The voice cast for the film included Stephen Garlick as Jen, Lisa Maxwell as Kira and Billie Whitelaw as the witch Aughra; Whitelaw re-recorded lines originally scripted for or read by Oz. Significant changes were made after test screenings, including the replacement of a language created for the Skekses with English dialogue. The movie received a mixed response both critically and commercially; on the latter front, it earned just under $40.6 million against a budget estimated as either $15M or $25M. Its reputation improved greatly over time, leading to a range of media including the 2019 prequel/ reboot Age of Resistance. The son of Froud and Midener, Toby Froud, appeared in Labyrinth, and went on to a career in special effects and animation.

For my experiences, I definitely saw this one in the early to middling 1990s, and came back to it perhaps two or three times before I picked up the very subpar DVD. What really kept it in my memory has been an uncanny sense that I must have encountered it quite a bit earlier, yet even with my world’s-worst-superpower memory (have I mentioned I found Krull?), I can’t piece together when or how. My clearer recollections are straightforward enough to account for, sightings from TV, magazines and comic shops that from what I know now could have been from this movie, Labyrinth, or certain other films either from the same people or the general time and genre. On the other hand, I have very early memories that seem related but are mashed together with things I know have nothing to do with it. The most irritating incident is that I have a very old idea for an alien species that’s damn close to the Skekses (I said it, and I’m sticking to it), which I’m sure I first thought of right about the time I would have seen the movie, but I still can’t convince myself which came first.

Moving forward, one more thing about this movie is that I have long had it filed on my animation shelves, and I’m cantankerous enough that I very seriously considered doing this review for my animation feature. Of course, it’s not really animated, but as I already pointed out, it’s so unconventional, it doesn’t fit in the live-action mold either. It is truly an updated Punch And Judy show, as far beyond its simple beginnings as a supertanker is from a canoe. Defining its genre poses at least as many problems, and this brings up more than a few strengths and weaknesses of the movie. Its premises and atmosphere definitely fall under fantasy rather than science fiction, though there are points where it comes close to that already hazy line. At the same time, as I first commented reviewing Willow, it still doesn’t quite fit within the swords-and-sorcery/ epic fantasy genre, and in certain lights, it could have been better if it did. There’s no counterpart here to Conan or even Bilbo Baggins. In fact, it’s debatable whether the Gelflings accomplish anything the Skekses couldn’t have been talked into doing themselves. (“Tricking” the bad guys into doing what’s already for their own good, unfortunately, seems a lot more apt now…) These and other issues fall into the alt-too-familiar pattern of effects guys allowed to run their own show.

Naturally, if you really like this film, this will feel like petty nitpicking. The undeniable power of the film lies in the beauty and depth of its world. By the standards of any time, this is easily among the richest fantasy realms on record, with a range of settings and environments that all have their own inhabitants. There’s further freaky wonder in the non-sentient animals, especially the disgruntled Fezzgig and the ethereal landstriders (which I mentioned way back in my patchisaurs post). The usual point of argument is whether the characters have corresponding depth. The easy targets are Jen and Kira, who among other things seem tailored to draw attention to the more serious glitches in the technology. In my assessment, the real and not-uncommon problem here is that the most developed characters are the Skeksis overlords. They look like vultures trying to dress up as peacocks (a premise I developed into a creation myth for “my” alien species), and are every bit as vain, petty and cruel as might be expected from that description alone. It’s worth further note that, while there’s no effort put into setting them “misunderstood”, one can still find favorable points compared to the literally useless Mystics. At least they know their world is dying and are trying in their own way to do something about it. To me, the most realized and flat-out entertaining race are the podlings, who never quite get the attention they deserve.

That leaves the usual “one scene”, and I’m going with one I only remember noticing after I finally bought the movie. After the death of their emperor, the Skeksis Lord Chamberlain challenges the more militaristic one I think of as their general when he matter-of-factly tries to take the old ruler’s scepter straight from his hands. The others promptly announce a “Trial by Stone!” We cut right to this duel, where the two creatures each draw a gnarly scimitar to use not on each other, but a large crystal column. There’s an impressive sense of heft and weight as they take turns trying to make the deepest mark on the rock. Their peers are cheerful and polite, encouraging both combatants with each swing. Then, on his second or third swing, the general swings and breaks the whole column with a visible flash. Everyone seems startled as it falls apart, visibly glowing. This is where I get suspicious. A long time ago, I really did study geology (see my Congo review/ rant), enough to get further experience carving through rocks. If you have a fair amount of experience, it’s really not hard at all to find a spot where a fraction of the force will crack the whole thing. So did the winner really strike the strongest blow, did he get lucky, or did he figure out something his opponent didn’t? It’s overanalyzing, but it’s exactly the kind that makes a movie more fun.

In closing, what I really feel the need to say isn’t the rating I have given, but how I came to review it at all. As I’ve commented occasionally, there are a lot of movies that go over my radar in my choices of what to review, and this one fits most of the criteria. It may have failed to make the top box office dollars in its own time, but it certainly reached the audiences it was meant for then and since, and that translated to the kind of real and enduring influence that usually eludes the movies I normally cover. The common-sense decision for me was that it didn’t suit my needs for any of the features I have done before, which in turn made it inevitable that when I did feel ready to review it, it meant a new feature as well. With that context, it can be a gateway to something new, and a frame of reference for other material that will be a lot less familiar. Finally, I hope that my review will give a new perspective on the movie and especially on just how unusual it was and is. With that, I’m done for the day and another year.

Image credit Cult Film Club.