John Kenneth Muir's Blog, page 7

May the Fourth Be With You!

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I first saw director George Lucas’s blockbuster space opera when I was seven years-old.  Up to that point, I had never witnessed a fantasy/sci-fi/monster movie crafted on such a grand scale, or one presented with such an incredible, unshakable sense of reality.

Unlike many genre films of the epoch (for example,  Damnation Alley  [1977]) there was never even a single moment during  Star Wars  when the “spell” was broken, or the fantasy facade broke down to accommodate a bad special effect, a lousy performance, a cheap set/costume, or some other weak production component. 

Rather, that atmosphere of reality – of a different and fantastic reality, no less – was rigorously and impeccably sustained for two hours.

And because of that fact,  Star Wars  was the most exhilarating movie I’d seen up to that point.  I remember coming out of the movie for the first time and feeling like I had been holding my breath for two hours.  Then, over a period of several weeks, I saw the film in the theater at least three more times...and felt precisely the same way.
The great joy of  Star Wars , even today, all comes down to George Lucas’s incredible ability to ground his otherworldly “space opera” world in a reality that is immediately recognizable to all of us.  For instance, underneath the flashy lasers and colored light sabers, or the strange aliens and robots, the film boasts this driving, human feeling of yearning, of almost anticipatory anxiety.

Star Wars’  lead character, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) gazes up at the night sky of Tatooine, and he wonders what awaits him.  Where will he go next?  When does his life really begin? When does he finally get to grow up and chart his own destiny?  What is he supposed to believe in?

Lucas grounds the viewer in Luke’s personal “coming of age” story, yet that’s far from the only grounding the director accomplishes here.  Without explaining in significant terms a back-story, Lucas crafts in  Star Wars  a lived-in world which nonetheless points to previous adventures, and to a larger universe beyond the main narrative. 

It’s such a big (and yet consistent…) place, in fact, that it almost can’t all fit within the boundaries of the movie frame.  Thu,s at times, it almost seems as if Lucas didn’t make it up his universe at all, or build it all from scratch.  Rather, it’s as though he took a camera in-hand and actually traveled to a galaxy far, far away, filmed what he saw there, and brought that footage back for us to enjoy.

The film’s dialogue, filled with descriptors like “this time,” or “no more,” captures obliquely the notion that this adventure is set on just another day in this faraway galaxy, and that there are many, many other adventures to witness, and personalities to meet there.  The film boasts many half-explored implications, from intimations about unseen characters like The Emperor, Captain Antilles and Jabba the Hutt, to tantalizing hints about the previous adventures of Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, R2-D2 and C-3P0. The scenery or set design itself possesses a kind of unexplored depth and breadth. There's a staircase leading up -- where precisely? -- beyond Docking Bay 94 on Tattooine. There's the packed-to-the-gills interior of a bustling, junk-filled Sandcrawler.  There are even alligators in the sewers, so-to-speak, or rather a Dia Noga in the trash compactor.
The visual form of  Star Wars  reflects this narrative content in a most unusual and resonant fashion.  Specifically, Lucas utilizes visual homage or visual tributes to previous and well-established cinematic productions to help us -- the audience -- process quickly and thoroughly the essential nature of life in the world of the Galactic Empire. 

So even if we don’t consciously recognize or identify all the visual touches in terms of the original source material (such as  The Hidden Fortress  [1958],  Metropolis  [1927] or  633 Squadron  [1964]), our eyes nonetheless understand the touches as belonging to some common “language” we all share.   Star Wars  is an accomplished blend of the familiar with the unfamiliar, the past with the present, and with the (imaginative) future.  And Lucas’s choice to re-purpose imagery from film history is one key to help us understand his universe.  Underneath this technique of tribute or homage is a simple yet elegant message about man's nature, and not least of all, his spirituality.  In short,  Star Wars  offers a renewal of movie spirituality in an era of anti-heroes, cynicism, and the personal, idiosyncratic cinema.

“If there's a bright center to the universe , you're on the  planet   that it's farthest from .”

While being pursued by the Emperor’s minion, Lord Darth Vader (David Prowse), Princess Leia of Alderaan (Carrie Fisher) hides the tactical plans for an Imperial battle station called the Death Star with a small droid called R2-D2 (Kenny Baker). 

With his counterpart, protocol droid C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) in tow, R2-D2 escapes to the desert world of Tatooine with the goal of finding former Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) and soliciting his aid.

On Tatooine, however, the droids are captured by scavengers called Jawas and sold to the Skywalker farm. There, a young man, Luke (Hamill), hopes to leave his dreary life working at the moisture farm, and tender his application to the Academy.  But his uncle resists.  He doesn't want Luke to go.  He doesn't want Luke to grow up.

Soon, Luke and the droids meet up with Kenobi,  an old man who urges the young man to help him  reach Alderaan with R2 and the technical schematics.  After his aunt and uncle are murdered by Imperial Stormtroopers, Luke agrees to join Obi-Wan's quest.  They book passage to Alderaan aboard the Millennium Falcon, captained by Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and co-piloted by a Wookie named Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew).

Unfortunately, the commanding officer on the Death Star, Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) plans to make Princess Leia reveal the location of the secret rebel base, and destroys her home planet of Alderaan to coerce her cooperation.  
When the Millennium Falcon arrives in the Alderaan system from Tatooine, it finds not a beautiful planet, but the Death Star.

Now, Luke and his friends must rescue Leia, Ben must confront his old student, Vader, and they all must get the plans to the rebels, before the Empire and the Death Star carry the day…

For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the  Old Republic. Before the dark times... before the Empire .

When you stand back and gaze at Star Wars from a good distance, you can detect that the film tells a very old story: the hero's journey.  But it tells that tale in a new way, and in a new (final?) frontier: outer space.  

Rather, it is the explicit details of the narrative that are new to audiences, from the history of the Jedi Knights and The Force to the explanations of such things as snub-nosed fighters, T.I.E. fighters, tractor beams, hyper-drive, Wookies, land-speeders and droids.  The way to make all these people, concepts, and ideas immediately understandable, Lucas understands, is to mine much of film history for visual antecedents, ones that make the story graspable for audiences, even though they don't know the precise details of the Old Republic, the Galactic Empire, or the Clone Wars.

From the film’s opening crawl, this is the very technique Lucas regularly deploys.  In particular, the crawl that appears immediately after the film's title harks back to  Flash Gordon  (1936), and the title cards used in each serial opener. In Flash Gordon, such screens conveyed important information about previous episodes in the thirteen installment production.  This crawl is actually our first visual indication that  Star Wars  is a pastiche, or a work of art imitating and honoring the work of previous artists.   It also sets the jaunty, almost retro tone of the picture. By recruiting this technique from the  Flash Gordon  films,  Star Wars  announces, specifically, its intention to be pulpy, lighthearted, swashbuckling fantasy and fun.

This was not a small detail in the 1970s.  The disco decade was an era when such swashbuckling adventure films were not in vogue.  In terms of the sci-fi genre, Dystopian-styled films dominated the landscape (The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, and Damnation Alley, for example.).  Not coincidentally, the same decade was the age of growling, violent anti-heroes like Dirty Harry and Paul Kersey (of the  Death Wish  films).  

By commencing  Star War s with a 1930s-era, serial-like crawl, George Lucas effectively renounced contemporary cinema, and reached back to an older tradition, a “golden age” of more innocent fantasy fare. Not incidentally, the screenplay seems to share his point of view, describing the light saber of the old Republic as an "elegant" weapon for a more "civilized time."  In other words, the past inside the  Star Wars  universe, and the past of Hollywood history outside  Star Wars  were both more elegant and civilized than the present of the Galactic Empire/anti-hero cinema.

Our invitation to adventure in a more elegant and civilized time:  Flash Gordon  (1936).
Our invitation to innocence in a cynical time:  Star Wars  (1977).
After the opening crawl,  Star Wars  very much begins to deliberately ape elements and details from Akira Kurosawa’s film,  The Hidden Fortress.   That film also used “wipes” as visual transitions between scenes, but more importantly, involved two pseudo-comic individuals, Tahei and Mataschici, who escaped a pitched battle, wandered for a time in a wasteland, and were then captured and enslaved.  They then became involved with the rescue of a Princess and the exploits of a General.  

This familiar sequence of events is repeated with the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO in  Star Wars.   Two likable (and funny) robots escape from the rebel blockade runner battle, become lost in the Tatooine desert, and unwittingly become involved with the rescue of a princess and the exploits of a Jedi-Knight.  The point in both films is to highlight two unassuming, even “common” individuals who become caught up in huge, important events beyond their control, and even their understanding.  It's a ground's eye view of world-shaking incidents, of history unfolding.

In terms of Star Wars, the first twenty minutes of the film or so mostly revolve around the droids and their exploits, and this kind of “macro” focus is one way to introduce the  Star Wars  universe without inundating audiences with tech-talk and difficult-to-pronounce names or sci-fi concepts.  Matters of galactic import (like the Death Star), can wait, and Lucas introduces his core concepts one at a time without risk of sensory overkill or confusion.
Two common men get caught up in world-changing events, in  The Hidden Fortress  (1958).
Two lowly droids get caught up in galaxy-changing events, in  Star Wars  (1977). A trek through the wilderness, their future uncertain.
A trek through the desert, their future uncertain.
The first hour of the Lucas film is, on retrospect, my favorite portion of the film. After things settle down a bit, there's a quiet yet vital scene set in Ben Kenobi’s desert home. What  Star Wars  accomplishes here, again, is revolutionary, if in an unassuming kind of way.  Kenobi quietly and steadfastly introduces us to his faith.  He describes the Force as the thing that “gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”  
Again dismissing the tenets of the contemporary and cynical 1970s Hollywood,  Star Wars  thus reintroduces “spirituality” to a cinema that had asked, explicitly, “Is God Dead” in films such as 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, and also, to some degree, Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973).  Certainly  Lucas's film is not a strict re-assertion of Christianity, necessarily, but rather a non-denominational acknowledgment of man’s inherent spirituality and interconnection.  The Force, like belief and faith in Jesus Christ, is a promise of immortality in  the  Star Wars  universe.  We see this quality of belief depicted in Ben Kenobi’s heroic death – or disappearance – after his duel with Vader.

This famous Time cover set the tone for the late 1960s and early 1970s American cinema.
But Star Wars re-introduces spirituality in the form of "The Force..."
And the film even promises "eternal life" for those who believe in its precepts.
As  Star Wars  continues, the film spends more time in space, and indeed, in space combat.  Again, George Lucas chooses to make his “space opera” one that visually resonates in terms of film history.  When Luke and Han take to the guns of The Millennium Falcon to destroy several pursuing TIE fighters, Lucas explicitly references combat visuals from  Twelve O’Clock High  (1949), a film about American flying fortresses in aerial combat during World War II.  

Once more, viewers may not exactly recognize the specific reference, but they absolutely "get" the allusion to a previous  global conflict, and a previous form of warfare.  We may not understand how lasers work, or what powers TIE Fighters, but we do understand the settings and dynamics of aerial combat, even translated to space.

The underside gun of a flying fortress in  Twelve O'Clock High.

A view on the inside looking out (from the same film) as a gunner targets evading fighters.
From  Star Wars : Targeting evading fighters.
And again, an underside gun mount.
The battle to destroy the Death Star follows the same film making approach. Only this time, Lucas re-casts a critical set-piece from the 1964 British film  633 Squadron  as his point of origin and point of audience recognition.  In that film, several Allied Bombers make a run against a Nazi base lodged between two mountains (essentially in a trench...).  As the bombers make their attack run, they  attempt to avoid blistering anti-aircraft guns.  There is also an initial false start, and a false detonation at the target site.  Additionally, enemy fighters swoop in to challenge the bombers and pick them off as they focus on their quarry on the ground.   If you’re at all familiar with  Star Wars , you will recognize the setting, sequence, and outcome of the Death Star trench scene as being very similar indeed to  633 Squadron .

The point isn’t that Lucas stole anything.  The point is that when “you’ve taken your first step into a larger world,” to quote Obi Wan Kenobi, elements of that world need to be understandable immediately, so that other important concepts can be grasped.  In other words, if you’re focusing on something like how a tractor beam works, or what is hyper-drive is, you’re not paying attention to the details of Luke’s quest, and Lucas’s story.  
By updating old cinematic imagery, Lucas conveys his story -- and his message about spirituality -- in a way that we visually accept and understand, almost at once.

From  633 Squadron:  the Nazi's strike back at attacking Allied aircraft.
From  Star Wars:  The Empire Strikes back at attacking rebel spaceships.
On the horizon, enemy fighters swoop in for the kill (in  633 Squadron ).
TIE Fighters swoop in for the kill (in  Star Wars ).
In the trench, planes avoid blistering gunfire. ( 633 Squadron ).
In the trench, rebel X-fighters avoid blistering gunfire ( Star Wars ).
I’ve long argued that  Star Wars  may not be a perfect film, but that the film offers a perfect presentation of a galaxy “far, far, away,” and I think that’s the point of all the tributes and re-framing of scenes from  The Hidden Fortress  or  633 Squadron .  But the deeper point is the one I mentioned in connection with the Force and  Flash Gordon .  George Lucas’s epic space fantasy serves as an explicit indictment of the 1970s self-involved “personal cinema,” and harks back to a time of greater innocence and greater adventure in terms of movie narratives. 
I suspect this is the reason why, seriously, that George Lucas altered the dynamic of the Han Solo/Greedo sequence. In that scene as it was originally crafted, Han fires his blaster, and Greedo doesn’t shoot at all.  It’s an almost anti-hero, Dirty Harry-esque moment for the Solo character.  I believe that’s precisely the kind of aesthetic Lucas wanted to eschew and avoid, and so on retrospect, did just that by making Greedo shoot first.  Han’s act was thus transformed from one of preemptive murder to self-defense.  I’m not arguing that his selection was the right one, or that Lucas should have tampered with the scene, only that some of the changes Lucas has forged in terms of  Star Wars  tend to play into this very notion of  Star Wars  as pastiche, of a call-back to an earlier, more innocent generation of film productions.  

Even the idea to title his  Star Wars  films numerically and with melodramatic sub-title fits in with this tradition of the crawl concept of  Flash Gordon  which boasted titles such as “The Unseen Peril.”  That sounds a lot like  The Phantom Menace,  doesn’t it?

If Han Solo shoots first, is he Dirty Harry?
The two concepts I have discussed most frequently in this review are: 1.) how Lucas grounds the reality of  Star Wars  by creating a lived-in, recognizable universe and 2.) how Lucas attempts to hark back to a more innocent, swashbuckling, spiritual age of movies.  If you link those two concepts, you will arrive at my unified theory of  Star Wars , and at the very essence of the film itself.   Star Wars  presents a universe so authentically-rendered and well-thought out that you can truly believe in it. The careful forging of the world discourages cynicism or disbelief.  
The idea of “May the Force be With You,” not unlike the exclamation “Go with God,” is inherently about belief; about believing in yourself and your capacity to tap the spiritual center of existence itself.  Yet no one would possibly believe in Lucas's world or in that inspirational message if the special effects in  Star Wars  were unconvincing, if the aliens looked hokey, or if the space battles were confusing. 

I believe that by referencing these older films and older visuals, Lucas was making certain that we could relate to  Star Wars . It’s a unique and intriguing technique, and I submit it actually works very well.  The later films in the franchise depend on vast, special effects set-pieces with digital backdrops and drooling creatures, and yet the greatest emotional thrill I felt during the saga occurred here, in the original  Star Wars , as Luke and Leia swung boldly across a chasm together, and John Williams’ scored blared heroically underneath their leap. 

A boy, a girl and a universe.  The thrill and appeal of Star Wars are almost literally that simple. Despite making a high-tech film filled with laser blasts, spaceships, robots, and a complex internal history Lucas directs us through this complexity and gets right to the mythic, spiritual heart of his film.
As of today -- how many years after I first saw the film?? -- that pure-hearted (but intellectually-conceived) approach still works for me.  

20 Years/Top 10 JKM Posts: #9: Space:1999 Eagle 1 Spaceship; Mattel (1976)

[This post originally ran on July 11, 2012 and is the 9th most read article on the site at the 20 year anniversary point.]

This Mattel Eagle 1 Spaceship (1976) remains my all-time favorite toy, hands-down. 

In part, I favor this 1970's Mattel toy because it comes from my all-time favorite science fiction TV series,  Space: 1999  (1975 – 1977). But in part it is also because the toy is downright colossal: over 2.5 feet long, as the box trumpets.  

Beyond these values, the Mattel Eagle also comes apart into a smaller ship, a combination of the command and engine modules.  This aspect of the toy seems very realistic to the series (or “show accurate,” to use collecting lingo) and the modular design of the Eagle (from SPFX maestro Brian Johnson).   The separated command module resembles some of the incarnations we saw of the Eagles in episodes such as “Missing Link” and “Dragon’s Domain.”

The box for this toy noted: “It’s a space vehicle. It’s a headquarters and living quarters on Moon Base Alpha! With three 3” characters.”  

In the latter case, that means that this Mattel toy came complete with three intrepid Alphans: Commander Koenig (Martin Landau), Dr. Helena Russell (Barbara Bain) and Professor Victor Bergman (Barry Morse).  

As a kid, I remember being deeply disappointed that there was no Alan Carter action figure, especially since he was the character most commonly seen piloting the craft on the series.  Anyway, the figures featured the show’s trademark orange space suits, as well as removable helmets and back/chest packs.

Again this just perfect for pretend play: the Alphans could walk in space, or take their helmets off for planetary action.  Just don’t tell the  Prometheus  nitpickers I took off their helmets in dangerous situations, okay? 

On the nose section of the Eagle, the “module hatch” would open and hold two action figures.  Inside the “carrier” section was the passenger section, replete with computer decals, “weapons rack” and “space crane.”  The weapons rack held four stun guns and one laser rifle. “Both side panels” of the carrier would slide open, allowing you access to the interior sections.

I was given this really awesome toy shortly before my sixth birthday, in 1976, by my Mom and Dad.  I remember that I was sort of depressed because my older sister didn’t want to play with me on a Saturday and I had nothing to do.  My Mom noticed I was down in the dumps.  So she led me into my parents’ bedroom and told me to look underneath the bed.  I did, and there was Eagle 1, ready for action!  The surprise gift made my day…and I’ve never forgotten it, or my Mother’s kindness.  She was always doing things like that for me (and still does, for my son Joel, to this day.)

Then, as my real birthday approached, my Mom and Dad took me aside and told me that my Uncle Glenn, who recently passed away, had also bought me an Eagle One toy.  They asked me if I wanted a second one, or something different.

Well, of course I wanted a second one.  The only thing better than having Eagle One was having an Eagle fleet! 

That Christmas season, both Mattel Eagles went to forest planets (my backyard), ice planets (on snow days) and other dangerous environments.  I recruited the giant squid from G.I. Joe’s Sea Wolf submarine to serve as the tentacle monster from “Dragon’s Domain.” 

Even after  Space: 1999  disappeared from the pop culture horizon and  Star Wars  (1977) took its place, I kept and cherished and played with my Eagles.

For years, I’ve kept and cared for these ships.  The one you see pictured is in relatively good condition.  Inside the box is the one I really played with, and which is…battle damaged, let’s just say.  I do worry about my “good” Eagle simply because it is getting really old.  In less than four years, it will be a forty-year old toy, which I find virtually impossible to believe.  

Anyway, if you look closely, you can detect yellow glue lines on the toy, apparently from manufacture, at all the seams.  These lines are becoming more pronounced over time.   The hull is also yellowing in spots (the dorsal lattice, particularly…).

That’s okay, though. I’m keeping this toy in my home office until I die. And then I’m leaving instructions to my son that it should be buried with me (along with the box).  

Unless, of course, he wants it, in which case I’ll be happy to pass it on. 

30 Years Ago: John Carpenter's Village of the Damned (1995)

"God said let us make man in our own image after our likeness. But image does not mean outer image, or every statue or photograph would be man. It means the inner image, the spirit, the soul...but what of those in our midst who do not have individual souls or spirits?...They have the look of man, but not the nature of mankind."
- Reverend George (Mark Hamill) discusses "the children" of Midwich in John Carpenter's Village of the Damned.

John Carpenter’s  Village of the Damned  is a remake of the beloved 1960 black-and-white classic directed by Wolf Rilla (itself an adaptation of John Wyndham’s book:  The Midwich Cuckoos ). 
All three productions focus on children of extra-terrestrial origin, and the world's response to these changelings.
The J.C. film dramatizes the story of a sleepy town in scenic, quiet Southern California. On the day of the annual town picnic, something unseen and malicious moves quietly over the placid, wide-open skies of Midwich. The presence of this invisible interloper is just barely perceived by some locals, including Dr. Alan Chafee (Christopher Reeve). But -- by and large -- it remains undetected...moving on a secret agenda.
Then, at 10:00 am, the object strikes. Everyone within the town boundaries of Midwich falls inexplicably unconscious. When the citizenry spontaneously awakens at 4:00 pm, all the women of child-rearing age are…pregnant. Even the town virgin. Even the faithfully married woman whose husband (Peter Jason) has been away in Japan for several months.

Before long, a secretive employee of the United States Government, Dr. Verner (Kirstie Alley) arrives in Midwich and encourages the pregnant women to carry their babies to term with the promise of Federal funding.

The women – perhaps affected by alien brainwashing – keep the babies. We experience one of these possibly alien brainwashing dreams too: a strange vision of euphoric emotions and roiling storm clouds. The women are garbed in simple garments and they caress their abdomens with a sense of exaltation.

In nine months, the mystery children of Midwich are born, and though they initially appear human, the platinum-haired children possess a distinctive “hive” or group intelligence. They also lack all human emotions. 
Over the ensuing six or seven years, the children separate themselves from the human citizenry of Midwich (even their parents) and protect themselves from human interference with terrifying psycho-kinetic abilities. In short, these alien children can “persuade” the weak human mind to commit terrible acts of violence; acts including suicide. The townspeople come to hate the children, just as the children come to regard humans as inferior.

Unfortunately, the children grow more powerful over time, led by Chafee’s icy daughter, Mara (Lindsey Haun). Sensing a losing battle, Dr. Verner finally reveals the childrens’ true alien nature to Chafee. Now their school teacher, Chafee attempts to destroy the emotionless alien progeny before their influence can spread beyond Midwich.

Only one of the children, named David (Thomas Dekker), seems to possess a human side. Perhaps this is so because his female “twin” or partner died in childbirth years earlier. That intense sense of loss has granted David a first-hand understanding of loneliness, and the human quality of “empathy.”

Hive Mind: One Size Fits All in This Village
There are many aspects of this particular Carpenter film that just don’t seem to work as well as they should; and these problems all stem from one particular creative decision: the apparent necessity of transplanting the events of the drama from an isolated, homogeneous English village in the 1960s to modern, diverse America in the 1990s. 
In other words, many of the problems exist at a script level; or at the level of intention.

For instance, in a small, isolated English community of decades past, it is possible to believe that all the villagers attend the same church, and are of the same religious persuasion. Somehow, we can accept the uniform nature of the indigenous population in that foreign, slightly timeless setting.

In  John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned , however, there is just one church and one priest (played by Mark Hamill) in Midwich, and all the new mothers without exception even attend the same “mass Baptism” service. This may sound like a small matter, but it means -- essentially -- that there are no Jews, no Muslims, and no Atheists in Midwich. Just Christians. And Christians all of the same denomination, apparently.

Again, that just doesn’t quite ring true. I live in small town North Carolina, and all around me there are people of various ethnicities, religions, and political beliefs. On a purely human level, would every mother and father involved agree to a mass baptism instead of an individual one?

I call this the “one-size fits all” dilemma, and it extends even beyond the film's central narrative to the very appearance of the children themselves. In the original film, the children wore ascetic-looking clothing that was contextually accurate to a life in the 1960s (and England). The clothing read to our eyes as “gray” or “black” because, simply, the film was shot in black-and-white. Again, there's a timeless quality to it.

In  John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned,  the Midwich children – all from different families – universally wear similar gray clothes, but a color world surrounds them. I understand that the filmmakers were groping for an “equivalent” look to that which was utilized in the 1960s original, but it’s a “one size fits all” solution that doesn’t make sense on more than a surface level.

Are viewers to assume these children – at age 7 – have no older (human) half-brothers and sisters in their families, and therefore no hand-me-downs to wear? 
That the children shop at the nearest Gap, but that their parents only purchase slate-gray outfits for them?
Even if the parents were forced to somehow purchase only gray clothes, it seems likely that someone might comment on this oddity. You could argue that there is a distinct leitmotif in the film concerning "eyes." It is the eyes which are the source of the alien power; and Mara and Chafee discuss eyes being "windows of the soul." Perhaps the gray clothes result from the fact that the children are color blind. That's a shot in the dark, however. The film does not establish that idea even indirectly. You get the feeling that this was a visual decision, to garb all the children in grays (in a color world), and it doesn't quite make logical sense.
That kind of unquestioned, “one size fits all” thinking is all over  Village of the Damned . Take for instance, the impressive night-time shot of the caravan heading to the hospital. Car headlights stretch over the horizon as the delivery date finally arrives. Again, a beautiful composition and a great visual, but we are made to understand that the pregnant women deliver at exactly the same time on the same night?

I understand the women have been implanted by aliens, but the aliens are gestating inside the bodies of human women; and those human bodies are individual. Each one is unique. I assume that during their pregnancies, the mothers-to-be had different diets and different exercise regimens, for example. 

Seems to me those factors would also determine how fast or how strongly the baby develops in each woman. Just like all the children wearing gray, or all the denizens of Midwich attending the same Church, this mass exodus to the hospital reeks of plot contrivance. On a simpler level, is it believable that every woman would still be living in the same town at delivery time, anyway? (Again, that could be a stipulation for the Federal funding, but that’s not established in the text of the film.)

And, as I belabored in my book,  The Films of John Carpenter , the plot of  Village of the Damned  clearly encompasses several years. By my reckoning at least seven or eight years pass, considering the age of the children by the film’s climax. And yet there is no on-screen indication that time has passed for any characters other than the children.  The Washington Post  review picked up on this and noted that Carpenter shows "no grasp of character development, plot line or time passage," (Richard Harrington,  The Washington Post , April 28, 1995).
Just think for a moment how greatly technology has changed in the last few years ors. Think of how different your street looks today than it did eight years ago. Look in a mirror and judge yourself for a second: even the healthiest amongst us “ages” in eight years in a variety of ways and I’ll testify to this: having a baby ages you faster than any force in the world.
But seriously, fashions change, hair-cuts change, people move from one home to another, and people gain and lose weight over the years. Yet,  Village of the Damned  skips over seven or eight years in the blink of an eye, and adult characters don’t change at all. Not what they wear; not how they style their hair; nothing!

For once in a Carpenter film, the action scenes aren’t particularly well-handled either. They come across as minor and not particularly scary. One character is injured when she is forced to squeeze painful medical drops into her eyes. Oh no, not painful eyedrops!

That incident may have read as dramatic on the page, but on the screen it just seems, well…silly.

Some of the pacing seems off too. Carpenter does well with the film’s climax: with Chafee blocking his thoughts (with images of a brick wall) from the children; even as a bomb ticks down to destruction. But the scene leading up to that finale -- a sustained assault on the children by local police and a helicopter -- seems entirely unnecessary. For one thing, we know the government is going to bomb the dickens out of Midwich anyway (because that’s what they did with the other “colonies"), so why bother to send police forces in on the ground where they’ll just be cannon fodder? 
For another thing, how do the children make a helicopter pilot (at night, no less) crash his chopper? Another moment, involving Midwich-ers of the 1990s spontaneously taking up torches (!) on Main Street also seems very off. 
Torches? Really? In 1995 America?

Village of the Damned  fails because of the relentless accumulation of little things like these aforementioned points. By itself, not one of these issues is enough to scuttle the film.But taken in combination, the film seems slap-dash; careless. 
Writing in  Magill's Cinema Annual of 1996 , Kirby Tepper noted that while  Village of the Damned  was well-intentioned, something was missing. He called the film "a bit shallow," and noted that the "lack of depth in the film can be seen in its campy dialogue and its discrepancies." Although I disagree, to an extent on the comment about dialogue, I agree with the rest of that criticism. Something just feels...off.
Why Can’t We Just Live Together? Race Relations in America and in Midwich

On my first viewing, the most troublesome aspect of  John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned  was its apparent (and bland) passing-over of an important hot-button issue during the Age of Clinton: reproductive rights.

After all,  Village of the Damned  concerns women forcibly impregnated during an alien rape, who all decide to carry their pregnancies to term.

I just felt that the film left the whole issue of reproductive rights entirely unexcavated. When does society consider it right to “terminate” a pregnancy? Is life sacred, no matter what the origin? As I wrote in  The Films of John Carpenter , I felt that the movie missed so many possibilities and opportunities by avoiding the issue of abortion all together.

Today, upon reading this complaint, I realize that I was reviewing the film I had expected and hoped for, rather than the film that was made. And that's not fair.  John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned  does indeed concern a hot-button issue of the 1990s, but it isn’t reproductive rights. Rather, it is race relations. This is entirely appropriate given some of the startling events of the decade.
On March 3, 1991, for instance, a twenty-five year old black man, Rodney King, was stopped by officers of the LAPD for speeding while attempting to dodge a traffic ticket. The policemen beat Mr. King so savagely that one eye socket was shattered, one leg was broken, a cheekbone was fractured, and some of his fillings were knocked loose from his teeth.

Soon after the event, CNN re-played the amateur videotaping of that beating around the clock. When a poll was conducted about the incident, some 92% of Los Angeles residents believed that the very men sworn to protect and serve the community had utilized excessive force on this occasion. Frankly, it was hard to see it otherwise: King was outnumbered by the police, and didn’t seem to be putting up much by way of resistance. And certainly not after the beating began. Yet on April 29, 1992, the four police officers most deeply-involved in the beating of Rodney King were acquitted of all wrongdoing by a jury of peers. As a result, Los Angeles…exploded.
A riot ensued on April 29, 1992 – the worst in American history -- in which 3800 buildings were vandalized, thousands of buildings were burned, and property damage spiraled to a cost of one billion dollars. Fifty-three people were killed. On TV, we saw looters and worse. We saw a trucker, Reginald Denny, pulled from his cab and attacked on live television. Sixty percent of the buildings destroyed in the Los Angeles riots belonged to Korean-Americans.

So it wasn’t just the King verdict that had sparked this conflagration. Something else had been unleashed. Hatred begat hatred, begat hatred, again and again, across the diverse population of Los Angeles. A shaken Rodney King timidly went before a camera crew in an attempt to curb the violence.

He famously asked: "Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?...It’s just not right. It’s not right."

That question -- "can we get along?" -- is the very question that appears to underline  Village of the Damned,  produced just two years after the L.A. riots .   Late in the film, a character involved in the racially-charged battle between the alien children and defensive mankind asks - in a clear echo of King's appeal - “Why can’t we just live together?”
Examine the scenario closely, and you can detect how this remake involves two races in one society jockeying for superiority .and survival. Even young David feels intense race-based pressure to conform to his kind, to side with, essentially, his “skin color.” Meanwhile, the majority race (the humans) fear that which is new, different and “alien” among them. They fear a loss of humanity’s role as the master of the planet. The humans want to protect what which is theirs, and which has always been theirs: the “human” way of life. They want things to be as they have been traditionally (and hence, theirs is the conservative, safeguard argument). By contrast, the minority (the alien children) views the same battle not in terms of “hate” but rather as a “biological imperative,” a stand for their own culture; which is in danger of being  assimilated or destroyed by the larger, more powerful culture
In the end, standing between these two entrenched racial viewpoints is -- literally -- a brick wall that seemingly cannot be breached. Chafee talks about competition vs. cooperation, and the superiority of human emotions, but even he is not impartial in his judgment. His prejudices are already set in stone. Mara – the leader of the children – calls him “a prisoner of his values.” She is thus arguing for a progressive cause: an acceptance of a new viewpoint outside that which is traditional and known. 
The children (violently) stand up for their way of life (“there are going to be changes...”) while the adults of Midwich attempt to kill or bully them. Religion turns them into a convenient scapegoat, and the Reverend of Midwich compares them to devils, or demons. George Buck Flower, appearing in a cameo, attempts to frighten and intimidate the children, telling them directly, “you ain’t right!” The children fight back with lethal, ugly, force.

Viewed in terms of race relations, one can start to see how some of  Village of the Damned's  apparent weaknesses are mitigated, at least a little. It even seems necessary that the adults are treated in as monolithic a fashion as the children (as merely humans, rather than as Catholics, atheists, Jews, liberals or conservatives) because every little difference begins to take away from the central metaphor. It is much more important to see the battle as being between humans on one side and the children on the other.

Even the distinguishing features of the aliens – those trademark gray clothes and bad platinum wigs – visually characterize the race “differences” we are meant to note. 
And the lethargic, overlong police attack on the children? In some way that too reflects the specifics of a race war: the law enforcement arm of the Majority has come to wipe out the minority. It’s Rodney King all over again, only here Rodney King is telekinetic, mad and quite capable of defending himself. And when the children riot, it is bloody...

And consider this too…perhaps the townspeople of Midwich are picking up those objectionable torches, willy-nilly, because they’re going to a “high-tech” genre lynching (President Bush Sr.'s description of another racially-tinged event of the 1990s: the 1991 confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas). The image of the torch is resonant in American history, and consistent with the racial motif. The torch explicitly reminds one of a KKK rally, or some such thing: of a mad mob out to destroy the reviled “other,” the “outsider” living in “our town.”
Although many townspeople and the Children die in the film,  Village of the Damned  is not without hope on the subject of race relations. David shows the capacity for love and other “human emotions” and is thus a bridge between man and alien...the hope for the future. Interestingly, he character of David was not featured in the original film, and therefore one must conclude that he was added here -- in a turbulent time -- so as to show that a peace was possible between the races; that race different need not necessarily end in riot, death or assimilation.

Maybe all the awkward, weird elements of  Village of the Damned  actually further the film’s leitmotif of a looming race war; of race intolerance and hatred in America. 

We Have Become Accustomed to the Power of Science
Nearly all of John Carpenter’s films feature some strong anti-authoritarian message.  Prince of Darkness  and  Vampires  take aim at the Catholic Church.  Escape from L.A.  and  They   Live  go after the Republican Party, and even  Halloween  exposes “holes” in our apparently safe infrastructure (law enforcement, medicine, parents, psychology…). 

Village of the Damned  is no different, but here the target of Carpenter’s maverick streak seems to be irresponsible, grasping science.

It is irresponsible science that allows the alien children to grow inside human women, out of “curiosity.” It is irresponsible science (represented by Alley's Verner) that keeps the secret of the aliens for so long, from the affected populace. It is alien science, of course, responsible for the strangest experimentation of all: the implantation of alien embryos into human wombs.

This anti-science message was part and parcel of the 1990s too.  The X-Files  (1993-2002) concerned, rather explicitly, alien experiments involving human gestation (in episodes such as "The Beginning" and in the first feature film,  Fight The Future ). Episodes such as "Soft Light" revealed the danger of forward-pushing science carried too far too fast. 
This whole philosophy of "tampering in God's domain" again came into vogue because of rapid technological advances in the 1990s. This was the era that saw Big Blue beat a chess master, cloning become a reality, and the development of the human genome project.
 But what was the moral authority behind such science? If you reject the race war analysis of  Village of the Damned,  you might consider in its stead, the film as an anti-science screed, one concerning the danger of genetic experiments carried to – literally – Aryan ends (blond haired, physically-perfect white children are the result). These Aryans wear uniforms (the gray outfits) that visually recall the uniformity of Hitler Youth. The children are also frighteningly dispassionate in the pursuit of their goals.

Sometimes Mysteries Don’t Get Solved

Village of the Damned  is not a great film. However, like all works of art, it reflects the issues of its day (the mid 1990s), whether that issue is the blazing pace of scientific advancement or turbulent race relations. For me, the film has never quite worked as more than the sum of its parts; but studying it in terms of the race aspect has proven illuminating. 
There is another facet of  Village of the Damned  I more thoroughly appreciate now than I did on original viewing: the visual component. 
In particular, the first half of  Village of the Damned  is very strong. The movie opens as an alien shadow goes by overhead, in a series of menacing aerial shots. On the soundtrack, we hear an inhuman whispering…like a storm is slowly building; like something is watching. Carpenter handles this section of the film deftly, generating a strong sense of paranoia and also voyeurism. The aliens are among us – chattering – but we don’t see them. 
In her review of the film, critic Janet Maslin praised Carpenter's staging of this opening, noting that  Village of the Damned  "has one of the eeriest opening sequences in horror history." (The New York Times, April 28, 1995).

Carpenter’s macabre sense of humor is also entirely intact here. One of my favorite moments involves the Midwich fellow cooking hot dogs at the Town Picnic. Last year he burned the hot dogs, goes the gossip. This year ,however, he falls asleep on the grill during the time of the alien “black out” – and burns himself to a crisp. When the picnic-goers awake, Carpenter cuts to a shot of the grill and we see a smoking, flame-broiled human form splayed out there. This is wicked fun, pure and simple, and the kind of nightmarish vision we expect in a carefully-crafted Carpenter film.

Many Carpenter films look better across the passage of years, as the director’s neo-classic virtues stand out more and more from today's interchangeable, TV-style movies. Ultimately, I submit that is also the case for  Village of the Damned.  Carpenter’s skill behind the camera makes a difference, and elevates the film. 
In the final analysis,  Village of the Damned  may not be a good film. But thanks to Carpenter’s visual aplomb, it at least looks like a good film.
On some days that’s enough...

50 Years Ago: Death Race 2000 (1975)

Fifty years after it was produced, Paul Bartel and Roger Corman's  Death Race 2000  (1975) remains an example of exhilarating, go-for-broke, low-budget science fiction film making. 

Of course, the "futuristic" film is undeniably brutal and bloody too, so much so that Roger Ebert awarded the film "zero stars" and contemplated leaving a screening early upon the film's initial release.
Yet the decades have been kind to  Death Race 2000 .  
What seemed viscerally excessive in the Gerald Ford Era now seems merely par-for-the-course in the post-War-on-Terror, post-Torture Porn Age, MAGA Age.

And with the on-screen violence neutered to some degree by contemporary expectations and standards, something truly wondrous and unexpected has occurred in this case: the film's satirical angle has more fully-flowered than ever before.

Like the best examples of the genre, this is a sci-fi movie that comments on the "American way of life" --" no holds barred," to quote the film -- in an intelligent manner.  

But it's not some heavy-handed political diatribe either.  

On the contrary,  Death Race 2000  is fuel-injected with laughs. The film boasts an unmatched sense of wicked black humor.  Today, you're far more likely to laugh than turn away in disgust from the film's action. In particular, Sylvester Stallone is a hoot as the movie's touchy villain, a guy who answers every perceived slight with a volley of machine gun fire or a good impaling.

Perhaps the great fun of returning to 1970s productions like  Logan's Run  (1976) and  Death Race 2000  today is sizing up their predictions about the unknown, unwritten future.  Logan's Run  predicted a dominant youth culture obsessed with beauty and fitness, for example.  Death Race 2000  imagines a dystopic future, one where a parochial American electorate is mesmerized and distracted by violent bread-and-circuses entertainment while a rich political class rules the land and pulls the strings.  

When this Orwellian Order is being overturned in the 1975 Bartel film, one of the rebels meaningfully shouts "The Age of Obedience is over!"   

That exclamation may not seem entirely appropriate to the year 2000; but it sure as hell seems appropriate in the year 2025, no?  

It's a bit unsettling, actually, how accurately (and viciously...)   Death Race 2000  predicts many of the defining trends of the 21st century. For instance,   Death Race 2000  looks meaningfully at the ways that manipulative politicians encourage xenophobia and jingoism to distract from important domestic matters.  

Simultaneously, the movie also shows the ascent of reality television in the American pop-culture firmament and imagines what impact the equivalent of modern "gladiatorial" games could have in a technological age 

On that front, just consider this fact: both  Survivor  and  Big Brother  first aired in the U.S. in the year 2000, the very year of this film's action.   

On a whole, would you judge that two full decades of reality TV has made us a more attentive, literate people? Or is the opposite true?  Has this kind of entertainment coarsened the culture?

Most trenchantly, however,  Death Race 2000  fully understands how dangerous it can be when the walls between politics, religion,  journalism, and pop entertainment crumble and these formerly-trusted pillars combine to form a giant multi-headed "media" Hydra.  
  "Is winning all you care about?"


Death Race 2000  commences as the "20th annual trans-continental road race" is about to begin in New York. In this government-promoted race, a "new American champion will be crowned," and there are several contestants in competition.

They are: Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), Machine Gun Joe Veturbo (Sylvester Stallone), Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins) and "Mr. President's" favored contestant: the U.S.-govt sponsored hero and two-time winner named "Frankenstein" (David Carradine).  He wears an all-black leather body suit, and a mask that ostensibly hides his racing "scars."

The racers' destination is New Los Angeles and on the way to the finish line, each driver is expected to rack up points by striking and killing innocent pedestrians.  In fact, their fearsome cars have been fiendishly designed for just such a purpose; decorated with blades and other impaling tools such as knives, horns and dragon's teeth. These are mean, lean, killing machines.

In the race's violent rules, women pedestrians are worth ten points and teenagers are worth forty points.  Hit a child under twelve and seventy points are earned  

The greatest reward? One hundred points per each senior citizen struck and murdered.  

As the race starts, Frankenstein is joined by a new navigator, beautiful Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth), secretly a rebel plotting with Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin) to kill the racers, abduct Frankenstein and force Mr. President -- who has been ensconced in high office since "The World Crash of 1979" -- to abolish the bloody race once and for all. This mission is called Operation "Anti-Race."

But on the open road, Frankenstein and Annie grow close, even as the rebellion and Frankenstein's fellow drivers attempt to kill them ...


"[Winning] in the name of hate" 


Death Race 2000  announces its intention to satirize almost every important aspect of American culture in its opening frames.

As the movie begins and the trans-continental race commences, we hear the familiar notes of the National Anthem as played by a high-school marching band.  So the Star-Spangled Banner is still the official theme song of the United Provinces in America in the year 2000, but there has been an important upgrade to Old Glory herself.  

In short order, we see that the blue background and white stars of our beautiful flag have been replaced by a gloved fist pointing heavenwards.  So now its fists and stripes, not stars and stripes.  

Arriving in theaters as it did in the last year of the Vietnam War, during an ongoing Energy Crisis, with inflation on the rise, and a President having resigned in disgrace,  Death Race 2000  also suggests a future America in which the old, dependable, and traditional pillars of the country have failed. They have abdicated their obligations and are running on empty, on fumes.

If anything, we are simply much further down this road in 2025 then we were in the disco decade, and the speculations today seem more accurate.

To start with, the journalists featured in the film are not independent arbiters of fact, rather they are access-hungry promoters towing the official party line.  

One shallow journalist, the wonderfully-named "Grace Pander," lives up to her moniker. To pander means "to cater to the lower tastes and desires of others or exploit their weaknesses," and that's exactly what she does. She symbolizes the total, seamless blending of news and entertainment -- which some  observers call "info-tainment" -- and again, the trend has gotten a lot worse since 1975.  She caters to the blood lust of an angry, resentful populace.

Pander treats the film's racers as celebrities and speaks in worshipful tones of "Mr. President," the dear leader.  For her own personal fame, Pander has forsaken her responsibility as a journalist to ferret out facts and truth. Instead, she merely encourages the populace to adore the racers, and support the race. She also plugs and parrots the anti-intellectual line of the government officials.  

When Frankenstein goes after physicians and nurses with his dragon car, for example, Pander reports it as a populist victory and writes off the murder as being, well...deserved. 

"Well, those doctors - dear friends of mine - have been pretty smug all these years setting up the old folks. Frankenstein must have decided it was their turn."

Yep, those darn elitist, college-educated physicians!  Who the hell do they think they are?  They got what was coming to them...the bastards.

Politicians don't get off any easier than journalists in  Death Race 2000 .  "Mr. President" governs the nation from his "summer palace" in Mar a Lago, I mean, Peking, China (another particularly timely joke about the United States become more and more owned by Chinese interests), and our Great Leader beats a familiar jingoistic drum in order explain to the people why the economy is so bad.  

In particular, he uses a long-lived and cherished American scape goat: the French. Specifically, Mr. President claims that France and her "stinking European allies" collapsed America's economy on purpose.

This is funny for a couple of reasons.  

First, some Americans always want to blame the French for our woes...conveniently forgetting that the French were our most dedicated and steadfast ally at the time of the Revolutionary War.    

But, again, look to the events of the last few years.  Remember when France wouldn't support the Iraq War in 2003-2004 and the mainstream media and the administration in power joined forces to trash everything French?  French fries became freedom fries. Bill O'Reilly actually launched a boycott of French wine on his Fox show, if I remember correctly.  Death Race 2000  hints at this still simmering American animosity or resentment for Europeans, particularly the French, and even ends with the President launching a war against that country after falsely claiming the French air force (humorously just one, measly plane...) ambushed Frankenstein.  

"Well America, there you have it," announces a reporter, "Frankenstein has just been attacked by the French Air Force and he's whipped their derrieres!"  

Secondly, in terms of 2025, consider the global economy and how interconnected it has become. The idea of another country subverting America's prosperity  doesn't seem as ridiculous today in an age of 145% tariffs. A stupid economic choice in another country, or even here at home, can damage us. So  Death Race 2000  gets that contemporary idea right too.

There's also no separation of Church and State in this America of the Year 2000. The Bi-Partisan Ruling Party of America boasts an official Deacon to bestow the blessing of the Lord (and the President) upon the racers, though he comes to a bad end.  

Again, this is an abdication of moral responsibility (probably harking back to Watergate in terms of historical context). So far as I understand them, religious men and women in power must obey one "higher authority," and shouldn't be shilling for the guy who happens to be in the Oval Office at any given moment.   

Interestingly,  Death Race 2000  even sees fit to include two Nazi characters: Matilda and her navigator, "Herman the German."  They drive around in a vehicle decorated with swastikas.  But nobody in the movie's culture -- not the reporters nor the audience -- seems to mind this "affectation."   
Again, look at the state of America today. In the 2020s, being a Nazi has been mainstreamed to an alarming degree. In the world of  Death Race 2000 , Matilda the Hun -- actually, truly a Nazi -- is just another "theme" driver, and no one is bothered by that. In fact, she's got lots of fans. She's just "an entertainer" and we're not supposed to judge her, right?  

But the most searing criticism embedded in  Death Race 2000  is certainly lodged against those people who would be manipulated by their fears of foreigners, limited by their narrow outlook on the world, and easily distracted by televised bread-and-circuses.  

In other words: reality-TV American culture.  

It's much easier to root for a hero in a televised sporting event then -- you know -- solve a problem.  It's much easier to get caught up in minutiae of a hobby, such as -- for instance, the new rules of the race -- than in the details of national economic policy. Sports fans are "enthusiasts," people who try to understand policy are called "wonks." 

The result, of course, is that the very men who "hold the power of life and death" operate in secrecy and with complete autonomy, according to their agendas, while the masses watch the race and are clueless about the government.  The rebellion against the Powers that Be can easily be dismissed as "the lunatic fringe" because the majority enjoys the bread and circuses.  

The movie also says something about the way our nation manufactures heroes for public consumption. Here, Frankenstein was raised in a government center and trained to be a racer. He is only one in a succession of many Frankensteins, though that fact has been kept secret from the people.  In  Death Race 2000 , fans so admire and revere the "public" Frankenstein -- essentially a hit-and-run driver -- that they willingly throw themselves in front of his car so he can score points.  

"You want to make love to me because I drive the Monster and wear this costume?" he asks an adoring fan. 
Yes. She loves the trappings of his fame. She worships it.

So  Death Race 2000  really gets in its satirical licks -- licks that resonate even more fully today than they did in 1975 -- all while providing some glimmer of hope. In the film, the rebellion is victorious and Mr. President's Orwellian Order is taken down...violently.  The death race is abolished.

The message to that defeated and murdered President is, perhaps, if you live by the sword (or the rules of the Death Race), you'll also die by the sword.  
Once you numb the people so thoroughly to the death of others on a routine, televised basis, what emotion would you expect your death to engender?  If you take empathy as weak, you can't expect to benefit from empathy when you're the one suffering, bruh...

How many points is striking down a global leader worth?  Or, in the language of the film, "Bye-bye Baby! Hello 70 points!" 


"The drivers are ready, the world is watching. Once more, I give you what you want ."

Readers sometimes ask me how I can support extremely violent films like  The Last House on the Left (1972)  Straw Dogs  (1971) or  Death Race 2000 , and my answer is always the same: I support violent films if they use their on-screen violence to make a point. To comment on our culture, or to present some kind of worthwhile moral statement.

Death Race 2000  is an exploitation film and it is incredibly violent.  Heads get crushed under tires.  Innocent pedestrians get struck and sliced with alarming regularity.  Yet, the film is a cautionary tale.  It declared  in 1975 that this is where America was headed; into a world of bread and circuses, into a world where celebrities are God, into a world where citizens have "tuned out" from politics and don't know what is being done in their names.

So the violence in the film certainly has a moral underpinning.  

What surprised me watching  Death Race 2000  for the first time in years was not only how accurate many of the film's speculations turned out to be fifty years later; but also how genuinely erotic the film is. There are quite a few scenes of explicit sexuality, and they add a lot to the film and particularly the relationship of Frankenstein and Annie. 

That's something that has changed a lot since 1975 too.  

Today, our movies are all about the violence, but rarely about the sex.  Sex has been deemed unacceptable as a serious subject in the culture, and swept out of movies by and large.  

So that's another reason I love this film. It's about pleasures we don't get to enjoy in the movies that much anymore.
Like watching real cars -- instead of the CGI equivalent -- race and jockey for superior position.  

So for me, Death Race 2000 -- with all its satiric and queasily accurate speculations -- will "forever howl down that freeway in the sky, knocking over... the angels." 

Happy Alien Day (4/26) - 5 Reasons Why Alien (1979) Endures

Here are my five reasons why the original  Alien  endures nearly five decades after its release.

1. Revolutionary production and art design, translated into revolutionary sets, costumes and miniatures.

Alien  truly pushed the science-fiction “space” film forward into a new realm of imagination.  Director Ridley Scott’s movie eschewed the stream-lined modernism and “neat,” minimalist future-look of such films as Kubrick’s  2001: A Space Odyssey  (1968) and  Journey to the Far Side of the Sun  (1969) as well as TV programs like  UFO  (1970) or  Space: 1999  (1975 – 1977). 

The film offered instead a world that was grungy, messy and recognizable…both lived-in and dirty.  It’s true that  Star Wars  (1977) represents a crucial step in this direction, having created a universe that – in terms of visuals – suggests a rich and storied past.  But  Alien  went whole hog into a world where coffee mugs rested on computer consoles, where pornographic pin-ups were hung up beside work stations, and where characters wore sneakers and ball caps when not asleep in cryo-tubes (or “freezers” in the vernacular of the film). 

This visual aesthetic has famously been termed “space truckers,” and it’s indeed a crucial element of  Alien’s  mystique and appeal.  In director Ridley Scott’s capable hands, outer space was not some glorious final frontier.  Rather, it was just your monotonous, unglamorous day-job.  In this future, the average blue collar space traveler still worked for the Man (Weyland-Yutani), and was still trying to get his fair share of corporate wealth and make a living wage. And he still made it through the day on coffee, cussing and swearing when things break down.

Alien,  which features a great and very believable monster, would not have succeeded if the elements of the film that involved “futuristic” mankind – his ships, his clothes, his environs – did not reflect a reality the audience could understand and readily identify with.  The recognizable world of the main characters, in fact, makes the alien world all the more disturbing and frightening.

2. The alien itself.

Perhaps this aspect of the film is the one that is actually most difficult to reckon with today because we’ve seen the  Alien  xenomorph in so many settings and films since the first film came along.  We’ve had three direct sequels, plus two  AVP  movies, plus toys and comics involving the alien.

The notion of a monster attacking a spaceship crew was not new, of course when  Alien , written by the great Dan O’Bannon, was produced.  By that point -- as history-minded film reviewers are certain to remind us -- we’d seen  It! The Terror from Beyond Space  (1958), Bava’s  Planet of the Vampires  (1965) plus episodes of  The Outer Limits  (“The Invisible Enemy”) and  Space: 1999  (“Dragon’s Domain”) that explored the trope, in many cases quite brilliantly.

But  Alien  represented a new horizon for “monsters” because of the bio-organic designs of Swiss sculptor and painter H.R. Giger.  This artist’s style had never been captured in mainstream film before, and his work expressed a total (and perverse) blend of human flesh and hard-edged machinery.  In short, the monster in  Alien  looked like nothing audiences had ever before reckoned with, a fusion of distinctly unlike elements.

There’s more to it than that too.  

Today we take this for granted, but  Alien  proved so horrifying a film because the monster’s shape and appearance were different every time we encountered it.  We now know the alien life cycle by rote: egg, face-hugger, chest-burster, and adult.  But when audiences first reckoned with Scott’s movie in the last year of the 1970s, none of this information was known. We had no idea what was coming, or how the alien was taking shape.  It seemed to be in a constant state of flux…of becoming.  

Again, all the stages of the lifecycle are familiar today, but in 1979, the alien seemed like the cinema’s first legitimate extra-terrestrial: a thing that changed and evolved into something ever-more hideous each time we saw it.  The title “Alien” expresses this idea beautifully.  Watching the film for the first time, we really felt we had encountered something not human, and not of this Earth.  Today, we’ve seen so many aliens and so many shape-shifters that we’re inured to the concept.  But  Alien  got it right, in revolutionary fashion.

3. Implications unexplored but suggested.   Alien  dramatized a complete and satisfying story of survival, but more than that, brilliantly implied a larger universe outside the context of the Nostromo’s last days.

Let’s gaze at the derelict ship that the Nostromo finds on LV-426, which has become an important part of  Prometheus’s  story-line.  When we encounter it in  Alien,  it is emitting a distress call (or actually, a warning: stay away).  The characters Dallas, Lambert and Kane investigate the ship and they see the dead pilot, the "space jockey" with a torn-open chest. They also find a giant lower chamber, which must be a cargo hold, given its dimensions and relative lack of instrumentation, furniture, etc.  
This hold is filled with alien eggs. The eggs are ensconced underneath a level of fog which "reacts" when broken.  What is this level of fog?  Is it some kind of technology keeping the eggs in stasis?  Was it a safeguard to keep the alien eggs dormant and the (odd) equivalent of the freezers we see on the Nostromo? Who was meant to control it?

One big questioned unanswered: if a chest-burster broke out of the space jockey’s (Engineer's) chest, where was the adult alien when Dallas and the others arrived to investigate?  A possible answer is that it had died out already, since in Scott’s original conception the alien was to be like something akin to a butterfly, a “perfect” creature that only could live for a few days

See how this film from 1979 is loaded with implications and questions above-and-beyond the "ten little Indians" template of an alien that kills astronauts on a spaceship? The deeper you delve, the more interesting  Alien  becomes. 

And again, this reflects our reality as human beings, an important aspect of horror films.  We are not privy to all the answers in life.  We don’t always know why things happen, or what fate has in store for us.   Some aspects of nature seem a mystery to us, even with advanced science.  The crew of Nostromo likewise encounters a terrible mystery on LV-426, but that mystery is largely left unexplored as the battle of survival begins.   

4.  It’s all about sex.

Alien  is cherished and remembered by horror fans for the gory chest-burster sequence featuring John Hurt.  But the film also features one of the creepiest off-screen deaths of all time, and a discarded idea (or hidden implication) in the franchise. When last we see Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), the xenomorph's tail is seen winding its nefarious way…up between her legs. Then, the film cuts suddenly to Ripley running down a dark corridor, but we still hear Lambert panting and suffering and some...inhuman moaning. 

So what the hell is going on here? What is the alien doing to Lambert? Does it -- by its very "perfect" nature -- boast some other form of reproductive ability that it is practicing on her? Is it fulfilling some kind of sexual desire?  

Alien  possesses this queasy, uneasy sub-text involving our human sexuality. On the immediately-apparent surface level, the film concerns a creature that can pervert our reproductive cycle for its own ends. But underneath - if we peel back the layers - there are moments in Scott's original that appear to involve homosexuality, sexual repression, sexual stereotypes and more.

Consider that John Hurt's character Kane becomes the first recipient of the alien's reproductive advances. Whisper-thin, British, and sexually ambiguous, Kane is depicted - at one point in the film - wearing an undergarment that appears to be a girdle; something that is distinctly "feminizing" to his appearance.

Also, Kane lives the most dangerous (or is it promiscuous?) life-style of anyone amongst the crew. He is the first to awake from cryo-sleep, the first to suggest a walk to the derelict, and the only man who goes down into the derelict’s egg chamber.  Soon in the film, it is Kane who is made unwillingly receptive to an oral penetration: the insertion of the face-hugger's "tube" down his throat...where it lays the chest-buster. What emerges from this encounter is "Kane's son" (in Ash’s terminology).

Consider Ash and this character's sexual underpinnings. He is actually a robot - a creature presumably incapable of having sex -- and the film's subtext suggests that this inability, this repression of the sexual urge, has made him a monster too. When Ash attacks Ripley late in the film, he rolls up a pornographic magazine (surrounded by other examples of pornography) and attempts to jam it down the woman’s throat...it's his penis surrogate.  The implication of this particular act is that he can't do the same thing with his penis, so Ash must use the magazine in its stead. 

Later, Ash admits to the fact that he "envies" the alien (penis envy?) and one has to wonder if it is because the alien can sexually dominate others in a way that the disliked, often dismissed Ash cannot manage. 

Also note that when Ash is unable to satisfy his repressed sexual desire for Ripley, the pressure literally causes him to explode.  The android blood is a milky white, semen-like fluid. And it spurts everywhere, a catastrophic ejaculation of monumental proportions. Ash, when confronted with his own sexuality and inability to express it...can't hold his wad.

The most hyper-masculinized (again, stereotypically-so) character in  Alien  is Parker (Yaphet Kotto), a black man who brazenly discusses “eating pussy” during the scene leading up to the chest-burster moment. He boasts an antagonistic, adversarial relationship with Ripley, and is the character most often-seen carrying a weapon (a flame thrower), a possible phallic symbol. 

In another type of film, Parker might be our hero.  But here he dies because of the stereotypical quality of male chivalry or machismo. Specifically, he won't turn the flame thrower on the alien while a woman (Lambert) is in the line of fire. The alien dispatches Parker quickly (mano e mano), perhaps realizing he will never co-opt an alpha male like Parker to be his "bitch;" at least not the way Kane was used.
Which brings me to Ripley. Ripley is a character written for a man but played by a woman (Sigourney Weaver). She is the only survivor (along with Jones the Cat), of the alien's rampage on the Nostromo, and there's a case that can be made that the alien cannot so easily "tag" Ripley as either male or female, and that's why she survives. She is perfect, like the alien is, a blend of all “human” qualities.
Given this uncommon mix of stereotypically male and female qualities, the alien is not quite sure how to either "read" or "use" Ripley. In the final moments of the film, it does make a decision. It recognizes Ripley - the best of humanity whether male or female - as kindred; a survivor. So it rides in secret with her aboard the shuttle Narcissus as they escape the exploding Nostromo.

Note that the alien could likely kill Ripley any time during that escape flight...but does not choose to do so. It knows it is in safe hands with her, at least for the time being. It uses her "competence," her skill (qualities of itself it recognizes in her?) to escape destruction...again establishing its perfection. 

Here, perfection might be measured by how well it understands the enemy, the prey.

So, underneath the scares and underneath the great design, what we get in Ridley Scott's  Alien  is the story of a monster that exploits our 1970s views of biology and psychology; causing us (as viewers) to re-examine -- perhaps even subconsciously -- the sexual stereotypes of the day. The homosexual man is endangered first, the alpha males (Dallas and Parker) are ineffective, the traditional "screaming" female gets exploited (not rescued...), and the most "evolved" human, Ripley (along with another perfect creature - a cat) survives to fight another day.

The strange, spiky and sexual nature of  Alien  lurks just beneath the surface of the film, and is noticeable even in the set design. Just take a long look at the "opening" of the alien derelict. Without being too graphic about this, it is pretty clearly a vagina. 

And the chest-burster is pretty clearly phallus-shaped. Ask yourself why. Sex, and -- sometimes discomfort with sex --  lurks at the heart of this horror film. This factor makes the film endlessly interesting and worthy of a re-watch or debate.

5. Sigourney Weaver as Ripley.  Ripley is indisputably one of the cinema’s greatest hero-warriors, but she’s more than that.  She represents a critical change in how women were conceived and written in horror and science fiction films.  

Ripley is simultaneously part of the “Final Girl” tradition and a crucial evolution of the archetype.   Ripley survives in the film because she is smart and because she possesses insights the others do not.  She understands why regulations are important, doesn’t succumb to emotion (regarding Dallas’s order to let Kane back aboard the Nostromo), and she is extremely competent on the job.  She takes command with authority, and is able to understand the ramifications of her actions.  She is tough, but never so much that we lose a sense of her humanity.  Male or female, we all wish we could possess Ripley’s qualities.

Ripley was Sigourney Weaver’s break-out role because the actress brought incredible commitment and intensity to the role.  Ripley herself showed that the Final Girl did not need others (particularly men) to rescue her, and that she could combat and even destroy the villain, not merely survive to another day.

20Years/Top 10 JKM Posts: Number 10. "Millennium: A Retrospective"

[This article was originally posted on October 24, 2016, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Millennium (1996-1999). It is the 10th most read post in my blog's first twenty years.]

Twenty years beyond its first broadcast, Chris Carter's brilliant and underrated crime/horror program,  Millennium   (1996-1999) remains the gold standard in terms of the genre “procedural.” 

Series such as  Bones, Criminal Minds, CSI, Medium  and even  Hannibal  owe the series a tremendous artistic debt.

Like those series,  Millennium  focuses on forensic pathology, oddball criminals, and crafty, perverted serial killers, but the series achieved something else beyond that description too.  

More importantly,  Millennium  also charts the impact of such dark, difficult investigations upon the investigator, and even more so, his family.

Catching society’s “monsters” has an impact on the psyche of the investigator, as  Millennium  episodes such as “Dead Letters” and “The Beginning and the End” aptly note.

In terms of its origin or inspiration,  Millennium  takes as a leaping-off point two relatively early episodes of  The X-Files  (1993-2002). One is the second season story, “Irresistible” which involves a horrible serial killer who operates in plain sight, seemingly normal, but really harboring sinister and monstrous urges.

The second is the third season narrative “Grotesque,” which involves the real danger to the investigator in entering the thoughts/worlds of the serial killer. Here, Mulder nearly loses himself, following in the footsteps of the episode’s copycat killer: an FBI investigator who has lost himself in the quest to find the original killer’s motives.

Millennium   ran for three glorious and all too brief seasons on FOX TV in the late nineties, in total broadcasting sixty-six episodes.

Millennium   starred the incredibly versatile and charismatic Lance Henriksen in the role of his career: ex-F.B.I. profiler Frank Black, a quiet, haunted man who has suffered two mental breakdowns in his life because of his capacity to "see inside" the minds of killers. 

As the series begins, he's just moved to a beautiful yellow house in Seattle with his wife, a therapist named Catherine (Megan Gallagher) and his young, gifted daughter, Jordan (Britanny Tiplady). 

Frank helps the Seattle PD solve difficult crimes from time-to-time, and consults for the mysterious Millennium Group, an organization of ex-F.B.I. professionals (based on the real like Academy Group) dedicated to understanding and apprehending criminals...and also, perhaps, cultivating The End Times.

Frank's friend, and later -- nemesis -- is his sponsor in the Millennium Group, Peter Watts (Terry O'Quinn). 

After a series of catastrophic events in the second season, Frank loses confidence in the secretive Group and returns to the F.B.I. Academy at Quantico, teaming up with a young, intelligent agent, Emma Hollis (Klea Scott) to bring it down. 

Most of his cases there involve the mysterious and odd misdeeds of The Millennium Group. As fans of  The X-Files  remember, a closing episode of that show, titled -- appropriately -- "Millennium," brought some sense of closure (though not enough for fans…) to the series.

According to Variety at the time of Millennium’s premiere near Halloween in '96,  Millennium  "makes  Twin Peaks   look like a morning in  Romper Room ," and the magazine called the series "literate, well-acted and blessed with an irresistible hook...the best new show of the season."(Jeremy Gerard, Variety, October 21-27, 1996, page 212.) 

John J. O'Connor, writing for The New York Times suggests that creator "Carter pushes all the right apocalyptic buttons...The production values darkly mirror the text."(The New York Times: "The Evil That Lurks All Around," October 25, 1996, page B16). 

In 1999, after the program finally and sadly left the air, X-Pose Magazine insightfully commented that " Millennium  surpassed itself in cultivating relationships between its principal cast" and called the show "a clear artistic success, making sense out of an often chaotic, disturbing world with consummate intelligence and powerful emotions."(X-Pose # 35, "Inner Demons," June 1999, pages 49-51.)

As these notices suggest,  Millennium  was constructed artfully, with symbols and ideas that continue to resonate deeply in today’s world.  Back in 1999, I wrote a book called  Terror Television , and opined of  Millennium   that it was "far better, far smarter, than just about any program on any of the American networks." 

I could easily (and happily) make the same statement today.

As part of  Millennium's  twentieth anniversary, I'll celebrate this week with some posts about the series, some of which you've seen before, and others which you have not.  But here, now, to start off, I want to break down some of the particulars of the series' artistry as I judge them.

Context and Literary Allusion

Many episodes of  Millennium  -- especially during the first season -- open with a white-lettered quotation from a literary or religious source.  In short order, the episodes then depict a tale that echoes, contrasts, or mirrors that opening selection. 

Yeats ("Pilot"), Dostoevsky ("Dead Letters"), Melville ("The Judge"), Jean-Paul Sartre ("522666"), Robert Louis Stevenson ("The Well Worn Lock"), Cicero ("Walkabout"), Nietzsche ("Broken World"), William Rose Benet ("The Paper Dove") and even Shakespeare ("Monster") represent just some of the literary giants and thinkers  Millennium   routinely referenced.  The Bible is often mined for pertinent quotations as well.

These opening quotes have not been included to be pretentious, but to provoke thought and to connect the viewer to the fact that the series concerns our history, our very nature.  

It's an invigorating purpose, frankly, and one that reminds authors that there is a direct link between past and present: a universality of the human condition.  The situations that criminal profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) encounters are situations that Shakespeare or Cicero contemplated or thought about, and so these opening quotes -- too easily dismissed as affectation by by some -- remind us of our literary and historical past.  

And since  Millennium  is, in some ways, about the passage of a thousand years, it's entirely appropriate, and even inspired, to focus on the link to our shared past.

In other words, these opening quotations help us contextualize the stories; but also contextualize Frank's journey in terms of human (or at least literary) history.  He's not just "a guy" trying to catch a serial killer, he's part of the ebb and flow of human history, doing battle at a vital juncture in such history.

The Yellow House
I find it endlessly rewarding to consider how   Millennium  was devised on artistic terms, from its opening quotations to its very unique application of symbols and imagery.  The oft-mentioned yellow house on Ezekiel Drive, for instance, is perhaps the program's most important and familiar symbol. Viewers associate yellow with brightness, and with bright, happy light, like that of the sun. 

Of course, the yellow house also represents Frank Black's only bright place away from the darkness and away from the horror that he witnesses on the job, and even within the recesses of his own mind.   Millennium  utilizes the recurring symbol of the yellow house in a plethora of stimulating ways.  It doesn't always mean the same thing.

In the series' first season, for instance, the house is seen as a place of safety for the Blacks, a sanctuary away from the darkness of the world.  That safety is violated (alarmingly) in one of the best episodes of the series: “Lamentation.”

In the second season, the yellow house becomes a representation of paradise lost and the object of the heroic quest, when Frank is, literally, banished from it. His purpose in life becomes reclaiming the yellow house and what it once represented (the wholeness of his family.) He spends this season separated from Catherine, and from his daughter.  He also loses the gift of insight in this season, so the yellow house, in season two, is something to be found again, metaphorically, or to be reclaimed.

In the third and final season, Frank's yellow house is but a sad memory, yet one which remains intact inside the recesses of his mind.  He visits his former home in the episode "The Sound of Snow," and it has been painted white.  

Still, the ever perceptive Frank envisions his Camelot, his yellow home in Seattle.  Frank's house is now an ideal, not a real place, one representative of a specific time and feeling.  The ideal can continue to exist, beyond the latest coat of paint, beyond the brick and mortar construct of the house itself.  As Frank grapples with the loss of Catherine this season, and the requirement to raise Jordan alone, he must come to understand that the yellow house is a state of mind.

One might suggest that the yellow house of  Millennium  represents an escape from evil, "the painting away of the darkness" as Chris Carter has beautifully described it, and yet it is also the very reason why Frank faces the heart of human darkness every day.  

By facing the dark inside and out, Frank preserves the yellow, inside and out. The two are interconnected in some significant way.  The house is Frank's yin and yang.

The yellow house could also symbolize, on a more basic level, small town America circa 1996.  Frank must rescue it from the encroaching evil.  Thus the yellow home is not merely beautiful in an architectural sense, it is a brilliant symbol because it shares with viewers an insight into Frank's personality and cause.  

It represents his interior architecture, if you will.

It is the reason Frank fights; and what he fights for, since the yellow represents the sanctuary for his family, for his wife and daughter.

And yes, I painted my first home yellow (a Dutch Colonial built in 1912), in honor of  Millennium's  yellow house.  

We all have a "yellow house" in our minds; whether in our adulthood or as a remembrance of childhood.  It is a place of safety, nostalgia, hope and dreams.   

In  Millennium , the yellow house is the center of gravity, the center of Frank's universe.

The Time is Near

 The specter informing so many episodes of  Millennium  is the end of the world itself: doomsday. 
This is a powerful and universal fear because many people suspect that the end will come one day...and perhaps soon.  Dinosaurs preceded us here and now they are extinct.  The Roman Empire came and went, a brief candle.  The expansive Native American culture which once existed on this land we now inhabit is but a memory too. 

Time passes, cultures die, and life is transitory and on some subconscious level, all humankind is aware of this fact, of the inevitable changing of the guard.  On a personal, individual note, we all must reckon with our personal appointed doomsday, or appointed apocalypse.  We will each die, and for us, that cessation represents, certainly, the end of the world.

Throughout  Millennium' s canon, the series writers obsessed on the universal human inquietude about our impending ends.  

Could our demise arrive in a second great flood ("Force Majeure?")  

Could it involve religion prophecy ("Forcing the End,") and, specifically the Anti-Christ ("Marantha?" “Antipas?”)  

Would our end come from deliberate, blind tinkering with our science, or our genetic make-up ("Walkabout," "Sense and Antisense," “Bardo Thodol”)?  

The series also gazed at ethnic doomsdays ("A Single Blade of Grass), Y2K fears ("Teotwawki), and one of the best, "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense,” boasted the audacity to suggest what we've actually seen since  Millennium   was canceled, with the advent of so many damned movie remakes: a creative apocalypse.  

Written by Darin Morgan, this installment of the series implied that all humans can look forward to for the next thousand years is "the same old crap."

Who Cares?

It probably seems strange to praise  Millennium  as an inherently optimistic series, considering how obsessively it wonders about the end of the world, or the fall of man.
Yet,  Millennium  boasts another recurring and potent symbol worth mentioning. That symbol is, of course, the child.  Segment after segment on  Millennium  explicitly involves children, and youth in general, because our offspring represent the future. In our children, in our next generation, we see hope and fear, and  Millennium  shares this viewpoint.  

For instance, in one of the best hours written for any genre show in history,  Millennium  explores a very real "evil" of modern American society: the way in which our culture encourages children to be the same, to conform to expectations, and be "ordinary." 

The episode I refer to is titled "A Room with No View," and it concerns a demonic force, Lucy Butler (Sarah Jane Redmond) who captures promising kids.  These abducted teenagers have all been voted "most likely to succeed," and are well loved by classmates and parents.  There is something almost intangibly special, something attractive, charismatic and magnetic about each of them. They all have spirit, for lack of a better term. 

But in "A Room with No View," our future leaders are captured and tortured until they succumb to the urge to become ordinary, invisible, and corrupt.  In this case,  Millennium  views an apocalypse not in some outside force, such as a flood, but in our inability to inspire and support our children; to let them be who they choose to be. Instead, we wish to fit them into pre-designed boxes, whether they fit or not.

Other episodes also very much involve children.  Chris Carter's "The Well Worn Lock" gazes at the terrifying problem of child abuse and how it intersects with politics, while "Monster" gazes at a child who -- for inexplicable reasons -- is purely and simply evil. 

The inspiring story "Luminary" involves a young man who forsakes the material "culture of desire" we've made here in the United States, and gives up all his belongings and money.  He goes to Alaska alone to seek wisdom.  When the boy disappears, Frank must find him.  But the very idea of renouncing things, of renouncing wealth, is a potent idea in  Millennium   (inspired by the story  Into the Wild ), and significantly, it finds purchase in the symbol for our future; in the next generation.

Throughout the series, the writers also followed the development and growth of Frank's daughter, Jordan (Brittany Tiplady).  

But importantly, we also witnessed, dynamically, Frank's viewpoint as a parent regarding his daughter, and regarding children in general.  In the aforementioned "Monster," he delivers an impassioned, heart-wrenching speech about what the arrival of Jordan meant to his life; and how it changed him. 

Specifically, Jordan's birth reminded Frank that he did not "manufacture" himself as a grown-up; that he too had been a child once.  And now he strives to see the child -- the potential -- in all of us, even the men he hunts.  If the serial killers are dark potential realized, then  Millennium  views children as exactly the opposite, as a source for hope.

The importance of the child (of our tomorrows, essentially) is signified in  Millennium  even in its opening credits, impressively.  As you can see in the photo above, there's an image of a young girl walking across a bridge, awkwardly, in danger of a fall.  That's the bridge to the future (the 21st century) and she will either make the journey intact...or plummet to her doom.

The Fall of Rome?

  Millennium   is an abundantly introspective series.  Back before Y2K, before 9/11, before Katrina, the series set up a very specific analogy that America was like something akin to Rome...an empire on the verge of collapse. 
And the cause of the collapse came from within; from a perversion or "weeds" growing up inside our borders, and personified by the serial killers of the 1990s. The series brilliantly and quite originally suggested "pathology is part of the grotesque master plan" (Alyssa Katz, The Nation: Millennium," November 24, 1996, page 35), and constantly raised the specter that, as a nation, America was rotting from within; from a kind of inbred decadence. 

I have written about this before, but I believe that writers such as Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz carefully used the concept of the "serial killer of the week," much like  Star Trek  used the concept of "the civilization of the week."

In each new encounter and each new episode, Frank would learn something valuable about himself, and something about the values of his country from the case of a twisted serial killer.  

We saw this paradigm in "Weeds," "Blood Relatives," "Loin like a Hunting Flame" and "Wide Open," among others.  

The idea was that madness had sprouted up in the land, a very specific madness born from "who we are."   The series suggested this madness would ultimately be America's downfall.  Unless men like Frank could stop it.

The Ouroboros

The Ouroboros is the symbol of a cycle. And  Millennium  is about such cycles.  In the Ouroboros symbol, a serpent swallows its tail. It eats itself.  It devours itself, and yet it still exists. This is a metaphor for human life.

And it is important regarding  Millennium’s  historical context, both in-world, and outside it. The Millennium Group speaks often of the last millennium (the year one thousand) and the one approaching. The implication is clear. We survived the test of the last Millennium, but we may not survive the test of this one.  

But we have gone through it all before.

Also, consider that in America we have seen these cycles again and again. We have war, then peace, then war, then peace again.  In the 1980s, we were locked in a Cold War, and in the 1990s, America was suddenly the last superpower standing.  Then came the 2000s and the asymmetric contests of the War on Terror.   Millennium  -- falling in the age between wars -- evidenced anticipatory anxiety; fear that the cycle of “peace” and “prosperity” would soon come to an end.

Of course, the series was quite correct.

Lance Henriksen

  It would be impossible to write of  Millennium  without considering the depth that Lance Henriksen brought to the role of Frank Black.  Even in a narrative that doesn't necessarily work on all thrusters, Henriksen completely invested himself in the role of Black. 

The scene I described above, in "Monster," is a perfect example.  The episode, as a whole, is pretty good, but boasts some pretty obvious deficiencies in the writing.  For instance, Lara Means (Kristen Cloke) is introduced in this episode as a semi-regular, and in the first twenty-three minutes, she quips "here's my thing" four times.  The viewer is practically bludgeoned with the catchphrase, and it's...well, lacking in nuance. 

But then, in the third act, amidst the dross, Henriksen delivers that speech; the one about childhood, about the importance of children; about the impact of his child's birth upon his life, and his performance is absolutely riveting.  

Suddenly, you're not watching a conventional tale of an evil child; you're watching the story of a human being, of a committed father facing the loss of all that he cares for.  The scene is emotional and beautifully performed (and written), and Henriksen accomplished miracles like this on a regular basis.

We're all shepherds

For me,  Millennium  was always at its best when it addressed our human fears (about apocalypse, about our culture, about violence) and made us look in the mirror.  In the opening credits the first year, the question "who cares?" would pop up in almost accusing fashion.
That was an important matter. 
Who cared enough about the world to make it a safer place?  By the third season, the series had formulated carefully it's answer to the question "who cares." 
The answer came, not surprisingly, from Jordan, from a child.  She said "we're all shepherds," meaning it is incumbent on each of us to care how the world turns out, apocalypse or no apocalypse.
For three years, despite format shifts,  Millennium   reminded us, "this is who we are," and in the process gave television one of its legitimate artistic masterpieces.  

20 Year of Blogging!

Today is this blog's 20th anniversary! Where does the time go!?

I started posting here on April 23, 2005. 

That was before my 18 year-old son was born, before I created The House Between (2006 - 2009), and while George W. Bush was still President of the United States.  

I was eagerly anticipating, at the blog's start, upcoming releases including Serenity (2005) and Revenge of the Sith (2005).

It was a different world.  

Since my start on April 23, 2005, I have written 11,935 blog posts here, which is crazy to me, and I have had, over that span of the blog's life, more than 11 million readers pay me a visit (that's 11,494,694 as of this writing).

Blogs and movies themselves both played a more central role in our popular culture in 2005 than they do now, which I think is probably not a good thing. The internet has also, I feel, become a much meaner place than it was two decades ago, when I began.

Over the years, most bloggers have either called it quits I guess, or moved to YouTube, Facebook, Tik-Tok or other social media to become "influencers."  

However, I still believe there is a certain place, a certain sweet spot, that is fulfilled by a web-log like this one. 

And so I still write here when I can. 

I accept -- after 20 years -- that this blog, like all my work, and all of life itself, goes through different phases. 

Whenever I've thought of ending the blog, something has held me back. I know I can jump on blogger, write, connect, and get my thoughts to the world instantly. There's a value in that, and I find it priceless.

No, I don't post here as much as I used to, it is true. 

In the blog's heyday, from 2012 - 2017, I was posting over a thousand times a year.  Ironically, 2023 was the blog's biggest year in terms of readership and audience, however, which convinces me there's still life in blogging.  

So, I'll just quote This is Spinal Tap (1984) and note, perhaps, that my appeal as a pop culture writer is not diminishing, just becoming "more selective."

Where and why have I shifted my focus? 

Well, in honesty, I am way out of tune with the modern era of film, not being a particularly big fan of Disney live-action remakes or endless superhero movies. Those productions bore me to tears, and I just can't devote energy to writing about them. By the same token, I don't want to be the cantankerous old guy who doesn't like anything new, or who constantly lives only in a place of nostalgia.  

That's why, since 2023, I have focused largely on creating my own universes in audio drama format (Enter the House Between [2023]), in fiction (The Subway Game [2024], with Alicia Martin) and in a comedy web series, the award-winning Abnormal Fixation.  

In terms of my traditional nonfiction, Horror Films of 2000-2009 came out not long ago, and Horror Films of the 2010s is done, and incoming, any minute now...

Making the jump from literary critic, pop-culture commenter to content "creator" is not necessarily easy but I feel committed to it. 

I remember back in the late 1990s, before I found an agent, a prospective agent asked me why I wanted to make the jump from non-fiction to non-fiction when I was so well-known for non-fiction film reviews and movie writing. He said it was a trick I simply wouldn't be able to pull off, so I shouldn't even try.

I hope that's not true, and it was incredibly rewarding in 2024 and now, in 2025 to see our web series, Abnormal Fixation pick up so much audience recognition (26 awards won so far, and 12 nominations) and so many views on YouTube.  I hope if you haven't seen it, you'll give a whirl.

That said, this blog is not going anywhere, at least not any time soon, and for the next several months, I'll celebrate this milestone by re-posting some of my most popular articles.  

In fact, I'll be counting down from the 10th most popular post to the 1st most popular post (at least in terms of views) in the blog's history.

So stick with me, please, as I celebrate 20 years of blogging, starting TODAY!

Cult-TV Movie Review: Shadow on the Land (1968)

"These are the symbols of democracy. A democracy we take as for granted as the water we drink. But democracy is a living thing; its skeleton an ideal; its bloodstream dissent; its tissue comprised of all the people who inhabit it.  All the people.
But what happens if the life of democracy is paralyzed by fear, or greed, or simple laziness, and the country is yielded up, or co-erced, or persuaded into accepting a dictatorship, a leader whose word alone is all of law?  
The skeleton of democracy is destroyed, its bloodstream, dissent, is bound in the barbed wire of concentration camps. And the leader's special police...terrorize the bulk of the people into acceptance.  And the flag of the Internal Security Forces -- the symbol of fear and darkness -- will fly over our land."
- A Voice of "God" narration, from the opening of the TV-movie, Shadow on the Land (1968).

The stirring and unsettling words printed above are accompanied on screen in  Shadow on the Land  by impressive views of national landmarks that we Americans hold dear: the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument.  
Yet these words are also accompanied by images that terrify every American citizen, regardless of political stripe or political party: a giant black "X" marked through our country's Constitution; red arm-bands decorating the uniforms of  a gestapo-like police force.
This TV-movie created by Sidney Sheldon and written by Nedrick Young contemplates something that we all fervently hope is impossible: the rise of a fascist, totalitarian dystopia in America. It's a 1960s TV variation on Sinclair Lewis's classic 1935 literary work,  It Can't Happen Here.
In  Shadow on the Land , The United States has been a dictatorship for some forty years, ever since the country's Leader exploited a national emergency ("riots in the ghetto" according to the screenplay) to seize total control of the nation and declare martial law.  

The people, in essence, gave the Leader "a blank check."
Over the years since the takeover, "discipline" has replaced "freedom" in America as an ideal. Dissenters -- part of an organized resistance group called "Society of Man" -- are sent to detention camps where they are they are beaten and tortured.  The police force, the ISF, is ubiquitous and well-armed.

As the drama commences, an ISF officer, Colonel Andrew Davis (Jackie Cooper) is arrested by authorities for stealing documents pertaining to the Leader's new top-secret initiative, "Operation Hammer."  
Davis is hauled off to Detention Camp 12, and tortured for information. The resistance movement attacks the camp and rescues Davis in an extremely violent sequence with overturned cars, soldiers electrocuted on fences and bullet-ridden corpses. This night-time action scene is impressive as such on its own, but there's one important moment of undeniable real power here as well. 
In particular, two nameless Society of Man fighters attempt to bring down the ISF flag and fly our Stars and Stripes instead. The first man is gunned down viciously (on-screen).  
Without thought, a second man jumps into the breach and raises the flag...and is also gunned down with extreme-prejudice, right before our eyes.  

But the flag goes up; Old Glory reigns.  
This moment goes by quickly, and without comment, but it makes a powerful statement.  These two men die to make a symbolic gesture that few people would ever see (in this context of a night-time prison break). They didn't die freeing other men, or retreat to fight the good fight another day. Instead, they gave up their very lives in service of a representation of liberty.  
As I was sitting on my comfortable sofa watching this scene, I tried to imagine myself in those men's shoes. Giving up my life -- everything I hold dear -- for the simple but powerful and universal idea of freedom.  

We've seen people doing this very thing, or something quite like it, in Ukraine, and other countries half-a globe away. Fighting to the death for the cause of freedom. But as Americans, we really haven't had to do that. In recent decades, we fought two wars in the Middle East, but most citizens haven't had to give up our sons or daughters to wage those wars. We haven't even had to endure tax hikes, or conserve our oil.
What would you and I do in the America portrayed in  Shadow on the Land?

Shadow on the Land  delvers further into this concept. 

A high-ranking Colonel in the ISF, Shep McCloud (Marc Stanger) is actually working for the Resistance, and he delivers a wounded Davis to Davis' brother, a priest at the local Midnight Mission, played by the late, great, Gene Hackman.  
This priest believes that all of life is a trial, one leading to death, and doesn't want to help his own biological brother. He says that he "renders unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" and that "God" should decide. But Shep insists...and he's a tough man to refuse.
In fact, Shep needs a lot of help, from both the priest and from a lovely ISF psychologist, because Operation Hammer could mean an end to the Society of Man. On this very night -- Christmas Eve -- the Leader plans to stage a "false flag" operation, one equated to the the Reichstag fire in the teleplay.  
Specifically, ISF soldiers will dress as resistance fighters and attack a power plant control room in California, plunging the state into darkness and cold. This terrorist act, the Leader believes, will finally turn the nation against the Society, and pave the way for the enforcement of "new restrictions" and the doubling of the ISF force size.
Most of this 1968 TV movie involves McCloud's attempts to prevent Operation Hammer from succeeding, and finding unexpected allies along the way.  

Even the hesitant priest comes to McCloud's aid, after Colonel Davis's death by torture. The movie ends at the dawn of Christmas, with the reminder that "there's always another battle to fight."
One of the most interesting facets of  Shadow on the Land  is its alternate reality viewpoint. It is still the year 1968, but fascism has reigned in America for forty years, since 1928 ostensibly.  

Still, America in 1968 looks almost the same as we remember it. There are freeways, Christmas decorations, office meetings, restaurants, etc. The only difference is that no one is free.  Concentration camps dot the landscape, and every park, every avenue, every building is monitored by the ever-present ISF (ICE?) soldiers.
Perhaps the tele-movie's second most powerful moment occurs when Davis attempts to find sanctuary following an ISF raid on the mission.  He begs people for help in the park, in the streets, even in a diner.  He tells them he's an army officer. He's bleeding, and desperate.
And no one lifts a finger.  No one even makes eye contact with him.  
The point transmitted by this scene is plain and clear: a fascist state depends on two things: a militia to bully people, and an apathetic, cowed populace.  
Again, this got me thinking. Who would I rather be?  
The guy who dies raising the flag?  
Or the guy staring down at his lunch plate as a free man is captured and tortured?
Shadow on the Land  was apparently a backdoor pilot for a TV series. The concept was never picked up for broadcast, but I was struck how timely it is today.  
For instance, the opening narration discusses America losing its democracy in three ways.  
1.) First by fear, and certainly, this country knew crippling fear after September 11, 2001, in the age of color-coded terror alerts and warnings from powerful politicians of "mushroom clouds over" American cities. Lately, we have seen fear ginned-up over immigrant gangs. 
2.) The second way is by greed, and indeed we worship wealth...and the rich. Oligarchs call our hard-saved money for Social Security an entitlement and try to take it away. But I have been paying a portion of my salary into Social Security since I was 16 years old, nearly forty years ago. How is that an entitlement? The Ponzi scheme is the one that lets the rich strip mine the savings of the middle-class.
3.) And third, finally, by laziness. So many voters are poorly educated, not taking the time to know the positions of the candidates they support, much less American history. It's easier to go along to get along, then to raise a voice of opposition to infringements on our freedom, like deportation to foreign work camps without due process.
In terms of action,  Shadow on the Land  is pretty-fast paced and brutal. And John Forsythe gives an, icy performance as high-ranking ISF officer, General Bruce.  

But again, while watching, I kept thinking that something like this TV-movie could be done very effectively today, when we've moved into a more technological age, when both political parties have apparently accepted surveillance of U.S. citizens without oversight, and the right of American interests to torture anyone deemed an enemy, without due process. 

I also liked the film's notation that all the people in a democracy deserve equal rights. Not special rights...equal ones.  And one of our most vital rights is that we are innocent until proven guilty.  How can we know if someone we want to deport is a "criminal" until they have been tried in a court of law, and that determination is made?
If this concept had gone to weekly series in 1968 (when the optimistic  Star Trek  was still on the air),  I wonder how it would have been welcomed.  Alarmist? Or ahead of its time?
How would we welcome it today?

50 Years Ago: Survivors (1975)

For those of you who have never seen it,  Survivors  is an absolutely grim and thoroughly fascinating British program about an insidious pandemic which wipes out modern civilization and leaves the shattered survivors to re-learn all the old trades in order to build a new -- and hopefully better - world.
In other words,  Survivors  is sort of  The Walking Dead , only without the periodic threat of rampaging zombies.   
Here, the true enemies are modern mankind's ignorance of his own technology and history; and the threat of dangerous, power-hungry men and women who see only opportunity in global tragedy.  The series is set in a new Dark Ages of sorts, with (some) humans afforded a second chance to get things right.


Survivors  first aired on the BBC beginning in April of 1975, and was conceived and written by Terry Nation, the man behind  Dr. Who's  pepper-pot Daleks as well as the classic cult-tv series,  Blake's 7  (1978-1981).  

Produced by Terence Dudley, the first series of  Survivors  stars Carolyn Seymour ( Space: 1999, Star Trek: Voyager, Otherworld )  as Abby Grant, a not-terribly special or notable middle-class housewife living outside London.
But Abby's life changes forever in "The Fourth Horseman," the inaugural episode of  Survivors .  After the opening credits, we find ourselves in Abby's comfortable country home as she deals with the inconvenience of a "couple dozen cases of the flu" in nearby London.
In short order, the inconveniences pile atop each other, and snowball  The phone lines become jammed.  The trains from London are not arriving on time, or have been canceled all together.  The radio tells an even worse story in America.  There's no electricity in New York, and a State of Emergency has been declared.  There are rumors that millions of people have already died in India and in secretive China.
Before long, the episode cuts to another main character, a single woman named Jenny (Lucy Fleming), whose roommate is suffering from the mysterious illness.  While her roommate is succumbing to lumps under the arms, fever and chills, Jenny goes to the hospital to seek help, and it's a scene of a modern health system in chaos, overrun and failing.  This is one of the most chilling moments in the entire episode.  A line of scared citizens are lined up in the halls, getting flu vaccines in their arms while an understaffed facility attempts to deal with the frightening and fatal unknown.
A doctor soon informs Jenny that the flu-like sickness has a six day incubation period and almost inevitably results in death, but that certain people appear to possess a "natural immunity" to the "mutant virus, not yet identified."  The doctor also implores Jenny -- who appears to be immune -- to escape while she still can, before the cities become "like open cesspits."   
Soon, he warns, garbage and corpses will line the untended streets...
The remainder of "The Fourth Horsemen" is every bit as bleak as this initial act.  
Abby grows ill but after several days unconscious, awakens "cured."  She promptly  finds her husband (Peter Bowles) dead on the sofa, and civilization, essentially, destroyed.
While Jenny wanders the  London streets alone and deals with thugs and looters, Abby sets off in search of her son, Peter, at his boarding school.  
Instead, she finds only an old man with a hearing aide, a teacher, who discusses the state of the world and a possible future. His perspective proves valuable. 
"The aftermath will be worse than the disease," he tells her.  "What is important is learning again," he establishes, pointing out that most 20th century people would not know how to make a candle from scratch, let alone create a machine to generate electricity.  
As this man stresses, "you need to know every part of every process" and "all the old skills and crafts must be learned."
This is difficult and frightening for Abby to accept at first, as part of the "generation that first put man on the moon," but soon she starts to see the wisdom of her mentor's words; and begins formulating, even in this pilot episode, a way forward.  

I admire this aspect of  Survivors  very much, and it fits in well with  Space:1999 , which also premiered in 1975 and concerned a global apocalypse of sorts. Both series very much involve what Science Digest editor Arielle Emmett called (in regards to  1999 ) "the downfall of 20th century technological man."
What remains most shocking, perhaps, about  Survivors  is that this pilot episode has not aged significantly in fifty years. Any fan of  Dr. Who  will immediately recognize the 1970s era visual aesthetic: film for exterior location work and videotape for interior studio work. But the important thing is that the ideas have not aged a day, and indeed, the teleplay and its presentation are rather artful in presentation
For instance, "The Fourth Horseman" opens with a shot of an automated tennis ball machine, one that "serves" tennis balls to a human player, in this case Abby.  Thus the very image that the  Survivors  story commences on is one of, if not excess, let's say "leisure technology."  

Abby spends her afternoon staying fit, playing tennis with a recreation machine. This idea fits in with the theme of the story: that the technological man of the 1970s, faced with a population-destroying pandemic, will no longer have access to such leisure pursuits, nor the wherewithal to construct such machines.  
Later, close-ups and insert shots of radios, televisions and other modern conveniences appear, making the idea of the soon-to-be-lost technology a leitmotif of "The Fourth Horsemen.'
Another great moment comes late in the show, when Abby cuts off most of her long hair and burns down her house, making a clean separation from the lost past. She's living in a new world now, and her first act in this world is, appropriately, to re-shape her appearance to a more practical, less glamorous one.  Her second act is to destroy the symbols of the old world's leisure and convenience: the fully powered, air-conditioned modern home.
An absolutely riveting premiere, "The Fourth Horseman" has some nice visual touches beyond these, including a drastic pullback from Abby -- right up into the sky -- as she begs God not to let her be the only survivor.  The episode also gains significant frisson and impact from its deliberate comparison of this 1975 pandemic to the 1918 Influenza, which killed 50-to-100 million people worldwide (some 3% of the population).Over 500 million people were infected in what was once termed "the greatest medical holocaust in history."


Terry Nation's implication with this 1918 comparison is obvious and important. Something like this deadly plague has happened before (in 1918) and it could easily happen again, on even more catastrophic scale.  

And, of course, today, in 2025, we have indeed seen this horrible history repeat itself in the COVID-19 era.  Basically,  Survivors  predicted it in the 1970's, at least after a fashion. 
The fear -- which the series got right -- is that with modern air transport, a person could do precisely what a clumsy scientist does in the opening credits of  Survivors : bring a fatal disease from country to country before anyone is even aware there is a problem.
Later episodes of  Survivor s, such as "Genesis," find Abby preaching the cause of "re-learning" old skills to the other ragtag survivors of the plague.  She also clashes with men and women who see opportunity in doomsday, including a governmental official who fancies himself a Feudal Baron, and an aristocratic woman who wants to hoard goods because cash has no value, and people will work for her in exchange for food.  It is her goal to get a piece of the pie, and live in comfort...and goddamn the other unfortunates.
Survivors  was remade by the BBC in 2008 -- following up on the contemporary fears of SARS and other viruses -- and was cancelled following a second season.  I have not seen the new series, but I can wholeheartedly recommend the original 1970s series to fans of post-apocalyptic science fiction.   Still, I don't know if too many people are willing to "go there" with COVID in our recent history.

The original  Survivors  is bleak, devoid of Hollywood bullshit, and intensely frightening.  
The writing is superb, and Terry Nation artfully utilizes the end of the world  scenario to raise questions about human nature, and issues such as law enforcement, allocation of resources and other post-apocalyptic, existentialist obsessions. 

Nimoy Day: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home  (1986), directed by Leonard Nimoy, proved such a sensation at the box office in the mid-1980s that its success led directly to the development of  Star Trek: The Next Generation  (1987 – 1994) in syndication.  

At the time, the fourth  Star Trek  film won rave reviews from general audiences and mainstream critics, both of whom praised the film’s fish-out-of-water humor and the inventive time-travel narrative.  
Hardcore  Star Trek  fans admired the film’s droll sense of humor too, as well as the jovial character interaction, though some percentage of this demographic also felt that the movie did not adequately tie-up all the loose ends of the  Wrath of Khan/Search  for Spock story-arc.

Today, The Voyage Home remains an enjoyably “light” installment of the franchise, though it seems to have lost a bit of its luster. For one thing,  The Voyage Home  is more flatly-directed than its unsung predecessor,  The Search for Spock.   

Some sequences -- particularly those involving the alien probe “talking” to the rescued whales in San Francisco Bay -- would benefit from some judicious trimming. This dialogue between whale probe and whale goes on and on, to such great and unnecessary length that it feels like the audience is being excluded from an important conversation.

But where it ultimately counts,  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home  re-captures the magic of the  Star Trek  TV series. This Harve Bennett production showcases the camaraderie between the characters to touching and comedic effect, and perhaps more importantly, serves as a response to the burgeoning “death” culture emerging in the punk movement of the 1980s. 

In the film, the beloved  Star Trek  characters encounter a 20th century culture of wanton cussing (or “colorful metaphors”), meet gentle life-forms hunted to “the brink of extinction” and tangle with Mohawk-adorned rockers singing “we’re all bloody worthless” and answers such challenges, simply, with the reminder that mankind will outgrow this violent and emotional adolescence, correct its mistakes, and -- at long last -- reach for the stars…

“They say the sea is cold but the sea contains the hottest blood of all.”

Set sometime after  Star Trek III: The Search for Spock  (1984),  The Voyage Home  (1986) commences with Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew (DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei and Walter Koenig) electing to return to Earth from Vulcan in their captured Klingon bird of prey, which McCoy has renamed the Bounty. 

Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), who is still recovering his memories after the trauma of Fal-Tor-Pan, elects to return to the Federation Council with his former shipmates so that he can testify on their behalf regarding the controversial Genesis Planet matter.

En route, however, the former Enterprise teams learn that a strange but extremely powerful alien probe is nearing Earth.  It has “neutralized” starships in its path, and is transmitting a strange signal.  Spock detects that the signal resembles the songs of Earth’s humpback whales, an extinct species, and that the probe specifically seeks a response. 

Realizing that only humpback whales can answer the probe, Kirk attempts time travel in the Bird of Prey.  He returns to the 20th century, circa 1986, and attempts to locate and recruit two humpback whales, George and Gracie, to bring back to the future. 

Along the way, Kirk also meets a cetacean biologist, Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks), who doesn’t know quite what to make of the out-of-their-element crew of the Enterprise…

“The only choice we’re given is how many megatons!”

At its core,  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home  is very much about one important idea: the sins of the father being passed on to the children.  
Here, 20th and 21st century man is responsible for destroying the humpback whale, an act which, in the 23rd century, imperils the very future of the human race.  The script acknowledges this fact when Kirk notes it that it is “ironic” that by destroying these creatures of the Earth, man has imperiled his own future there as well.  
Perhaps the most remarkable and disturbing footage in the film is a documentary of whale slaughter that Kirk and Spock view at the Cetacean Institute.  Here, we watch -- without gimmickry or fakery -- as men wantonly massacre whales, rip-apart their bodies, and stand in a veritable sea of blood. It’s grotesque and gruesome behavior, and yet the real-life footage establishes well that we are, in fact, hunting an inoffensive species to extinction for, essentially, no reason at this juncture.

When this documentary footage of whale slaughter is considered in tandem with some of the other examples of mankind’s behavior in the 20th century portions of the film, it isn’t a very pretty picture of human nature.  

A garbage man likes how his wife “fights.”  

A driver calls a pedestrian “a dumb ass.”  

Newspaper headlines in San Francisco reveal the world on the edge of a nuclear precipice. “It’s a miracle these people ever got out of the 20th century,” Bones quips.

And last but not least, a punk on a bus rudely and aggressively plays his loud, nihilistic music, without thought or regard for his fellow riders.

The lyrics of the song the punk plays go:

“Just where is our future? 

The things we’ve done and said!

Let’s just push the button, we’d be better off dead!”

‘Cause I hate you.”

And I berate you.”

And I can’t wait to get to you!”

“The sins of all our fathers, being dumped on us – the sons.

The only choice we’re given is how many megatons?”

And I eschew you!

And I say screw you!”

And I hope you’re blue too!”

This scene with the punk rocker on the bus is especially important in regard to  The Voyage Home’s  ultimate message and social commentary.  
The lyrics even mention the “sins of all the fathers” being “dumped on us,” the sons.”  More trenchantly, it espouses a belief that the world is going to tend in self-destruction, and that this destruction, in fact, may be the best thing for mankind…and the planet. 
Importantly,America in the early span of the 1980s was enmeshed in a deep economic recession, locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and our elected government saw Armageddon around every corner.

On the campaign trail in 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan had noted (to televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Baker) that ours "might be the generation" that sees the Biblical Judgment Day. His belief was reinforced in a People Magazine interview in December 1983 when the Gipper noted that the eighties were "the first time in history" that so many Biblical prophecies were coming true. 

Even President Reagan's appointed Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, didn't believe the world was going to last. On February 5, 1981, he said that America's natural resources didn't necessarily need to be safeguarded by government because he did not know "how many more future generations" could be counted on before "the Lord Returns."

Again, these were elected government officials making claims about the pending end of the world. 

So throw in TV movies such as  The Day After  (1984), Reagan's joke about bombing Russia in "five minutes" and bluster about Russia as the “Evil Empire,” and it is no wonder that America's pop culture (especially genre films) became virtually-obsessed with the End of Life as We Know it.”

The great thing about  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home  is that it gazes into this cultural darkness and responds not by going “into darkness” in kind.  
Instead, the film responds…with lightness.  

With humor and humanity.  

Kirk, Spock and McCoy reflect (with amazement and surprise) on this “primitive” time period in human history and remind us that -- 20th century behavior to the contrary -- we will survive and endure.  
We will grow up.  We will do great things.  The world is not going to end in this generation. No, the human adventure is just beginning…

This is the great optimistic spirit of  Star Trek,  and the very factor that differentiates from many other movie and TV franchises.  It doesn’t tell us that the future is going to be a dystopia.  Rather it says that our present dystopia now is simply a result of our species’ “growing pains” and that the future is a day worth living for. 

The Voyage Home  vividly and humorously makes this argument, and indeed there’s something quite inspiring about the whole affair. The film ends on a high-note of uplift and satisfaction as Kirk once again takes the center seat of the starship Enterprise (to the nostalgic sound of 1960s sound effects “chirping”…) and once more sets out for the great unknown, to expand the frontiers of human knowledge.

Regarding the whale probe and its final scene over San Francisco Bay, I credit the filmmakers for not wanting to “spoon feed” us information about the whales’ conversation.  Subtitles would have reduced the conversation to a joke, even. But still, the scene goes on far too long, and the sight of the probe leaving orbit doesn’t seem like resolution enough for the crisis.  

Was the probe just checking in?  Visiting?  I would have loved for instance, if special effects were affordable, to see the probe land in the bay and humpback whales spill out…colonizing the Earth all over again.  That would have been a beautiful statement that mankind is now grown up,  ready and willing to share his world with other peaceful creatures.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home  also gets a little carried away with it sense of humor in my opinion.  It’s as if everyone – including the writers – is so caught up in the spirit of fun that some corners get cut. For instance, Scotty and McCoy share the futuristic formula of transparent aluminum with a 20th century engineer without knowing for certain that he is the actual, historical inventor. 

At another point, the Bird of Prey goes to warp speed while still in Earth’s sky, which seems abrupt at best and dangerous at worst. There are a number of moments like this in the film where it feels like the  Star Trek  world has been set aside for getting an easy laugh, or for moving the plot-line along.

And again, I just have to state that the film is directed almost listlessly.  There are fewer close-ups here (in direct opposition to Nimoy’s technique apparent in Search for Spock ) and many wide-shots that, while capturing great locations like the Golden Gate Bridge, somehow distance us from the characters and their situation this time around.  There’s something about the editing and selection of shots that make the film feel almost unfinished, or half-complete.

Despite such drawbacks,  Star Trek: The Voyage Home  overall oozes a sense of joy, fun and optimism.  It’s a happy, forward-looking movie in the  Trek  canon, and there’s not a super-villain or terrorist in sight to motivate the action or the relationships.