Michael May's Blog, page 156

Bigfoot (2012)

Who's In It: Danny Bonaduce (The Partridge Family), Barry Williams (The Brady Bunch), Bruce Davison (X-Men, the Harry and the Hendersons TV show), Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks), Howard Hesseman (WKRP in Cincinnati, Head of the Class), and ever-so-briefly Alice Cooper (Wayne's World, Scream, Dark Shadows).

What It's About: The rivalry between former members of a New Wave band comes to a head when one of them (Bonaduce) wants to tear down forest land to throw an '80s music festival and the other (Williams) tries to stop him. Then Bigfoot shows up.

How It Is: As I told a friend on Facebook, Bigfoot really unmixes my mixed feelings about The Asylum, and not in a good way. There's everything to love about the idea of Danny Bonaduce and Barry Williams hunting Bigfoot, but The Asylum managed to screw it up.

It's not just about crap effects, though there's also plenty of that. Bigfoot is a horrid, cheap looking CGI creature with maybe five or six different moves that get repeated over and over again throughout the movie. I've come to expect that of Asylum movies and usually cut them a lot of slack, but maybe that's a mistake. More on that in a minute.

What makes Bigfoot  an especially miserable experience is the story and the characters. Bonaduce plays Harley Anderson, a stereotypically crass right-winger who doesn't care about the environment, while Williams' Simon Quint is a just-as-cliché tree-hugging liberal. There's no depth or subtlety to either character and though the movie seems to have an environmental theme, it has absolutely nothing to say about it. Bigfoot is supposed to represent the dangers of messing with nature, but he slaughters people so indiscriminately that it's impossible to root for him. And when Simon tries to, it just makes him look as clueless and pathetic as Harley has been saying he is. Since Harley is just as despicable, there's really no one to pull for in the film.



Sherilyn Fenn is supposed to be the audience's connection to the movie as the town's new sheriff who's just taken over the job from her dad. But she and her deputy (Davison) spend the entire movie running around helplessly and making a lot of plans that don't go anywhere. The movie could lose both of them and not be affected except for its running time.

Bigfoot isn't all bad though. The actors seem to be enjoying themselves, especially Bonaduce and Howard Hesseman (who plays the town's delightfully crooked mayor). Alice Cooper shows up for a few minutes at the music festival and is a lot of fun to watch. And my favorite character in the whole movie was a nameless guy who dressed as Bigfoot to attend the concert. Well, him and the blonde woman with novelty glasses who kept making devil signs to Alice Cooper during the show. I also dig the guts it took to go ahead and make Bigfoot a giant, rampaging monster instead of a shadowy, skulking figure.



As much as I love those elements though, they frustrate me. They're meant to prove that the film isn't taking itself seriously, with the implication being that the audience shouldn't either. That's pretty much The Asylum's trademark, right? They're known for bad movies, so it's pretty dumb to be critical of them when their movies meet that expectation.

But I don't know if lowering the bar all the way to the ground should be an excuse. As much as I like certain moments in Bigfoot, watching it wasn't a joyful experience. I genuinely like some pretty bad movies, but this isn't one of them. The bad movies I enjoy are usually earnest attempts that just fail for whatever reason: not enough money, not enough talent, whatever. Most of Bigfoot just feels lazy and uncaring and no amount of winking at the camera can make that better.

Rating: Two out of five super-sized sasquatch

Mummy Monday | The Mummy's Hand (1940)

Who's In It: Dick Foran (Black Legion), Peggy Moran (King of the Cowboys), Wallace Ford (Freaks), Cecil Kellaway (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?), George Zucco (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, House of Frankenstein), and Tom Tyler (Stagecoach, The Adventures of Captain Marvel).

What It's About: A down-on-his-luck archeologist (Foran) and his partner (Ford) discover a map to an important tomb and convince a fellow American (Kellaway) and his daughter (Moran) to finance an expedition. Unfortunately, the tomb is guarded by an evil priest (Zucco) and a living mummy (Tyler).

How It Is: Not so much a remake of the 1932 Mummy as it is a reboot of the concept. It uses the same backstory for the mummy's creation. In fact, it reuses the same footage from the flashback scenes of The Mummy, replacing Boris Karloff with Tom Tyler in the parts where we get a good look at his face. But as you can tell from the plot description above, that's where the similarities end.

The Mummy's Hand was 15 years before Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, but there's a strange, Abbott and Costello schtick going on between Foran and Ford's characters. Foran's the straight man, while his partner Ford is a short, chubby, cowardly goof named Babe, which even sounds like the name of a Lou Costello character. Hand isn't a comedy, but it has a lighter heart than the Karloff film. Kellaway's character, for instance, isn't just a guy with money; he's a successful stage magician who loves showing off tricks and baffling his audience. Especially Babe.

The plot is lighter too. Moran's character isn't the reincarnated soul of the mummy's lost love and the mummy doesn't actually have a lot to do. He doesn't even speak, thanks to an addition to the backstory where his tongue was cut out prior to his mummification. The real villain of the piece is Zucco's priest, who's willing to use the mummy as a murder weapon to protect the tomb's secrets. Late in the movie, Zucco falls in love with Moran and tries to immortalize her and himself as the mummy keeps the good guys at bay. Instead of the gothic romance of Karloff's Mummy, The Mummy's Hand is mostly an adventure story.

That makes it more fun in a lot of ways, but also frustrating. I like Tyler's silent, shambling mummy. He's exactly what people think of when they imagine mummy movies. And maybe this is sacrilegious, but I like him better than Karloff's version. What's frustrating is that since he's just a weapon used by Zucco, he's really not important to the story and only even appears after a half-hour, which is significant in an hour-long film.

Another frustrating element is Moran's character. Especially after the way that Zita Johann's character so successfully looked after herself in the Karloff movie, it's hard to see Hand's only female stand around useless except when it's time to be kidnapped and rescued.

Rating: Three out of five mute, meandering monsters.

FallCon report

FallCon was a huge success on Saturday. It was an especially cold day (the weather folk were evening threatening snow), but that didn't keep people away. Crowds were great all day and especially huge around lunch time. And they were spending money, too. Every creator I talked to had great sales days.

Kill All Monsters did really well and my son David sold out of a couple of issues of his Hulkasaurus mini-comic. He also made huge dents in his stock of the other two. I'm really proud of that boy. He set his own prices and hawked his own stuff all day. His work is great, too. I know I'm totally biased, but his drawings are super imaginative and often laugh out loud funny. He's becoming a real pro at this.

My wife Diane had kids lined up all day long for face-painting and for the second year in a row FallCon was her most successful show of the year. After doing FallCon solo for so many years, it's been great sharing a table with David for the last two or three and with Diane a little more recently than that. As she says, "The family that cons together, bonds together." Gonna need that on a T-shirt.

We were worn out after the show, so I didn't get a post ready for yesterday, but I'll make that up tomorrow with two horror movies. And I'll have one up tonight, too. It is Mummy Monday after all.

[Thanks to Grant Gould for taking the photo above.]

The Last Days on Mars (2013)

Who's In It: Liev Schreiber (Scream, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), Elias Koteas (Some Kind of Wonderful, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Romola Garai (Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights), and Olivia Williams (The Sixth Sense).

What It's About: As an international team of scientists wrap up their stay on Mars, they discover an indigenous bacteria that turns humans into space zombies.

How It Is: Almost entirely rubbish, but I do have to say that it's a good-looking movie. It was shot in the deserts of Jordan, so the landscape is stunning, and the designs of the shelters and vehicles are cool. That's all the good I have to say about it though.

The Hollywood pitch is Alien with zombies set on Mars and that is exactly what the movie has to offer. I mean, it's nowhere near as good as Alien, but it's obviously trying to evoke that feel. Replace one of the greatest monster designs of all time with the most generic, overused monster of all time and voila, you've got The Last Days on Mars. All that's left to do is make a list of every sad horror trope ever and tick them off one by one. The movie writes itself. Or at least it feels like it did.

Rating: 2 out of 5 space rovers.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2014)

Who's In It: Tilda Swinton (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Moonrise Kingdom), Tom Hiddleston (Thor, The Avengers), Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, Stoker), Anton Yelchin (Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation), and John Hurt (Alien, Hellboy).

What It's About: A vampire couple struggles to find meaning in their immortal lives.

How It Is: Like Under the Skin, Only Lovers Left Alive starts with a horror trope, but isn’t interested in the horrific elements of it. Under the Skin was the story of a killer alien stalking human prey, but told from the alien’s point of view as a dark, fish-out-of-water experience. Only Lovers Left Alive is about vampires, but doesn’t care about the usual themes of seduction and death. Instead it focuses on immortality and how that would affect a person.

It also deals with hunger, but not in the usual way. The vampires obviously need blood to survive, but their real hunger is for meaning in lives that never end. When you have that much time, how do you fill it with purpose? It’s a cool way to tackle a fundamental question. It’s also the second time I’ve seen a writer/director use fantasy to discuss the meaning of life in the last few months, but Lovers’ Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) is way more successful at it than Luc Besson was in Lucy. Besson suggests that the meaning of life is to learn and to pass on knowledge, but that’s boring and unfulfilling. Exactly like his movie.

Jarmusch’s vampires each have different answers to the problem, but they’re all more compelling than Besson’s. Adam (Hiddleston) has succumbed to ennui and lost whatever’s driven him in the past. He’s a musician and he appreciates great art, but he’s also depressed about the state of humanity and finds no joy in anything. His one tether to life is his wife Eve (Swinton), who lives on the other side of the world, but travels to Detroit to visit Adam when she learns he needs help.

Their separation isn’t due to a rift in their relationship. It’s obvious that they love each other very much and always have. Instead, not living together seems to be the natural product of their healthy, but immortal relationship. It’s good for married people to have individual interests that they don’t necessarily share with their partners. And when they literally have all the time in the world, it’s easy to see that extend to where they live. Detroit very much reflects Adam’s state of mind, while Eve embraces the life and culture she finds in Tangiers. Adam has withdrawn from vampire society and relies on an unwitting human (Yelchin) to get him stuff he needs, while Eve has the support of fellow vampire Christopher Marlowe (yes, that Christopher Marlowe; played by John Hurt). Another coping method is represented by Eve’s sister Ava (Wasikowska) who lives hedonistically and carelessly among humans.

Jarmusch presents one of these points of view as the healthiest, but he never comes right out and says it. He simply introduces these characters and lets us spend a couple of hours with them until we figure it out on our own. And that’s both the biggest strength and biggest problem with the movie. Adam and Eve’s worlds are aesthetically gorgeous, filled with things that give them pleasure, and it’s pleasant to spend time with them in those environments. But that’s really all that the movie is about. Things happen to the characters, but there’s very little actual story. Enjoyment of it depends entirely on how much you like just sort of hanging out with these characters. For me, I enjoyed visiting with them for a couple of hours and listening and thinking about what they had to say, but when our time came to an end, I wasn’t exactly wrangling for an invitation to come back.

Rating: Three out of five nonchalant nosferatu.

The Mummy (1932)

Who's In It: Boris Karloff (Frankenstein, The Black Cat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas), Zita Johann (Tiger Shark, The Sin of Nora Moran), David Manners (Dracula, The Black Cat), Edward Van Sloan (Frankenstein, Dracula), and Arthur Byron (The Prisoner of Shark Island).

What It's About: An ancient, undead being (Karloff) preys on a young woman (Johann) as the men in her life (Manners, Van Sloan, and Byron) try to protect her.

How It Is: The Mummy is essentially a remake of Dracula, from the plot description above to Edward Van Sloan and David Manner's basically playing Van Helsing and Harker all over again. Also, The Mummy's director Karl Freund was officially the cinematographer of Dracula, but making that film was such a chaotic mess that Tod Browning unofficially let (made?) Freund direct most of it. Add in an Egyptian protective charm that substitutes nicely for Dracula's crucifixes and the similarities are too many to ignore.

But if it's a remake, it's better than the movie it's imitating. The plots of both hinge on their leading ladies and Zita Johann's Helen is way more compelling than Helen Chandler's Mina. That's partly because Johann is a better actress (Chandler's melodramatic performance nearly ruins Dracula for me), but her character also has stronger ties to the villain and takes a more active role in fighting him. In fact, she ultimately saves herself from Karloff's Imhotep and the men just rush in afterwards to help clean up.

The pacing of The Mummy is brisker than Dracula, so it's a more exciting film. It also has more genuine chills. Imhotep is much creepier than Dracula, though he sacrifices Dracula's charisma to get there. That's one place where Dracula beats The Mummy. Imhotep is scarier, but I like Dracula more. I also prefer the gothic aesthetic of Dracula to The Mummy's Egyptian one, but that's a minor advantage. From a storytelling standpoint, I'll take The Mummy every time.

Rating: 4 out of 5 resurrected princesses.

Under the Skin (2014)

Who's In It: Scarlett Johansson (The Avengers, The Prestige)

What It's About: An alien disguises itself as a woman in order to travel Scotland and lure men to their dooms. Until...

How It Is: Not as much a horror film as the premise suggests, but that's okay. I may stretch the definition of the genre this month. Johansson plays a murderous alien, but the film isn't about exploring the horror of that from her victims' point of view. It's interested in her story and that's cool, even though I wasn't as wrapped up in it as I wanted to be.

Director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) believes that if a shot is worth taking, it's worth spending at least thirty seconds looking at. And sometimes that's true. Under the Skin is largely a gorgeous film and makes great use of its Scot landscapes and cities. But the languid editing reaaaally makes the movie drag. To its credit, my mind never wandered away from the movie and some of my time was well spent pondering Johansson's character and her motivations. But some of my time was also spent waiting impatiently for the next shot. That means that I was always interested in what was coming next, so the film is riveting in that way, but it can also be frustrating.

Something Glazer did that was cool though was shoot some of the film Borat-style with hidden cameras recording Johansson as she seduces and has conversations with non-actors who don't know they're being filmed. I knew that going in, but I didn't know how much was shot that way or which scenes. That meant that for a while every shot had the illusion of authenticity, so that when some really horrible things started to happen they were that much more impactful as I tried to figure out what was staged and what was just Glazer letting the camera record life. As the film went on though, I got better at figuring out what was what and that impact wasn't as powerful.

I don't want to reveal too much about the development of Johansson's character, but she does have an arc and it's at least an interesting one, if not especially powerful for me. She's a blank slate, a cipher that you can either read a lot into or not much at all. Britt Hayes wrote an awesome piece for Screen Crush that's an example of the depth to be mined from what's going on with Johansson's character. I watched it from a different perspective and didn't get as much out of it. It's a good film and possibly a great one, but where it falls on that scale depends on how much you're willing to give back to it. Maybe I was just feeling lazy, but while I was intellectually curious about how the alien was changing and behaving, I was never emotionally invested in it.

Rating: Two out of five man-eating extraterrestrials.

Countdown to Halloween!

James Bond will return!

But first, we have some Halloween to take care of.

So, my James Bond project hit a giant speed bump. More of a speed mountain, really.

I blame a couple of things. First, the end of August got super busy with End of Summer activities and I slowed down my reading of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But probably more impactful was finally hitting the Dr. No movie in my schedule. I started the Bond project because I wanted to blog through the movies, but I wanted to do that after a fresh look at the books since those have always informed my opinions of the films. When I discovered what looked like an actual character arc through the book series, I got excited about that and was looking forward to OHMSS, which I imagined to be the top of that arc. When I got to it, I was raring to go. But then I watched Dr. No and had such a ball blogging about it that I suddenly got bored with the idea of going back to the novels again.

Don't worry. I'm still reading OHMSS and I'll finish blogging through the Fleming novels and all of the films. But the scope of the project has changed and I'm not going to make myself do a bunch of stuff that I'd planned to do. I feel like I've said what I want to say about the newspaper strips, for instance. I'm still planning to read those, but I'm not going to force myself to write about them if I don't notice anything new. I'm also not going to blog through the non-Fleming novels. I'd still like to read those too, but I know that when I finish Man with the Golden Gun I'm gonna want a break. I made a trip to our local mystery bookstore a few weeks ago and picked up a bunch of stuff I can't wait to dig into, so I'm not going to put that off while I force myself to endure Q'ute. Not having to blog all that relaxes my schedule so that I won't get burned out and leaves me extra time to do some things I want to do like the Countdown to Halloween.

I'm doing this year's Countdown a little differently from the last few years. Instead of picking a monster and writing about various iterations of it over the next 31 days, I'm going to watch a ton of horror movies and write about those. The plan is to do that for 31 movies, but I'm not going to beat myself up if I miss a day or two. There's some awesome Kill All Monsters stuff brewing that I shouldn't talk about yet, but it involves deadlines and I need to make sure I hit those. There should be plenty of time to do that and watch/blog about 31 horror movies, but if I ever end up in a spot where I have to make a choice... well, you know.

One way or the other though, this blog's about to get a lot busier. Hope you're up for some Halloween, then we'll get back to Bond in November and take another break in December for the next installment of the Christmas Carol project. We've also got new posts scheduled from GW Thomas, who's guest-blogged here about space pulp a few times and has lots more to say. Fun times ahead.

FallCon is this Saturday!

If you live in or near Minneapolis/St Paul, I hope you're making plans to come to FallCon on Saturday. I'll be there with Kill All Monsters books and posters and a few other things, but even if you've already got what you need, please stop by and say "hi" anyway. It makes the day go by and you know I love to see you.

My wife Diane and son David will also be there. Diane will be the one decorating kids' faces with superhero and other nerd stuff. David will have issues of his Hulkasaurus mini-comics and plans to debut a new anthology of short strips. He showed me one of them and I LOLed all over it, so it's good stuff. Not that I'm biased.

Pirates of Treasure Island (2006)

Who's In It: Lance Henriksen (Aliens, The Terminator, Millenium), Tom Nagel (Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter's Cove and a bit part in Man of Steel), and Rebekah Kochan (Eating Out, Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds, Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat).

What It's About: A loose adaptation of Treasure Island in which Jim Hawkins (Nagel) is in his 20s and dating Anne Bonney (Kochan), while Long John Silver (Henriksen) lost his leg to giant insects.

How It Is: This found its way into my Netflix queue I'm sure because I was just adding pirate movies one day. If I ever knew what it was, I'd forgotten until I popped it in and saw the opening words, "The Asylum Presents." Coming out the same year as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, this was The Asylum's mockbuster rip-off of that franchise.

I go back and forth on my feelings about The Asylum and did so again during the ten seconds after I saw their logo on this thing. First my heart sank, dispirited that I wasn't about to discover some hidden gem. But that disappointment quickly turned into "let's do this" and a determination to enjoy whatever goofiness I was about to jump into.

The effects - what few there are - are actually okay. The giant insects that inhabit Treasure Island are rare, so the CGI team only needed to create a couple of them and they look pretty good. Director Leigh Scott even hired a real ship to film on, though it's obviously not moving in the scenes that are shot on deck. The effects and ship money all came out of the costume budget though. The wardrobe (as Chris Schweizer pointed out when I tweeted some images) looks like it was borrowed from a community theater, and even then some hats and other pieces get reused between characters.

We know going in though that any Asylum film is made on the super cheap, so let's not belabor that. What's worth judging is how they tell the story and Pirates of Treasure Island makes some fun choices. Making Jim Hawkins older changes the story in a big way, but it's still interesting, especially when his girlfriend turns out to be a famous, feared pirate who doesn't want that life for him. Giant insects are also a nice twist and an early indicator that the movie isn't taking itself at all seriously. As are the wacky novelty glasses worn by Blind Pew and having Captain Smollett demand that everyone use the French pronunciation of his name. And while I wouldn't dream of spoiling them for you, the dying words of a major character are unbelievably stupid and hilarious and end the movie in the same spirit that it began.

Rating: Three out five giant, peg-leg making bugs.