Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) – Review

Republic Pictures may have been considered a “Poverty Row” company when compared to bigger studios like Warner Brothers, Columbia and Fox as they were mostly relegated to doing B movies and westerns, but when it came to producing serials they left all the others in the dust by giving us such great entries as Dick Tracy and Zorro’s Fighting Legion they dominated Saturday morning matinees. Then in 1941 Republic Pictures brought to the world the Adventures of Captain Marvel that was not only the single greatest serial of all times but it would also be the first time a comic book superhero had ever graced the silver screen.

In 1940 Republic Pictures struck a deal with National Comics (later to become DC Comics) to make a fifteen chapter serial based Superman but unfortunately disagreements with the script and how to handle the character forced the two companies to part ways. Enter Fawcett Comics, the publishers of Whiz Comics, and they offered the serial rights of their flagship hero Captain Marvel to Republic who were more than happen to tackle The Big Red Cheese. And why exactly does the Adventures of Captain Marvel stand head and shoulders above its serial brethren? Republic Pictures certainly didn’t spend any extra money to bring a superhero to life, the action isn’t any better than you’d see in a King of the Rocket Men or Zorro serials, and the cast though filled with excellent character actors it wasn’t anything to write home about.  What the Adventures of Captain Marvel serial did have was an iconic hero who actually looked to be flying through the sky.  For close-ups of Captain Marvel the standard process shot of a guy on wires in front rear-projected screen was used but for the long wide shots of our hero flying across the landscape or up to the top of a building they actually filmed on location without any optical effects, and this was done by having a slightly larger than 1:1 scale papier-mâché dummy of Captain Marvel being slid down a long cable between two points.  A simple but effective technique that must have blown the minds of any 1940's kid who had the pleasure of seeing it.

 

You will believe a dummy can fly.

The plot of the Adventures of Captain Marvel wasn’t all that dissimilar from the dozens of other serials that came out before or since; an American archaeological expedition traipse into the country of Siam so that they can loot the Valley of the Tombs and thus find the lost secret of the Scorpion Kingdom. And what exactly is this lost secret? Well turns out that hidden inside the tomb is an artifact called the Golden Scorpion, which is basically a large model of scorpion that has special crystal lenses located in each of its pincers, but when the legs of the scorpion are moved and the crystals aligned you could either find yourself at the wrong end of an atom smasher or be turned to gold. Needless to say both its destructive power and its ability to generate endless wealth gets the Malcolm expedition all hot and bothered.  The group decide to divide the crystals amongst the members, giving Billy Batson (Frank Coghlan Jr) the scroll that contains the directions on how to operate the Golden Scorpion, and they plan a quick return to the United States.

 

The Malcolm Expedition consists of your standard group of white upper class twits.

Of course it’s not a proper serial if it doesn’t have a nefarious villain for our hero to thwart at every turn and for this one we have hooded dude named The Scorpion who manages to incite the locals to attack the Malcolm Expedition for defiling the sacred Valley of the Tombs. During the attack Billy is knocked out and both his scroll and the Golden Scorpion are stolen, but it’s when members of the expedition get trapped when the nearby volcano causes the tomb to shake apart that we are introduced to the wizard Shazam (Nigel De Brulier).  It's this immortal wizard who tells young Billy that he will be given the ability to transform into Captain Marvel (Tom Tyler) by simply speaking the wizard's name, and with this transformation he will be granted great power that he must only use in the service of right.  He's also supposed to protect the secret of the Golden Scorpion but us comic book fans could give a rat's ass about that.

These powers consist of the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and speed of Mercury and because of that line-up of powers this serial has a tough time coming up with viable threats for a character who is basically a demi-god. In his first real battle he approaches a few of the Scorpions men who are manning a Browning heavy machine gun; they open fire on him but the bullets bounce harmlessly off Captain Marvel’s chest and the goons logically run away in terror. What many fans of comic books may find surprising is that Captain Marvel’s response to this is to pick up the Browning and gun down the fleeing natives by shooting them in their backs.

 

The smile that he sports during his fights is kind of chilling.

In fact Captain Marvel ends up killing more people in these twelve chapters than the villainous Scorpion does, and for the most part he does it with an almost maniacal grin on his face. This stone cold killer version of Captain Marvel so upset creator C.C. Beck so much that he made no bones about how much he hated this take on his beloved creation, but on the other hand he found the almost sadistic glee in the kills absurdly funny.

In the chapter titled "Death Takes the Wheel" the serials main damsel in distress Betty Wallace (Louise Currie) is unconscious in an out of control car as it careens wildly down a multiple story parking garage (this wasn’t even the first time she found herself unconscious in an out of control vehicle) but Captain Marvel of course arrives in time save her. Unfortunately for the villains, who had placed poor Betty in that particular death trap, Captain Marvel is all about brutal payback; he flies to roof of the 30 story parking garage, catches an engine block the idiots try to drop on him, throws the engine block at one of the henchmen and then the grabs the other goon and tosses him off the roof.

 

Do not screw with Captain Marvel.

So how do the Scorpion and his men pose a threat to Captain Marvel? I mean you can’t really have a movie serial with nail-biting cliffhangers if the outcome is never in question.  Well to solve this problem most of the chapters deal with one of Billy’s friends being in danger, whether it be Betty or his best pal Whitey Murphy (William Benedict), and occasionally it will be Billy in danger but then the script forces the henchman to gag Billy for no particular reason (we know it's so he can't speak the name "Shazam!" but the bad guys don't know that) and they never gag Betty or Whitey.  Of course most of those cliffhangers are resolved with Billy managing to get the gag off at the last minute so there really wasn’t all that much suspense after the first couple of times he does this.

The funniest cliffhanger has to be when Captain Marvel gets knocked back between an electric eye and is shocked unconscious by a bolt of high intensity electricity (he gets shocked unconscious a total of two times in this serial and being his powers arrive via a lightning I guess electricity could be a weakness) and he falls on a conveyor belt that carries him towards the deadly blade of a guillotine. Watching this cliffhanger one can only ask the question, “What in the hell is a metal blade going to do against the world’s mightiest mortal?” The answer is of course nothing at all.

 

The Guillotine of Total Fail.

Now you certainly can’t fill twelve chapters, and roughly four hours, of your serial with just Captain Marvel beating the crap out of a bunch of dime store hoodlums, it’d be fun but you still need some kind of plot to hang it all on, so for much of serials running time you have the Scorpion trying to steal the crystals from the members of the Malcolm Expedition while also dealing with Billy trying to figure out which one of the members is most likely the Scorpion himself. The serial does cheat a bit to keep the big mystery of “Who is the Scorpion?” by having Billy, Betty, and Whitey almost tumbling on a clue that would reveal the secret multiple times but then the writers would just abandon that particular clue and race off to the next scene. To make it even harder for audiences to figure it out who the Scorpion is under that hood his voice  was provided by uncredited actor Gerald Mohr who sounds nothing like any member of the Malcolm Expedition.

 

In fact his voice sounds a lot like someone narrating a nature documentary.

Co-directors William Whitney and John English clearly knew that the mystery wasn’t all that important, the members sitting around a table all looking equally suspicious is almost laughable at times, the real point to the plot is how it can be used to string together all those scenes of peril, daring do and knock-down drag-out fights. A key components to all of that is stuntman Dave Sharpe who doubled Tom Tyler for the more dangerous and acrobatic feats; one particular moment when a couple of native goons go after Captain Marvel we get to see Dave Sharpe perform a standing back flip to kick the two bad guys in their jaws. Sharpe was also integral in making the flying moments work as his acrobatic training made the take-offs and landing that much more effective.  Add all that to how bang on Tom Tyler looked in costume and you had all the ingredients you needed to make a great superhero serial.

As serials go there really isn’t anything in the same league as the Adventures of Captain Marvel as its stunts and set pieces make almost all others pale in comparison, with maybe King of the Rocket Men being the closest contender, and the pure fun that fills these twelve chapters makes this a true gem.  Kino Lorber has now released this action pack serial on Bluray with a beautifully re-mastered 4K scan from the Paramount Pictures Archives, simply put this is a must own for fans of superhero movies and classic serials. Highly recommended!

The Cat from Outer Space (1978) – Review

By the 1970s the Golden Age of Disney animated movies was clearly over and the studio began to focus on their live action movies as not only were they cheaper to make then animated features but you could also make a dozen or more live action films for the price of one animated feature.  Sadly the gamut of quality in these live action movies ranged wildly from the excellent adventure tales like The Island at the Top of the World to the less than memorable zany comedies such as One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing. One could suspect that many of these lower budgeted films hit theaters for just a quick buck, with no real intent to become lasting classics or big money makers, but were really meant to provide content for the studio’s very popular television show The Wonderful World of Disney. A prime example of this would be 1978’s The Cat from Outer Space as its low budget, and a cast of mostly television actors, has a very “Made for Television” feel to it.

The premise for The Cat from Outer Space was nothing new to audience goers as aliens being stranded on Earth for repairs dates back to the 50s with It Came from Outer Space, a film that this Disney version clearly wanted to invoke by their choice of title, but instead of a one-eyed horrifying looking alien creature the boys at Disney went in the cute and cuddly direction with a house cat. Of course a few years later a young Steven Spielberg would take the stranded alien premise with his film E.T. The Extraterrestrial in a slightly different direction, which funnily enough had more of the classic Disney feel of childlike wonder than anything the studio had managed to put out in years. Now looking back, without our nostalgia glasses on, let’s take a peek at Disney’s The Cat from Outer Space.

 

Regardless of anything else I’ll give them that the alien craft was a neat design.

The movie opens with an unidentified flying object landing in a farmer’s field because it is suffering some kind of mechanical failure, and before you can say “Anal Probe” a farmer has called in the military and the place is soon swarming with guys in uniform. First on the scene is General Stilton (Harry Morgan), a four star general who is bound and determined to find out if this strange craft is some kind of commie weapon, and along with him is Colonel Woodruff (Howard Platt), Captain Anderson (James Hampton) and Sergeant Duffy (Ronnie Schell) who also provided the voice of the cat), and they will be supplying much of the comedy relief as they bumble along trying to track down the alien invade.

 

“No sign of death rays or tripod war machines but shouldn’t we nuke’em just to be safe?”

The spacecraft’s occupant had managed to exit his ship before the military arrived to snatch his craft and is thus able to follow them back to the army base, and being the alien is in fact a cat he is able to quietly sneak around and find out what the Earth men are planning to do. Lucky for him General Stilton seeks advice from local science lab Energy Research Laboratory (E.R.L.), hoping to find out how the alien’s propulsion systems works, and even luckier for the space cat he encounters one of the visiting scientist Dr. Frank Wilson (Ken Berry) whose radical scientific theories just so happen could be key to fixing his damaged ship. Frank is an “Out of the Box” kind of thinker and is kicked out of the briefing by Stilton, not so much because of his outlandish theories but because of his terrible attempts at humor. Ken Berry was a staple of television throughout the 60s and 70s most notably in The Andy Griffith Show and its spin-off Mayberry RFD but as good as a comic actor he is Berry can’t really pull off the scientist aspect of the character and basically makes Fred MacMurray’s Absent Minded Professor look like Albert Einstein.

 

In this film Ken Berry comes across as a poor man's Dean Jones.

The cat is named Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7, who Frank names Jake for the sake of convenience, and the cat promises to give Frank advanced scientific knowledge if he would help with the fixing of the spacecraft (apparently whatever planet this cat is from they don’t have any kind of non-interference prime directive), Frank quickly agrees and thus madcap shenanigans can now begin. Rounding off the comedic cast of characters is Dr. Elizabeth "Liz" Bartlett (Sandy Duncan) in the thankless role of fellow scientist at E.R.L. who is this movie’s possible love interest and girl hostage when things go bad.  Then we have Dr. Norman Link (MacLean Stevenson) another scientist from E.R.L. but one who is more interested in drinking Frank’s beer and losing money to his bookie than he is in science (his specialty is garbage and I’m not sure what field of energy that falls in), and because the military don’t fill the antagonist bill completely we have another employee of E.R.L. by the name of Mr. Stallwood (Roddy McDowall) who is in fact a spy. But what kind of spy is he? Is he a Russian spy working for the commies? Maybe he’s an industrial spy employed by a rival research company? Either one of those would have made perfect sense but this movie has no intention of ever making sense.

 

He’s actually working for what looks like a Bond villain.

And what interest would a shadowy organization have with an alien cat? Well what they really want is Jakes magical collar. And why is that you ask, well we learn that on Jake’s home world cats are the top of the evolutionary ladder, as he explains, “In our civilization that’s as far as we needed to evolve. We developed are brain to a fine point. Now, man rose off his four legs and developed tools, machinery, agriculture and a chronic pain in his lower back. We developed tools for the mind. This collar here, it amplifies brain power.” With the collar Jake can amplify his telekinetic and telepathic abilities; he can defy gravity, freeze people in their tracks, and most importantly he communicate telepathically with Frank so the people at Disney don’t have to worry about getting a cats lip movements synced to any kind of dialog. What doesn’t make sense is that Jake tells Frank that without the collar he’s just an ordinary cat. If that is the case how did these advance cats manufacture and develop the tools required to make those special collars?  Because according to Jake without them they don’t have telekinesis to move shit around. Last time I checked cats do not have opposable thumbs, which is one of the key things that allowed man to become top of the food chain, and so I’m not sure how even super smart cats managed to pull this off. It would have been much simpler for the script to state that it only amplified his ability but even without the collar he’d still have some degree of telekinetic and telepathic ability. Of course this would have prevented those comic moments when he loses his collar and our heroes have to figure out how to pull off whatever scheme they've got going without Jake’s help.

 

Such as hustling pool.

And why would our hapless heroes be hustling pool when they’ve only got a short time to fix Jakes ship? Well turns out that to fix the ship they need about $120 thousand dollars’ worth of gold and Link’s bookie connection is the only way to get that kind of money fast enough. Disney has clearly stated in such films as Son of Flubber and Black Beard’s Ghost that cheating is completely okay as long you have a good reason, but unfortunately in this movie the cheating done isn’t even orchestrated all that well.

• Jake makes a horse win a race by speeding up the animal in such a fashion that it goes from being several lengths behind to winning in a matter of seconds, which mostly likely would have exploded the poor horse’s heart and tore up most of its muscles.
• They hustle their neighborhood bookie by winning a pool game against the bookie’s ringer, but the manner in which they make the balls fly around the table telekinetically there is no way the crooks wouldn’t suspect foul play, our heroes would most likely find themselves fitted with a nice pair of cement galoshes.

 

And good ole Frank could go to jail for impersonating a four star general.

With gold in hand Frank and Jake are able to fix the ship, after of course having to outwit the military at every step of the way (Frank is able to pass himself off as General Stilton because the base gate guard is clearly clinically blind), but once things seem all wrapped up a wrinkle appears in the form of Stallwood’s mysterious boss Mr. Olympus (William Prince) who had his goons kidnap Liz to force our heroes to hand over the cat’s collar. How does this plan work? Well Mr. Olympus sends Link to deliver the ultimatum to Frank and Jake, while they are working on the ship inside the bases hanger, and once again the military personnel show their lack of sense by letting Link on the base by him simply stating that he is the General’s friend. Worse is that the manner in which Mr. Olympus planned to counter Jake’s ability to freeze people is never explained nor what he exactly planned to do with the collar if he managed to get it.

Note: Somehow Mr. Olympus believes this collar won’t just make him a lot of money but will also somehow help him conqueror the universe. Sure telekinetic and telepathic powers are pretty nifty but I don’t see them on par with something like the Death Star.

The film’s big finale has a chase between a helicopter occupied by Mr. Olympus and company and a wreck of bi-plane being flown by Jake’s collar and a terrified Frank. The flying stunt-work on display during this sequences is quite good, harmed of course by close-ups of our leads that are clearly in front of a badly processed blue-screen (not to mention the really fake looking stuffed cat prop that is supposed to be Jake), but as good as some of the moments in this chase are it goes on far too long. By this time in the movie we've had Frank and the gang win the money needed to get the gold, they then managed to infiltrate the military base (a second time I might add) against all odds, next they fixed the ship in time for Jake to make the rendezvous with the mothership, but then the ending is hijacked by this silly subplot with the Bond villains.

 

At this point the end credits should have finished rolling.

The Cat from Outer Space though released theatrically does have a very made-for-television vibe to it which is not surprising as director Norman Tokar was known mostly for his television work; he had helmed a handful of Disney projects like Follow Me, Boys! and The Apple Dumpling Gang but the kindest thing you can say about his stuff is that it is competent and work-man-like. Clearly he was like many directors brought on by Disney Studios as just "guns for hire" with no individual style required or probably wanted. One can look back at The Cat from Outer Space with fondness but at most it can be charitably called inoffensively nice with a couple of fun comic moments. Sure this a movie aimed at kids but for me that's no excuse for poor story telling as just a year later we’d get another sci-fi comedy from Disney called The Unidentified Flying Oddball which though scientifically accurate as The Cat from Outer Space it at least worked the comic elements a little better.  Then that very same year we’d get Disney’s The Black Hole where we’d see that maybe Disney should have stayed focused on the comedy aspect and left science fiction to other studios.

Final Thoughts:

• General Stilton brings the spacecraft’s propulsion unit to E.R.L. to get the best minds on the case but then for some reason he puts the unit back inside the ship. Wouldn’t that thing be kept in a lab to be studied?
• Frank is able to use Jake’s collar in the same fashion as the space cat. Does that mean we are just as mentally evolved as them? If so does that mean we've just been too lazy to develop interstellar travel?
• Jake hits on Liz’s cat which would be like a human hitting on a particularly attractive neanderthal.
• Mr. Olympus and his goons are all wearing parachutes in the helicopter which is a strange thing for anyone to do unless you had planned to bail out from the start.
• Jake decides to stay on Earth and is allowed to as a representative of an off-world "friendly power" but when he is sworn in as an American citizen he makes the judge float up into the air.

 

So he’s from an advance alien civilization but also a bit of a dick.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) – Review

Can true love save the day? Well in the 1997 science fiction film The Fifth Element writer/director Luc Besson certainly thought so as that film revealed that love was the key ingredient to saving the universe and now 20 years later with Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Luc Besson once again puts love center stage, if not exactly in saving if not the universe this time out but at least the day. Now we must ask ourselves, does the theme work this time out?

The movie opens with one of the best cinematic moments put to film as we see the International Space Station where over the years it becomes a place of peace where people of many nations can come to work and explore the future of humanity, and during this opening montage the visitors to the station start coming not from just Earth but from the far reaches of space.  Mankind is not alone.

 

Note: Luc Besson really loves those big clunky alien spacesuits.

The President of the World State Federation (Rutger Hauer) explains to us that the ever expanding space station has reached such a point of weight and mass that it now poses a threat to the Earth and so now named “Alpha Station” it is must be sent off on a deep space mission of peace, and over time it becomes the home of thousands of alien species or as one could say it becomes the city of a thousand planets. The first five minutes of this film perfectly encapsulates our hopes for the future but unfortunately it also raises our expectations for the rest of the film that Luc Besson is unable to meet. The film jumps 400 years further into the future as we are introduced to a beatific seemingly primate alien race who seem at total harmony with their planet, and they do seem to have amazing beaches, but soon this idyllic world is destroyed when it is caught in the crossfires of a massive space battle.

 

Paradise Lost.

Who could be responsible for such an atrocity you ask? Well if you are well versed in your science fiction analogs you’ll probably assume its evil white government men who are behind the wiping out of a primitive indigenous people, and you’d be right. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a simply gorgeous film but its themes are less than original and covers ground that has recently been well hammered over by James Cameron in his film Avatar.  I will give Besson credit for at least giving us a more interesting alien race than what Cameron’s did incessantly dull Navi, but unfortunately the film does not escape having two truly dull characters as the titular heroe, and the title character of Valerian (Dane DeHaan) is about as boring as one could get.  Though he is teamed up with slightly more interesting of Laureline (Cara Delevingne) who is not only Valerian’s partner but also the film’s love interest.

 

The lack of on screen chemistry between these two is truly staggering.

The plot is your standard hero must retrieve space MacGuffin while various nefarious dark forces will try and stop him.  Valerian and Laureline will run and shoot their way through various CGI created environments as they bounce between being ordered given to them by the Defence Minister (Herbie Hancock) and Commander Arun Filitt (Clive Owen) who does everything but a twirl a moustache to clue us in that he is the bad guy. Subtlety has never been Luc Besson’s strong suit and none of the film’s characters venture far beyond their two dimensional natures that is required by the plot.

 

Stock alien underworld crime boss #3

The hundreds of alien races and cool locations are sadly unable to overcome the fact that the film lacks any sense of urgency (towards the end they throw in the ticking clock but it doesn’t help much) and the pacing is all over the map. The biggest example of this would be when Laureline is captured a group of nasty aliens who make her dress up pretty so that they can have her brains for dinner, and it has nothing to do with anything. Just how bad does this sequence fail?

Let's break it down:

• Laureline is supposed to be Valerian’s partnerm and a bit of a badass in her own right, but she is captured with ease and just sits around waiting to be rescued.
• Valerian needs a disguise for his rescue plan to work so he visits an exotic bar owned by Jolly the Pimp (Ethan Hawke).
• We next sit through a “striptease” number by a shape-shifting dancer named Bubble who is played by Rihanna.
• Valerian wears the shape-shifter so he can sneak in to the alien clubhouse and start lopping of alien heads.
• Bubble is killed during their escape because the filmmakers thought we needed a bit of pathos and killing off this sweet innocent character would be the best way to achieve that.

 

What was Besson thinking?

This is a twenty-two minute detour that had no business being in a film that is two hours and twenty minutes long, not only was it a complete waste of screen time but it also undercut the character of Laureline while introducing and killing off one of few other interesting ones the film provided. This kind of scene may have worked great if you reading it in an issue of a comic book, and this film is based on the French comic Valérian and Laureline, but in a movie it just derails any momentum you had achieved up to that point.

 

Rihanna is given a character that deserved a better movie.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has space battles, colorful villains, and frenetic chase through the underbelly of an amazing space station but at no point did I ever find myself fully invested. There was a lot of potential on screen, and every penny of the $180 million dollar budget is clearly on display, but when the film tries to hang itself on the emotional core of Valerian and Laureline’s relationship it fails and it fails hard. If you want to see one of the best looking science fiction films out there this is worth a look but if you are hoping for a solid story and good characters this is hard one to recommend.  True love may have saved the day but it didn't quite save the movie.

 

"I can't be this film's white savior if you guys are even whiter than I am."

The Punisher: Season One Review

Season two of Netflix’s Daredevil brought everyone’s favorite gun toting vigilante to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and this particular depiction of The Punisher was so well executed that he completely overshadowed the Elektra storyline. Once Frank Castle was presumed dead and left the plot I became a lot less interested. Thus when it was announced that Netflix was going to give The Punisher his own web television series I was thrilled at the news and eagerly awaited its arrival. Sadly my expectations may have been a tad too high.

The season opens with Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) hunting down and killing the last members of the criminals groups believed to be responsible for the death of his family, oh if only things could be so easy for dear ole Frank, turns out that the Castle family were actually victims of a conspiracy consisting of C.I.A. and Homeland Security members who used Federal resources to orchestrate the Castle family's death because they wrongly believed that Frank had leaked information damaging to their torture assassination squad. Remember when The Punisher was this badass vigilante who killed criminals because the justice system failed to keep them locked up? Well that guy is gone and is now replaced by Black-Ops murderer who only comes after the main villains because they thought he’d ratted them out and then made the mistake of killing his family.

 

I miss the days of straight forward obsessed vigilantes.

Did we really need to have more people directly responsible for the death of Frank Castle's family? What's wrong with The Punisher going after random bad guys? There is certainly enough gangland activities across America to keep Castle busy for several season.  All this does is allow the writers toss in some more character angst as Castle blames himself for their deaths, and being he was one of those doing the murdering and torture the karmic blowback can’t be all that unexpected. Now the first episode did involve Frank saving some dude from being murdered by his fellow crooks when the robbery of a high stakes poker game went wrong, resulting in Castle brutally murdering at least a dozen people, but this kind of thing is abandoned for the season’s main arc of Castle finding the people responsible for ruining his life.

 

Look in the mirror Frank.

Joining him from the comic books is Micro (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who here is an ex-NSA analyst on the run from the same guys that Castle is after. Turns out he was the one who leaked damaging Intel about the death squad to Agent Dinah Madani (Amber Rose Revah) who is now working for Homeland Security and is obsessed with the hunting down of this squad for their involvement in the death of her partner Ahmed Zubair (Shez Sardar) of the Afghan National Police. Micro teams up with Castle to hunt down the mysterious Agent Orange who ran the death squad, which was financed by smuggling heroin hidden inside the bodies of dead Americans, all the while Madani and her new partner Sam Stein (Michael Nathanson), whose life expectancy you could track with an egg timer, get caught in the crossfire between Castle and the bad guys.

You will wait about ten episodes to see him back in this costume.

I’m not saying the plotting of this show is overly convoluted but at times it becomes so forced and contrived that it has to routinely bend over backwards, with characters doing the dumbest things, just to propel the plot forward. And one of the strangest decisions the show made was in turning the comic book character of Billy Russo (Ben Barnes) from the gangster who would eventually become the villain Jigsaw into an ex-military friend of Frank Castle, and he’s so obviously a bad guy that one simply groans when Madani ends up in bed with him. But as bad as his character is the cartoonishly evil and clichéd Agent Orange, who is revealed to be a high ranking C.I.A. agent named Rawlins (Paul Schulze), is a clear victim of lazy writing.

 

If he had a moustache he’d twirl it.

But what about the action? The first episode does have some nice Punisher action but if you are to take into account all thirteen episodes the percentage of action versus people just yapping about conspiracy and stuff I’d say the series as a whole is only about 10% action. And an important note to comic book fans Frank Castle retires his iconic skull emblazoned costume in the first episode and doesn’t put it back on until episode eleven, so don’t be expecting a lot of “Punisher” action as to be honest the series feels more like a Lee Child's Jack Reacher story than it does anything else. Seriously, I’ve read about every Jack Reacher novel and many of them consist of Reacher trying to uncover some government or military conspiracy, where he will then get the aid of a female from some form of law enforcement, and that is literally what this season of The Punisher is about.

“Do you think The Punisher will eventually show up?"

Though this review may seem fairly negative I must state that it’s certainly better than Iron Fist and I’d say it's on par with The Defenders, and if this had been called anything other than The Punisher, like say something along the lines of Jack Reacher: Never Look Back, I’d be a lot more forgiving. Netflix introduced an excellent version of Frank Castle in the second season of Daredevil and then for some reason they took the character in a completely different direction. It’s a shame because Jon Bernthal leads a very talented cast here and when we do get action it’s pretty balls-to-the-wall great, but stretched out over thirteen hour long episodes it seems overly drawn out for the story it’s trying to tell. It’s clear that the Netflix model for their original shows is to make overlong movies that are “broken” up into chapters designed for binge watching, unfortunately it doesn’t work here as not only is the overarching storyline completely unoriginal, with clichéd moments flying in from all directions, but The Punisher character would probably work better in an episodic format.

Stray Thoughts:

• The season repeatedly cuts away from Frank Castle and friends to follow an ex-solider with PTSD who turns into a crazed Unabomber killer. If this vastly uninteresting subplot had been jettisoned they could have shaved off a couple of episodes easy.
• Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) shows up to keep the Marvel Cinematic Universe connected and she is a welcome addition.
• The authorities in this series are so vastly incompetent that they make the Keystone Cops look good by comparison.
• Netflix had the chance to make a strong character out of Homeland Security agent Dinah Madani but instead she’s about as effective as a tissue in a hurricane.
• The second last episode is almost entirely “The Talking Killer” cliché.
• The last episode is basically an hour long epilogue and aside from the “surprise” villain reveal it was completely unnecessary.

Justice League (2017) – Review

With Zack Snyder’s Justice League the DC Extended Universe moves into full gear, unfortunately at times it looks like they've stripped a gear or two. As the film’s troubled production has been no secret, with the original concept of it being a two part film being jettisoned in favor a two hour standalone one, and then the tragic death of Snyder’s daughter leading to the studio to bring The Avengers director Joss Whedon on board to finish the project, so it’s no surprise that the final product is less than polished. That aside it still feels very much like a Zack Snyder film, one with a few Whedon quips randomly thrown in to lighten things up, but the dark and gloomy colour palette remains consistent from his previous outings with Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

The collapsing of two films into one is the biggest detriment the film has as the “plot” rushes along at breakneck speeds only to be brutally halted occasionally for the introductions of new and old characters and massive info dumps; Martha Kent (Diane Lane) has lost her farm, Lois Lane (Amy Adams) has been reduced to writing puff pieces, Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller) visits his wrongly accused father (Billy Crudup) in prison, and then there is Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) who is beating up terrorists in-between working at the Louvre while also helping Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) recruit superheroes for a team that could be their only chance in stopping an alien invasion. The first guy Bruce looks for is Arthur Curry/Aquaman (Jason Momoa) who really has no interest helping mankind, and Wonder Woman tracks down Victor Stone/Cyborg (Ray Fisher) who also isn't all that keen on the whole "team-up" thing as he's bitter about being turned into some kind of Frankenstein monster.

 

A monster with at times SyFy original levels of CGI.

That’s a lot going on for the first act of a movie and I’ve not even got to the alien threat; turns out Lex Luthor was right about an oncoming alien threat and soon we have Amazons and Atlantean warriors battling Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) a giant dude with a horned helmet who has returned to Earth to retrieve three space McGuffins (The Avengers only had one space McGuffin so already this movie is obviously superior) that he needs to reclaim victory after losing a battle to the Amazon/Atlantean/human alliance five thousand years ago.

One of the common criticisms of the Marvel movies is their lack of good villains, something they are finally getting better at, but Justice League provides us a villain so terrible that he makes Jesse Eisenberg’s manic pixie Lex Luthor look good by comparison. Not only is the CGI used to create him terrible, and I’m not sure why a guy in a horned helmet had to be a total computer generated creation, but he is monumentally boring with absolutely no character development. His sole motivation seems to be, “I failed to conqueror the Earth last time and so I’m totally doing it now.”

 

“I’m also going to kill the rabbit, kill the rabbit!”

Warner Brothers had issued a mandate that the movie could be no longer than two hours and that is exactly what Zack Snyder/Joss Whedon delivered, unfortunately the result is a movie so crammed to the gills with action and plot exposition that we literally have no time to care about any of the characters. There is about zero chemistry between the Justice League members and the writers attempt to lighten things up by turning The Flash into an annoying comic relief sidekick which pissed me off to no end. The Flash is not a sidekick, he is one of the core members of the League and his powers are badass, but for this movie he’s introduced as a social awkward nerd who previous to this movie has apparently done nothing more than shove random criminals aside and then run away. Aquaman even talks smack about The Flash tripping over his own feet, and don’t get me started on how crappy that cluttered costume looks.

Note: Bruce Wayne notes that Flash’s costume is armored with the same materials that is used to protect the space shuttle during re-entry, but if Barry needs this type of protection to keep him from burning up when he engages the Speed Force where is the protection for his face?

One of the hardest elements of writing a Justice League story is justifying why any other team member than Superman (Henry Cavill) is needed, if you need someone to talk to fish you call Aquaman but other than that there isn’t much the team can do that Superman can’t on his own. So you either have to somehow knock Superman out of the action for a while or come up with a serious threat that would require six or more superheroes. Well in the previous movie the studio managed to completely waste the "Death of Superman" storyline and had good ole Supes kacked, but as dumb as that was it did allow for the first half of this movie to exist, and when he does come back *Spoiler* it’s abundantly clear that Steppenwolf and his Parademons were no credible threat to the last son of Krypton. During the final fight Superman is even sent off to rescue some civilians just so the movie doesn’t end too soon.

 

Can’t have Clark hogging all the glory.

Justice League is not a terrible movie, and certainly nowhere near as bad as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but it’s a step back from the fun and engaging outing that was Wonder Woman and does not bode well for further team-up movies.

Final Thoughts:

• I still don’t buy the whole world mourning Superman when he never seemed all that beloved in the previous films.
• Aquaman is bitter about his mom, former Queen of Atlantis, for abandoning him as a child. Gee, that sounds something worth seeing.
• Cyborg is a bitter brooding dude who seems to be around only to give exposition.
• “Do you talk to fish?” About the best joke in the movie
• Batman may be against using guns but cannons and missiles he’s okay with.
• So has Batman’s nightmare from BVS: Dawn of Justice been averted?
• Diana tells the guilt ridden Bruce Wayne, “You didn’t kill him.” Technically no, he didn’t kill Superman but he certainly tried.
• What was with all the cutting to that Russian family? That screen time could have been better utilized.
• The Parademons being uncontrollably drawn to fear was lame.
• Would have been nice to know who was activating the Boom Tubes.
• The League practically hands over the third Mother Box to Steppenwolf because they are idiots.
•  J.K. Simmons was criminally wasted as Commissioner Gordon.

 

"I get a bigger part in the next film...right?"

Amityville: The Awakening (2017) – Review

The Amityville movie series is one of those franchises that just won’t give up the ghost, it doesn’t seem to matter that in the almost forty years since the original movie was released that none of them have been particularly good, or even that profitable as it’s one of those franchises that hopes that brand recognition will be enough to overcome the stigma of past failures and thus bring in enough ticket sales to at least compensate for their modest budgets. In the horror genre this is not a unique marketing strategy. Now with Amityville: The Awakening being the tenth entry one can assume it will never stop as the producers of this series seem to love failure.

Amityville: The Awakening is one of your typical troubled productions as it was originally supposed to be called Amityville: The Lost Tapes and was to move the franchise into the found-footage subgenre with a reporter trying to uncover the house’s secrets, but then after several delays that idea was abandoned and the standard haunted house tropes were put back in place with once again another family moving into the notorious murder house. The family this time out consists of  teenage-daughter Belle (Bella Thorne) her little sister Juliet (McKenna Grace) and Bella’s twin brother James (Cameron Monaghan) who is in a persistent vegetative state due to a tragic fall, and finally there is their widowed mother Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who seems a bit off the rails with false hope. The wrinkle here is that Joan is completely aware of the nature of the house and her reasons for moving to the murder house provides the movie’s ludicrous twist.

 

Could the evil within this house have an adverse effect on a coma patient?

Belle is the film’s protagonist and it’s mostly through her eyes that the horror unfolds, though little Juliet does get one of the film’s better jump scares in a film just littered with endless amounts of fucking jump scares, but what makes the movie stumble is that we can’t really relate to her. The film spends little time setting up her character, her background motivations are not revealed until almost the final act and when they are it's too little too late, and worse is the fact that actress Bella Thorne seems to have a real hard time coming across as scared or even sympathetic. Then the movie has the audacity to have us believe she’s never heard of legend of the Amityville murder house yet this movie takes place in a world where the James Brolin/Margot Kidder movie from the 70s and the Ryan Reynolds remake exists. Belle is depicted as a somewhat Goth misfit yet somehow we are to believes she’s never even heard of The Amityville Horror? At one point two friends she makes at her new school bring over DVDs of the movies to watching during the houses supposed witching hour.

 

There is Meta than there is just plain stupid.

Amityville: The Awakening does have some cool atmospheric moments, when the sound track isn’t pounding musical stings with the accompanying jump scares; we do get a nice moment when neurologist Dr. Milton (Kurtwood Smith) is attacked by a swarm of flies in a clear homage to the flies attacking Rod Steiger in the original, but then the movie doubles down on its lameness by having it turn out to just be a vision. In fact most of the horror moments in this movie are revealed to be either visions or nightmares and we don’t get any real physical manifestations of the evil, instead the movie takes the route of Amityville II: The Possession and it’s all about demonic forces controlling a teenage boy into going on a family murder spree.

 

Why would you even bring a shotgun into a house with that particular history?

The greatest crime Amityville: The Awakening is guilty of is being incredibly boring, it’s not even so bad it’s good as it’s just so bland and generic. I will not get into spoiler territory here but the motivations behind the mother’s reasons for moving into the murder house are not those of a grieving woman desperate for any kind of help, as the movie would like us to believe, her actions are of someone who is either clinically insane or vastly stupid. For a horror movie to work you must be on the side of the protagonists but between vapid and uninteresting Belle and her cuckoo for Coco Puffs mom we’ve really only got little Juliet to feel bad for and sadly the film treats her more like a prop than an actual character. With this tenth entry in the franchise director Franck Khalfoun fails to bring anything new to the table, nor much in the way of scares either, which makes this one horror fans should just skip. It’s not even worth the rental fee.

 

Caveat emptor.

From Hell It Came (1957) - Review

Do you remember when the tree grabbed that kid out of his bedroom in Poltergeist? Or how about the poor girl getting raped by the forest in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead? As genres go “The Killer Plant Movie” is a rather small subset of horror films with a few notable films like Little Shop of Horror and Day of the Triffids being any good while the rest can easily be forgotten. Does anybody even remember the 2008 film The Ruins? Well today we are taking the Wayback Machine to the year 1957 where director Dan Milner and his producer brother Jack who brought the world the jungle thriller called From Hell It Came.

This movie was the kind of creature feature that would have populated the local Drive-Ins in the 50s, where teenagers could neck in the backseat while gleefully ignoring the action on screen, but even by low budget monster movie standards From Hell It Came was bargain basement bad. In a film that looks like it was shot at either a local park or someone’s backyard the production value is almost non-existent, and the film’s only stand-out feature is the monster itself because it is so hilariously goofy that you almost have to admire it.

"Tabanga just pawn in game of life."

The movie opens with a group of South Sea island natives killing the former Chief's son, Kimo (Gregg Palmer), by virtue of staking him to the ground and then driving a ceremonial knife through his heart.  The reason for this killing is that the tribe’s witch doctor, Tano (Robert Swan), has accused Kimo of being responsible for the Chief’s death by allowing Western medicine to be used on Kimo’s ailing father. Conspiring with Tano is new Chief Maranka (Baynes Barron), who informs his people of Kimo’s crimes of working with those evil Americans, and Kimo's wife Korey (Suzanne Ridgeway) backs him up by informing the tribe that it was Kimo who had allowed the American’s to poison their chief and not Tano as Kimo claimed. Its Korey’s damning testimony that seals the deal and Kimo’s heart is pierced and his body placed in a wooden upright coffin that is then buried in their sacred burial grounds.

Question: Why bury the supposed killer of your beloved chief in the sacred burial grounds? You would think the body of such a betrayer wouldn’t get such nice treatment and instead would be tossed into the local quicksand patch like so much garbage.

Of course before Kimo died he was able to proclaim his plans for revenge from beyond the grave, “I promise you all, I shall come back from Hell and make you pay for your crimes.” So with our supernatural revenge plot properly set up the film jumps over to those sneaky Americans Maranka was complaining about; we have Dr. William Arnold (Tod Andrews) and Professor Clark (John McNamara) who are scientists hired by the American government to study fallout from a nearby nuclear bomb test, apparently an unexpected typhoon blew the fallout towards this poor island and these two manly men spend most of the time bitching about being there and dealing with the superstitious locals. We learn quickly that Arnold would rather be back stateside but the woman he wants to settle down with is Dr. Terry Mason (Tina Carver) who has no interest in leaving her work to pump out babies. Arnold laments, “Why did I have to fall in love with a dedicated female scientist? She considers marriage some kind of prison, and sometimes I could kick her beautiful teeth in. Here I offer her the Earth, the Moon, the stars...” with Clark cutting in “And she prefers test tubes on a tiny Pacific atoll.”

 

Who wouldn’t prefer test tubes over these jackasses?

Their commiserating over the failure of the modern woman is interrupted by a scream and the two rush outside to find British expatriate Mrs. Mae Kilgore (Linda Watkins), who had witnessed the execution of Kimo and fled for her life, struggling with one of the natives. The villain is chased off and we are introduced to the film odious comic relief. If you are familiar with the works of character actress Una O'Connor in such films as Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man you will recognize that actress Linda Watkins is from the same school of over-the-top Cockney comic relief. Her characters incessant babbling has one praying for the title monster to shamble on screen and end our suffering, but sadly she survives and our sanity does not.

Now it turns out that nuclear fallout isn’t the real problem causing illness among the locals it's the plague and witch doctor Tano has forbidden his people to seek medical help from the Americans.  This brings us to the arrival of another doctor who has shown up after Clark reported their problems to Washington. No surprise that said doctor turns out to be the aforementioned Terry Mason, and before you can say "Sexual harassment" Bill is trying to force his tongue down her throat.

 

Is this movie about a tree monster or a sexual predator?

Terry tries to explain things to the idiot, “Bill dear, I’m not the girl you want, or anybody’s girl.” Explaining further that she has no interest in living the “normal life” that Bill wants for her as her idea of normal is certainly not being cooped up in a stuffy apartment getting her ears blasted with Rock and Roll music. His rebuttal is, “Do you want to go through life alone? Don’t you want a husband, children, like other women?” He then kisses her hard and passionately and then asks, “You do love me, don’t you? Admit it.” She shakes her head, “I don’t love you,” and his rebuttal to that is, “Then why did you kiss me back?” This guy is one class act but she does beautifully shut him down by answering, “I don’t know…my metabolism? It was unconscious, involuntary.” Then he lands the Sexist Pig of the Year award for uttering the following line, “Terry, will you stop being a doctor first and a woman second? Let your emotions rule you, not your intellect.” Instead of a well-deserved punch to the throat, as he so richly deserves, Terry calmly informs the asshat that, “I live by my intellect and reason; if I let my emotions run away I wouldn’t be any good in my work.”  Dr. Terry Mason is a career woman fighting for the right to live her life on her own terms, who can guess how this will eventually end?

 

"Don't start the Sexual Revolution without me."

It’s at this point that the film remembers it's supposed to be a monster movie and so Terry spots a weird tree growing out of sacred burial site. This rare plant discovery warrants immediate research, sorry plague ridden villagers you’ll have to wait your turn this looks more urgent, and word from Washington is for our “heroes” to dig up the plant and study it. Norgu (Lee Rhodes), one of the more friendly natives, identifies the wooden growth as the Tabanga, a creature of vengeance animated by Kimo's angry spirit, and like a previous vengeful dead chieftain who came back as a tree monster it to will wreak unspeakable death and destruction. Professor Clark “Pooh-poohs” such superstitious nonsense, even after the weird wooden stump with a face turns out to be radioactive and has a ceremonial blade sticking out of it. When he discovers that it also has a human heartbeat he still manages to state, “Norgu, what you fear is scientifically impossible.”

 

I’m no scientist but I’m sure radioactive tree stumps with human heartbeats are also impossible.

In record time the tree stump grows to man size and our trio of scientific morons dig it up and cart it back to their lab, but what is startling here is that Bill is all for chucking the thing in the nearest quicksand patch they can find. Up to this point Bill has been a complete jerk yet all of a sudden he is the voice of reason, “If moving that monster violates another tribal law, we'll be in for it. You know we're greatly outnumbered here. They could easily overpower us. And don't forget what Norgu said about it being taboo for strangers to go near the... Tabanga.” Sadly he is outvoted, one man cannot stand in the way of science, and Terry even uses an experimentally formula she had developed to save the creature when they realize its heart rate is decreasing. This of course results in the creature reviving and going on a revenge fueled rampage of death and destruction…well more of a revenge fueled shuffle if one is to be accurate.

 

Beware the horror that is Tabanga.

Which brings us to the key problem with this particular monster, not only is he an incredibly silly looking creature but he moves at a speed that makes The Mummy look like an Olympic sprinter. The only way you are endanger from Tabanga is if you accidentally back into him or by some happenstance are knocked unconscious or dazed when he is nearby thus allowing him time enough to get close.

The first person to fall victim to the evil that is Tabanga is Korey who gets dazed after a hit to the head while fighting her rival Naomi (Tani Marsh), the native girl who took her spot as Maranka’s main squeeze when he didn’t feel comfortable marrying someone who betrayed her last husband, and Tabanga grabs hold of her and ever so slowly he carries over to some quicksand and tosses her in. Next on the revenge list is Maranka himself who manages to get killed because he has no peripheral vision or apparently the ability to hear a tree monster slowly lumbering up behind him. Maranka even manages to miss Tabanga with a thrown spear when the creature was barely a spear length away.

 

“Pssst, he’s right behind you.”

Then in a surprising display of courage Tano, realizing that the creature is hunting those Kimo swore to kill, he offers to use himself as bait to destroy the creature, and the plan works…briefly. Tano is able to lure the monster into a disguised pit trap and then the remaining villagers toss flaming brands to turn the pit into a fiery hell. As plans go that is a pretty good one but unfortunately this particular tree monster is of the non-flammable kind and so Tabanga just climbs out of the pit, hunts down Tano, and then kills him by rolling him down a hill.

 

I think he probably died of shame for being caught in the first place.

With the three villains that Kimo vowed to get revenge on dead you’d think the monster would peaceably wander into that ever present quicksand patch for some nice sweet oblivion, but sadly we still have our “Great White Heroes” to contend with and so Dr. Clark, Bill, Terry, and even the annoying comic relief Mae, along with Eddie (Mark Sheeler), the camps security specialist and man voted most likely to be fired for being bad at his job, load up with guns and venture into the jungle to hunt down the creature. It should surprise no one that Terry is grabbed by the monster, but that she is nabbed because she leans against the thing while adjusting her shoes (we won’t get into questioning why she was wearing heels for a trek through the jungle) is truly sad, and so our heroes have to chase after the monster before it can toss her into the quicksand.

 

At least Tabanga didn’t tell her to quit her job and pop out babies.

The group unload a barrage of bullets at the monster but the bark of Tabanga seems indestructible, “Doc I’ve never seen anything like. The bullets bounce off it like bee-bee shot on a stone wall,”  The group then somehow come to the conclusion that if they can shoot the ceremonial knife that is sticking out of the creature they could drive it deeper into the monster’s heart and end its reign of terror. The small end of a knife’s hilt is certainly no easy target, not helped by the creature refusing to turn around and face it’s attackers, but eventually a volley of bullets annoys it enough that it drops Terry, turns around to face our heroes, and Bill is able to land one round on the knife's hilt. The monster staggers back, falls into the quicksand and disappears below its murky surface. The day is saved and Norgu runs up to Dr. Clark and exclaims, “We now know American magic is better.”

 

“Better health through bullets” is the new AMA slogan.

Do remember that debate earlier in the film where we heard Terry claim she didn't want to give up her intellect for a career in baby making? Well after being saved from the clutches of Tabanga the once spirited Terry runs to her rescuer, gives him a deep kiss and a passionate embrace, and upon seeing this Clark comments to Mae, “Looks like a honeymoon and back to the States for them.” So according to the Milner Brothers all it takes is a life or death situation to show a woman that her place is in the kitchen.

 

“The Sexual Revolution has been postponed, please stand-by for a word from our sponsors…Men.”

The monster Tabanga will always have a place in horror movie history as one of the dumbest looking creatures to ever grace the silver screen, but From Hell It Came also briefly gave us a female scientist who seemed more interested in her career than in men, and though she kind of recanted that belief at the nine yard line it is still something that a film of this nature even brought up the subject matter in the first place. At seventy minutes in length the film isn’t long enough for the lack of monster action to be too detrimental but the annoying Cockney comic relief does make things a trifle painful at times.  On the other hand that most of the natives are played by Caucasians is certainly typical of time and their stilted acting as primitive natives is simply quite awful. From Hell It Came is good as a curiosity but not one I can honestly recommend seeking out.