Ready Player One (2018) – Review

Based on Ernest Cline’s best-selling book of the same name Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One could honestly be marketed as Pop Culture References: The Movie, and to be honest if you’ve seen the trailer that shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but with one of the premier directors of this or any generation at the helm we at least know that it is going to be an entertaining ride.

The story takes place in the dystopian future of 2045 where much of the Earth’s population live well below the poverty line (but way up in the air in what one must call very unsafe housing), and it's there that we find our hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) who lives in one of these unsafe housing projects called The Stacks, and like many people he spends most of his time in the virtual reality world of the OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation) because the real world sucks and in the OASIS one can create a better version of yourself while hanging out in fantastical worlds.

 

Who wouldn't want to escape this?

The creator of OASIS was a brilliant but incredibly introverted nerd named James Halliday (Mark Rylance) who after his death revealed in his will that he hid three keys inside the OASIS that will lead to an Easter egg and anyone who finds this egg will land themselves a half a trillion dollars and complete control of the OASIS. If this scavenger hunt plot seems a little reminiscent of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory it should because Ernest Cline has made no bones about the fact that he was basically remaking Willie Wonka only with 80s pop culture references instead of candy.

 

“Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination.”

Spielberg takes the basic premise from the book but does mix-up the contest a little; no longer is 80s pop culture trivia the key to solving the quest but instead its hidden nuggets about Halliday’s life, this works well and provides some heart to the story, and because movies are a visual medium Spielberg is able to go whole hog presenting us with countless “Hey, I get that reference” moments without having to literally spell them out as Cline had to do in the book. For the most part Spielberg’s structural changes to the source material works but the two hour and twenty-two minute running time does spend a little too much time on the visual spectacle of the virtual world and very little on the characters that occupy it. Wade in his virtual avatar persona of Parsifal works with his online best bud Aech (Lena Waithe) and fellow virtual badass and possible love interest Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and aside from Art3mis we aren't given much backstory to any of them during their quest for the Easter egg. These are fun and engaging characters but we really don’t find out what makes them tick, hell we don’t even learn how anyone makes real money to buy stuff like food or pay rent.

 

"Can we use game tokens to pay for pizza?"

The greatest victim of the “character assassination” problem are Daito (Win Morisaki) and Sho (Philip Zhao) who pretty much pop out of thin air halfway through the movie as two of Wade’s online friends and aside from them being Asian, and one of them being an eleven year old boy, they are fairly forgettable. Ernest Cline’s book was no literary masterpiece but he at least spent some fleshing out all the players, while in the movie the secondary characters mostly have the unfortunate job of showing up to spout clunky expository dialog and then disappearing. Now this review may sound overly negative, and the film has several things to be negative about, but I have to admit that I enjoyed myself quite a lot watching this movie and most of that stems from Spielberg knowing how to shoot the hell out of an action sequence. When Parsifal hops into the Back to the Future De Lorean, while Art3mis blows by him atop Kaneda’s bike from Akira to win a game that puts Wacky Racers to shame, all the while trying to avoid a T-Rex and King Kong, I was in seventh Heaven.

 

It's as if Spielberg looked straight into my soul.

Of course the real villain in Ready Player One isn’t a prehistoric beast or a giant ape it is the more sinister threatl of corporate greed, and in this story that would be Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) the evil CEO of a video game conglomerate that wishes to win control over the OASIS so that they can basically remove Halliday’s ad blocker and make a shit ton of money filling the virtual world with giant pop-up ads. Mendelsohn is a lot of fun as the villainous Sorrento and he leaves very little scenery, virtual or otherwise, unchewed as he and his virtual reality bounty hunter i-R0k (T.J. Miller) do their best to thwart our band of plucky rebels.

Spielberg pulls out all stops in the creation of the virtual worlds in Ready Player One; the aforementioned race, the trip into a certain Stephen King movie was a treat, and the final massive show down with more pop culture character than one could shake a glaive were simply spectacular, it just would have been nice if the screenplay could have spent a little more time on the dystopian aspect of the world (the opening narration spends most of its time talking about the OASIS and not much on how the real world functions) and if that glorious last act was trimmed just a tad we could have got to know our heroes a little better as well.

Note: How the virtually reality rigs works are played rather fast and loose in this movie; we see Wade on a multi-directional treadmill but then later we see everyone out in the street joining him in virtual battle but they are just on sidewalks outside not any kind of treadmill. Wouldn’t they end up running into traffic or accidentally punching the person standing next to them?

Ready Player One is an entertaining “E” ticket ride and though some of the changes from the book I quite liked, and any movie that has The Iron Giant fighting Mechagodzilla is a tough movie not to love, but the short changes made to the characters stopped me from being full invested.  That all said I can still heartily recommend the trip out to the theater to see this thing as it is "A world of pure imagination".

Note: This movie seems almost designed for Bluray players in mind as the pause feature will be great aid in further viewings so you can hunt for all those hidden references.

Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) – Review

Who doesn’t love giant robots fighting giant monsters? In 2013 director Guillermo del Toro took that love and made a decent Kaiju movie out of it called Pacific Rim, but instead of your basic Saturday afternoon matinee fight fest the genre was mostly known he gave us a film with a unique aesthetic and the visual flair, now with Pacific Rim: Uprising we have a sequel that pretty much abandons what made the first one stand out and brings it back to its matinee roots.

Taking place ten years after the cataclysmic events of the first film we are introduced to Jake Pentecost (John Boyega),  once a cadet in the Jaeger Corp who has since been kicked out for basically being an egotistical idiot.  He is also the son of Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), hero of the Battle of the Breach, and if you don’t recall Stacker having a son don’t feel bad as he wasn’t in the original film and is another one of those “Sons who have to impress their dead fathers” characters that we already had in that horrible sequel Independence Day: Resurgence. Jake has been spending his time pillaging and looting parts from fallen Jaegers but soon he is forced to once again take up the mantle of reluctant hero.

 

The Force is strong with this one.

Joining him on this adventure to once again save the world are a ragtag bunch of misfits who if they put their differences aside they just may be able to work together to get the job done, and if your Cliché Meter is starting to beep loudly I advise you to turn it off so as to save on batteries. In this ensemble we have Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny) a spunky kid who somehow managed to build her own smaller version of a Jaeger, before getting arrested with Jake for illegal possession of an unlicensed Jaeger, and when the two arrive at the Shatterdome they meet Jake’s estranged former co-pilot Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood) and Jules Reyes (Adria Arjona), who may have some romantic history with Jake and is possibly an attempt of this movie to throw in a love triangle, but she is mostly forgotten for the bulk of the film so don’t worry about this subplot as the writers didn’t feel the need to care about it either. Next we meet a group of green cadets who barely have any personality amongst them, and could have easily been escapes from the movie SpaceCamp, and the only stand-out cadet is a Russian chick who irrationally hates Amara only so at the end she can irrationally all of a sudden like her.

 

Are they the Right Stuff?

This leads to the film’s biggest flaw, it’s just too damn packed with characters and plot for what is basically a monster mash-up movie. Aside from being chock full of all the military cliché characters, ones we’ve already seen beautifully parodies in such films as Starship Troopers, we also have a plot that somehow revolves around a powerful Chinese corporation, led by cold calculating CEO Liwen Shao (Tian Jing), who wants to replace the manned Jaegers with giant robot drones. If you guess that the drone idea is going to turn out bad that’s because you’ve probably been to the movies before, in films unmanned drones almost always equal wrong. The film does try and throw a twist or two to kind of make things interesting but the screenwriters tip their hands too soon and any kind of surprise is spoiled early on.

We do get a few returning cast members, though strangely enough Charlie Hunnam’s character isn’t even mentioned, and they all kind of vary between being a waste of screen time or being incredibly annoying. Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), who was Stacker Pentecost’s adoptive daughter, is back simply to be the disapproving sister to Jake and also to provide some rather transparent motivations and plot contrivance. Dr. Newt Geiszler (Charlie Day), who once mind-melded with a kaiju, is now working Liwen Shao while is old partner Dr. Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) is hobbling around his old lab in attempt to create booster rockets for the Jaeger program. These two scientist pop in and out of scenes with seemingly the sole purpose of vying for me to hate one of them more than the other.  In the first film they were charmingly eccentric but here they are just irritating, that is when they are not being inexplicably stupid.

Now this is a movie about monsters robots so having well defined characters and an original plot was probably never in the cards, we all came to see big city destroying fights not relationship drama, and we do gets some nice knock down drag out fights that the effects team did a bang up job on, but the fights tend to go on way too long and when the film finally reached the last act I was pretty much worn out.

Will Jake sack up and redeem himself? Can Nate put aside his animosity towards his old partner when push comes to shove? Will Amara end up piloting a Jaeger with Jake to possible save the day? If you have any doubt that the answer is yes to all those questions you haven’t been paying attention to this review. Pacific Rim: Uprising isn’t a bad movie it’s just an okay Saturday morning action show that mostly exists today because the Chinese market is huge and Hollywood is all about pandering to that huge audience. This is a move I can easily recommend you wait to catch it on Netflix and save your money for the next Godzilla movie.

 

Note: The movie hints at a third film but that will only happen if China foots the bill.

Tomb Raider (2018) – Review

Video game adaptations have always been a dodgy prospect, who can forget Van Damme’s Streetfighter or the horrible Mario Brothers movie (no matter how hard we try), but transforming the Tomb Raider game into a movie always seemed like an easy prospect to me, it’s basically sexy Indiana Jones so how can you screw that up? Well with three movies featuring the amazing Lara Croft it's apparent that even with what looks to be a sure fire premise there is still the ability to drop the ball.

In 2013 the video game company Square Enix rebooted the Tomb Raider game with a darker tone than what could be found in previous entries in the series, one that kind of works as a prequel to the strong self-assured Lara Croft we've all come to know and love.  Now in 2018 director Roar Uthaug takes that same aesthetic for his reboot of the Tomb Raider movie franchise; no longer is Lara Croft sparring with robots within the bowels of Croft Manor, now she’s practicing mix martial arts in a city gym ( a place that she can barely afford to pay her membership fees), and working as a bike messenger/delivery girl. But hold on, isn’t Lara Croft supposed to be stupidly wealthy? Well apparently Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) refuses to acknowledge that her father is dead, he went missing seven years on some secret mission to investigate the tomb of a supposedly powerful and mythical Chinese Queen, and because she won’t sign the “Death in Absentia ” papers she lives practically the life of a street urchin.

 

Lara Croft is Premium Rush.

For me penniless Lara Croft was a thing the film needed a little more time explaining as it simply makes no sense that sole the heir to a billion dollar company, with holdings that span the globe, somehow can’t afford her gym membership. Even if Lord Richard Croft (Dominic West) wasn’t able to be declared legally dead there would surely be money set aside in some kind of trust to take care of his daughter. If we are to believe that the whole thing is about Lara not taking the money because she refuses to believe her father is dead, well that is simply moronic, and it gives her a character trait less believable than her ability to survive leaps from raging rapids and rusted out WWII bombers.

Alicia Vikander is quite good as the spunky and courageous Lara Croft, and she sells the hell out of the action set-pieces, but sadly the plot they stick her with isn’t only weak but also not all that original. Not to get into too much spoiler territory but basically Lara discovers a secret room that contains all her father’s research about Himiko, the mythical Queen of Yamatai, who he believed would, if ever released, could very well end life on Earth. In a video message left for Lara our good Lord Croft tells his daughter to destroy all his research notes so that an evil militant organization known as Trinity cannot get their global conquering mitts on them. Lara of course doesn’t destroy the notes but instead takes her father’s diary to China where she will team up with Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), the son of the sea captain who also disappeared seven years ago with her father, and the two of them will take the same ill-fated trip to a mysterious island located in the dangerous waters of the Devil’s Sea to hopefully find their lost parents.

 

“You're a Croft, can't you afford a sea plane or a helicopter?”

When they reach the island Lara runs into the villainous Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins) who works for Trinity and apparently murdered both Lara’s as well as Ren’s father and for seven years Vogel has been stuck on this island because without Richard Croft’s notes he has been unable to find the tomb of Himiko.  His evil employers don’t even give him vacation days so he and his mercenary buddies have been spending all their time blowing up parts of the island in the futile hope of stumbling upon the tomb, you could almost say they’d “Use a bulldozer to find a china cup.” Now we all know that Lara Croft is very much cut from the same cloth as a certain globetrotting adventurer but in this movie the plot similarities to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are a little too on the nose.

• Professor Henry Jones was obsessed with the Holy Grail.
• Lord Richard Croft was obsessed with the mythical Chinese queen Himiko.
• Nazis wanted the power of the Grail.
• The evil Illuminati type group known as Trinity wants the rumored power of Himiko.
• Indiana Jones goes in search of his father not really caring about the Grail.
• Lara Croft goes in search of her father not really caring about the myth of Himiko.
• Indiana Jones basically hands his father's crucial diary to the Nazis.
• Lara Croft basically hands over her father's crucial diary to Trinity.

 

“I should have mailed it to the Marx Brothers.”

This is certainly not the worst video game adaptation, and parts of the film I quite enjoyed, but once Lara and company arrive at the island it becomes a bit of a “paint by numbers” action film with not much of a plot to hang those cool action sequences on. Fans of the game will certainly get a kick out of watching Lara Croft run through the jungle, dispatching villains with her now trademark bow and arrows, and of course solving the standard video game puzzles (that sadly always frustrate the hell out of me when I try and play the game), but the average audience member may find themselves less than engaged. Now the one thing that is done remarkably well in this film is the gritty and brutal moments of Lara trying to survive her numerous life endangering encounters, one particular jungle fight with a rent-a-thug was particularly vicious, and so I do hope this film does well enough to warrant a sequel (the film heavily hints at an ongoing threat) and that Alicia Vikander gets another shot at playing Lara because I truly think she has the potential to be a very interesting action hero.

 

And maybe they can cut down on the silly puzzles a tad.

Unnatural (2016) – Review

Man versus nature is a very popular genre, generating quite a few films ranging from such classics as Jaws to simply fun films like Lake Placid, but then we have the subgenre that deals with man and science mucking around and creating aberrations that will literally bite humanity in the ass. In 1978 director Joe Dante gave us the delightful horror flick Piranha, where scientist altered those razor teethed little buggers resulting in the death toll at a local summer camp to take a sudden steep incline, and now fast forward to 2016 and director Hank Braxton gives us Unnatural (aka Maneater) a film that gives us a story from that same subgenre but with production values that would make the average Roger Corman film look big budgeted.

 

This version of the poster belongs with a much better film.

What kind of monster movie can you make with just $3 million dollars? Well aside from some independent found footage movies there are not too many examples of good films with that low of a budget, certainly not ones that are filmed in the harsh climes of Alaska and whose plot centers around a genetically altered polar bear, and thus this film is pretty hamstrung from the get-go. If we take the way-back machine to the year 1975 we see that Universal and Steven Spielberg spent around $7 million dollars to get their killer shark movie into theaters, which in today’s dollars would be about $32 million, and despite the mechanical shark never working properly, and shooting at sea being a nightmare Spielberg never foresaw, the talent behind and in front of the camera led to the creation one of the greatest movies ever made. This would not be the case with Braxton’s Unnatural as this insanely low budgeted film, saddled with a terrible script and some of the worst supporting actors ever gathered, was doomed from the outset.

 

Movie Mathematics: The lower the budget the more skin must be shown.

The plot of Unnatural, and I’m using the term “plot” very loosely here, is that a supposedly benevolent corporation run by Victor Clobirch (Ray Wise) is working to ensure that animals of our world will survive the ravages of global warming, and just how will the Clobirch Corporation ensure the safety of mankind and prevent the extinction of the endangered wildlife?

 

“If you guessed genetic manipulation you get a cookie.”

As this is an on-the-cheap movie about a rouge genetically altered polar eating a bunch of people you may also guess correctly that we are not going to be burdened with a lot of scientific explanations dealing with the whys and wherefores of this polar bear’s particular modifications, and you’d be right again. This movie is more interested in giving us endless pov shots from the “bear” as it chases people across the snow landscape than it is about crafting even the remotest plausible story. Now if we look back at the 1999 film Bats, starring Lou Diamond Phillips as a sheriff facing off against a colony of genetically altered bats, Phillips asked why the scientist (played wonderfully by Bob Gunton) had altered bats so that they would be smarter, larger and more violent than normal bats, and the response he got was, “I’m a scientist, that’s what we do!” That hilarious and meta moment allowed the film to forgo any need to explain the ridiculous “science” of the movie, while in the case of Unnatural I’m assuming they didn’t even have the budget to be self-aware.

 

“This plot is so thin I can’t even see it through a microscope.”

And just who is on the menu for this creature feature? Two barely named scientists are brutally murdered by the bear while their cohort Dr. Hanna Lindval (Sherilyn Fenn) escapes the snowbound lab in one of the company trucks, only to crash into a snowbank a little while later. This is so she can eventually stumble across the other group of soon to be entrees at a local lodge. Black Rabbit Lodge is owned and operator by Martin Nakos (James Remar), who is assisted by a couple Athabaskan friends (Gregory Cruz and Q'orianka Kilcher) and a ham radio operator named Buffalo (Graham Greene), and visiting the lodge out of season is fashion photographer Brooking (Ron Carlson), two models (Ivana Korab and Allegra Carpenter) and his camera assistant (Stephanie Hodes). We don’t get much characterization out of any of these people; Nakos is the gruff and easy going boss while Brooking is a racist and overall dick, while the rest of the cast barely get anytime to make an impact before they are eaten.

 

“Can something come and eat me now so I can get out of this picture?”

Running at just over 85 minutes one can’t expect much character development but when your plot is this thin you’re in big trouble, so in most case the filmmakers would then rely on their kickass monster to comes in to save the day.  Sadly that is far from the case here as the monster on display is subpar at the best of times, and what is truly surprising is that the creature was created by effects house Amalgamated Dynamics who had worked on such films as Tremors, Jumanji, and the 2017 version of Stephen King’s It, yet in this film we get a lame polar bear puppet head, one gives the word puppet a bad name, and then there are the occasional moments of some dude in a bear suit that are seriously embarrassing and practically rival the crappy bear costume that appeared on The Secrets of Isis.

 

Dark and blurry is about the only way you see this thing.

I can sympathize with how hard it must be to create a believable monster polar bear on what was basically a shoestring budget, but when you are making a monster movie at some point you are going to have to show the audience what they paid their five bucks to see, instead we get interminable shaky-cam shots and endless dark scenes that are all in service of hiding how terrible the creature looks. I can excuse a lot of things from a crappy monster movie, there is a lot working against them, but I will not forgive a film that doesn’t have the balls to at least give us one fucking clear shot of the beast.

 

The movie is like a “Where’s Waldo” only they didn’t even give the bear a striped shirt.

I’m fond of James Remar, Graham Greene and Ray Wise so I can at least be happy that they all got paychecks out of this thing, but as a monster movie fan I was more than slightly pissed off after watching this glacial paced and poorly shot outing, and don't get me started on the tacked on “environmental message” aspect of the film which was about as lame and insulting as what we got from Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground, and that is not a film you should be emulating. If this was supposed to be a satire they needed the Ray Wise character to be more than a two minute bookend and given us something more than “City folk are assholes” and “Climate change is bad” drivel. Overall this picture is dull creature feature that is guilty of barely featuring a creature.

 

“Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits.”

12 to the Moon (1960) – Review

 Science fiction movies released prior to 1969, and the actual moon landing, ranged from the somewhat series entries like George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950) to the more campier type of Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) variety, but regardless of the intent the “science” in those science fiction movies tended to lean towards the more laughable end of the spectrum. 
It was in 1960 that Columbia Pictures released a film that purported to show mankind setting aside its jingoistic leanings so as to explore the Moon through international cooperation; sadly the end result was the space opera 12 to the Moon which had about as much realism and political integrity as films like the Queen of Outer Space.

So that we the viewers can realize just how important this film is it opens with the Secretary General of the International Space Order (Francis X. Bushman) informing us, in very serious monotone voice, of a space mission that consists of an international team of astronauts that would be comprised of twelve members from twelve different countries; United States, Poland, Israel, Sweden, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, France, Brazil, Britain, Turkey, and even Nigeria. Now that may seem like a lot of people to cram into a spacecraft (the original Apollo mission had a crew of three) but that’s not all as the ship also sports a menagerie of animals including a dog, a pair of cats and a monkey. And just who could lead such a possible volatile collection of scientists? Well to no one’s surprise the captain of this mission is American John Anderson (Ken Clark), who during his introduction strikes poses as if he’s competing for the Mister Universe competition. Then in the category of “Something for the Ladies” we get a scene where a shirtless Captain Anderson walks in on the two lovely crewmembers while they are showering.

 

 “Captain Beefcake to the bridge!”

This international crew may have been assembled with idea to prevent any one country claiming the moon for their own but it doesn’t stop tensions from forming between the astronauts; Russian geologist Feodor Orloff (Tom Conway) boasts about his countries contributions to science and the space program, this quickly gets on everyone’s nerves and can almost be considered a precursor to the Chekov character from Star Trek.  Then there is the soon to be revealed secret that Erich Heinrich (John Wengraf), who designed the spacecraft and is actually the son of a Nazi war criminal who was responsible for the death of fellow astronaut and Israeli born David Ruskin’s (Richard Weber) entire family during the Holocaust. Did the International Space Order not do background checks before picking this crew? Sure Heinrich isn’t responsible for the sins of his father but sticking him on a crew with a Holocaust survivor seems a little bit insensitive. Of course personal drama isn’t the only thing threatening the stability of this mission as mere hours into space Lunar Eagle 1 is found flying into a “meteor cluster” (Science Note: The movie keeps on calling these celestial bodies “meteors” when they are in fact asteroids as they only become meteors when they enter the atmosphere) but luckily their ship is outfitted with something called “penetration rockets” which can destroy oncoming threats, or at least any that they aren't able to outmaneuver.

Note: I hope you like this shot of Lunar Eagle 1 rocketing through space because it gets used ad nauseam throughout the film, and which is also not helped by the fact that you can see the stars through the ship’s hull.

Eventually they do land on the Moon’s surface, where Captain Anderson quickly hands out assignments to the crew with one particular job I found quite hilarious, he instructs doctors Sigrid Bomark (Anna-Lisa) and Hamid (Muzaffer Tema) to “search for signs of air and life” as if oxygen is something you could possible find lying about the lunar surface. The two enter a cave and they just so happen to discover it contains breathable air, and any half-conscious viewer is most likely wondering, “Does the cave entrance have some kind of magical airlock that lets people in but not oxygen out?” What is even stranger than random pockets of air on the Moon is that once discovering this amazing phenomenon the two astronauts immediately take off their helmets and proceed to make-out, like teenagers at Inspiration Point.

 

Is the air on the moon some kind of weird aphrodisiac?

The movie had not bothered to set up an kind of previous relationship between Bomark and Hamid, so their sudden passionate embrace comes completely out of left-field, and it's almost as out of place as the idea of air on the Moon, but before we can question the morality of two professionals acting in such a manner the pair walk hand-in-hand deeper into the cave, when some strange alien presence then seals the cave entrance behind them with a wall of impenetrable ice. Well the old chestnut of “It’s aliens” is as good an explanation to the bizarre goings on in this movie as we are ever going to get, because at this point 12 to the Moon leaves behind an semblance of logic and sense.

• The crew are routinely bombarded by meteorites but their “Metal meteorite deflectors” keeps them safe.
• The astronauts discover that there is gold on the moon. So that’s nice.
• They uncover a massive glowing crystal that Dr. Asmara Markonen (Cory Devlin) intones, “It is beautiful but evil. Evil and sharp like the jewel of Medea.”
• A mortar detonation reveals a fountain of some strange liquid that Feodor stupidly sticks his hand in, resulting in severe chemical burns. Are we sure these guys are actual scientists?
• Geophysicist Dr. William Rochester (Phillip Baird) steps into lunar quicksand and cries out, “Don’t get yourselves caught. It’s no use. I’m finished.” This total drama queen is then sucked below the surface, and we are given no reason as to why his friends couldn’t just pull him out.

 

Are there aliens below the surface pulling him down?

With two crewmembers missing behind an ice wall, another sucked to his death beneath the surface, and a third suffering from severe burns, you'd think it’d be best to get back to the ship - I myself would have been halfway back to Earth by now - but no sooner do they reach Lunar Eagle 1 than they discover that not only can they no longer contact Earth but they are receiving a typed message from the lunar inhabitants. The message scrolls across one of the ship’s monitors, and though it does not seem to be any Earthly language it also somewhat resembles Asian ideograms, so they ask Dr. Hideko Murata (Michi Kobi) to translate. This of course makes about as much sense as pockets of air on the Moon, so I guess we are supposed to go along with it, but I don’t care what an alien language “resembles” there is no way you are going to be able to translate it on the fly. Regardless of the stupidity of this scene we at least learn a bit about the Moon people as the message that is imparted to the crew of Lunar Eagle 1 reveals that they are an emotionless race who live below the Lunar surface and they do not want Earthlings to "contaminate our perfect form of harmony" and that they will be keeping the two doctors because they are unfamiliar with love, and if they discover that  this emotion can turn to evil they will destroy them and your kind. So they understand the concept of evil but don’t know what love is? Unfortunately the two lovers are not the only item on the Moon People's want list.

 

“Sir, they want us to leave them in peace, also they want our cats.”

Seriously, for some reason the lunar people want the two cats from the Lunar 1’s menagerie, stating, “Cats have an unusual appeal for us, but unfortunately we have none here on the moon.” This movie could have been called “Mars Needs Cats” and it would have made more sense, but regardless of how bizarre this demand is our heroes hand over the cats and flee the Moon. Unfortunately things get even more tense, for while on route back to Earth the crew discover that North America has been flash frozen and if they don’t do something soon the whole Earth could become one giant frozen dinner.

 

Though it does give Congress a reason for getting nothing done.

This leads to the Holocaust survivor and the son of Nazi teaming up to fly this ship’s “space taxi” to drop "atomic bomblets" inside a volcano in the hopes it will trigger a massive thaw, but all plans in this movie run into snags and so this time out it’s French commie Etienne Martel (Roger Til) who tries to sabotage the bomblets - this is so that the United States of America can remain frozen, which will allow the advancement of international communism. In a nice turn of events the Russian dickhead Feodor is revealed to "not be down" with this plan, and he alerts Captain Anderson and the two are able to thwart the evil plan.

 

“I’m not only a scientist I’m a human being, not an insane murder.”

Will Erich and David survive an apparent suicide mission to save the Earth? Can America survive being turned into an alien TV dinner? And what about those poor cats on the moon? Some if not all of those questions will be answered in the startling conclusion to 12 to the Moon.  This is a movie that at just under 75 minutes does its best to bore the hell out of the audience with a story that consists of nothing more than a collection of standard movie stereotypes and bad science, and laughable acting. With a surprising budget of $150,000 dollars there really isn’t much spectacle on hand here - we don’t even get to see the bloody aliens - and the script is simply a lazy collection of tropes that are not helped out by the over-packed cast that populates the screen. This may not be the worst science fiction film out there but it doesn’t offer much for fans of the genre to warrant investing their time in watching it.

 

If these guys are humanities only hope we are all doomed.

The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015-2017) Review

When Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley released her novel "Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus" back in the year 1818 I doubt even her fertile imagination could have guessed the journey her creation would take, and over the following two hundred years it did take some marvelous turns. The author may have lived to see “The Monster” depicted on stage in a variety of productions but since then her story of mad science and revenge has seen nearly countless interpretations on stage, screen and television; from the classic 1931 James Whale movie starring Colin Clive and Boris Karloff to now this BBC production of The Frankenstein Chronicles which takes the gothic tale of science and terror into the world of murder, mystery and political intrigue.

Set in 19th Century London this series follows the investigations of Inspector John Marlott (Sean Bean), a river police officer given the task of solving a particularly gruesome mystery. While rounding up a group of opium smugglers the body of a young girl is discovered washed up on the banks of the Thames, but what makes this unusual is that the body is later discovered to be a patchwork of parts that belong to at least eight different children. This discovery puts Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward) in a bad spot as he is currently trying to pass “The Anatomy Act” which would prevent unlicensed doctors from operating in and around London, and he believes this stitched up abomination is an attempt by the opposition to discredit his fellow surgeons. Leading the opposition is Lord Daniel Hervey (Ed Stoppard), an impoverished nobleman who believes that this act is for the sole benefits of the rich and would prevent the average person from getting decent medical care.

 

Opposed to alternative Mad Science Medical Care.

It’s between these two forces that poor John Marlott finds himself trapped, not helped by the seemingly amorous attentions of Daniel Hervey’s beautiful sister Lady Jemima Hervey (Vanessa Kirby) who can be delightfully distracting, and of course the fact that the slums of London are incredibly dangerous, even without body snatchers practicing mad science on children, it all makes his job nigh impossible. Yet good ole Marlott isn’t alone on this hunt as he is paired up with Joseph Nightingale (Richie Campbell), a Bow Street Runner that though a little green around the edges turns out to be a stalwart ally when things begin to get messy.  For a bit of extra tension a little spice is added to the mix in the form of a homeless girl named Floras (Eloise Smyth), who Marlott saves from the clutches off a nasty bloke named Billy Oates (Robbie Gee), a hardened street-smart criminal who is kind of a black version of Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist, and he becomes a chief suspect in the child snatching.

 

"How about a quick shave, guv'nor?"

The Frankenstein Chronicles is a dark and brutal show with a mystery that keeps both Inspector Marlott and us the viewers completely engaged, and to help the story along the BBC populated this series with some of the best actors in the business.  And this great cast is is aptly aided by the show’s amazing production values as one can almost smell the putrid air of the slums or feel chilled to bone as we watch the poor unwashed masses huddled in fear and despair, and over the course of the first two seasons we find ourselves helplessly lost in the world created by Benjamin Ross and Barry Langford.

This is obviously not a straight adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel but instead posits a theory as to where the author got her inspiration for her finest creation, Marlott even crosses paths with Mary Shelley (Anna Maxwell Martin) and English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake (Steven Berkoff) who both steer our hero down his dark path. I don’t want to get any further into spoilers as that would deprive you of much of the fun this show has to offer, but I’ll just say that the casting of Sean Bean as dogged police officer haunted by his past, sometimes more than figuratively, was pure brilliance on the producers part and the journey he takes us on I hope doesn’t end with just two seasons.

 

"I declare that season three must happen!"

Recently we have been subjected to less than stellar movies inspired by Mary Shelley’s novel, the godawful I, Frankenstein and Victor Frankenstein for instance, but if you have liked British-American horror television dramas like Penny Dreadful you will mostly likely get a kick out of The Frankenstein Chronicles as it is much in the same vein, if a little lighter on the fantasy elements, and with Sean Bean leading such an endeavor how can you not at least check it out?

There are currently two seasons now available on Netflix and as the streaming service has purchased it as a “Netflix Original” hopefully this means they are willing to fund further chapters in this fantastic world of mystery, political intrigue, corruption, science and murder. If you are a fan of Gothic horror and police procedurals this could be the show you were looking for, if not check it out simply for the amazing way it shows life in London, England in the 19th Century, you will not be disappointed.

Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! (2015-2017) – Review

Scooby-Doo, everyone’s favorite mystery solving Great Dane, has been chasing ghosts (or being chased by them) for almost fifty years but with this twelfth incarnation of Scooby-Doo the show takes a decidedly more comedic tone. Of course even dating back to the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? this series has always had comedic elements to it, even the previous incarnation Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated though much darker still had many moments of brevity, but with Be Cool, Scooby Doo! the comedy reaches almost Meta levels at times.

This particular incarnation of Scooby-Doo could be considered a reboot as it chronicles the Scooby Gang’s first adventures after finishing up their senior year of high school, and as the series progresses we are “introduced” to the tropes that would be familiar to the legion of Scooby fans. One of the most notable features of this new run is in how the show’s aesthetics differs markedly from previous versions as the animation style is much looser and freer, more comparable to such contemporary animated shows as Family Guy and American Dad, but the character designs do at least remain basically true to their classic look.

What makes Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! stand-out from its predecessors is in the way all of the characters are allowed to be funny, and I mean laugh out loud funny not just a random chuckle or two, no longer is Fred Jones (Frank Welker) the strong straight man of the group instead he’s a mystery obsessed dude who only thinks he is the leader of the group and really only holds this position because the rest of the gang could care less about the position.  Velma Dinkley (Kate Micucci) is still able to rattle of reams of facts and minutia at the drop of a hat but in this incarnation she often finds herself being one-upped by Fred when it comes to solving the mystery.  Shaggy Rogers (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby (Frank Welker) change the least from their previous versions as they are still a cowardly duo obsessed with food but as the series goes on they do become a little more self-aware as to what their place in the group actually is, unfortunately for them it mostly involves them being bait for a trap.  The character with the biggest change is Daphne Blake (Grey DeLisle) for no longer is she “Danger Prone Daphne” a simple damsel who gets gagged and tied to a chair once an episode, but instead she is the moral heart of the team and is the one who rallies the gang when things look their darkest.

 

She’s also a little nuts.

Each episode will find Daphne displaying some new eccentricity whether it be a fondness for puppets, dressing up as a sports mascot, becoming a mime or even wearing a moustache and Vandyke beard. Her bubbly enthusiasm throughout the series is infectious, and dropped dead funny at times, and she is easily my favorite part of this particular series.  Yet Daphne isn’t played as an idiot as we see that from time to time it’s her on-the-point insights that will solve the many of the cases. Such oddball wackiness does not detract from the standard Scooby-Doo formula it's just the right amount of added “color” that makes this show work so well, and I must state that this series does completely retain the same story structure of the Scooby-Doo mystery.

• A ghost or monster terrorizes some locals.
• The Scooby gang arrive to investigate.
• The group will split up to look for clues.
• Shaggy and Scooby will encounter the “creature” and run in terror.
• Shaggy and Scooby will come up with some elaborate disguise and ruse.
• We will get a musical montage of the Scooby gang running down hallways.
• Fred will come up with a trap that involves Shaggy and Scooby being bait.
• The trap will fail but some kind of accident will result in the villain being captured.
• Masks will be pulled off resulting in the standard “I would have gotten away with it to if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.”

Now Be Cool, Scooby Doo! may follow that formula from episode to episode but that didn’t stop the writers from occasionally tweaking things and dancing around self-awareness of said formula by having such moments as Shaggy and Scooby commentating on the fact that it seems they are always the one chosen to be the bait for one of Fred’s traps, and we even get the origins of such things as Scooby Snacks which leads to a brilliant moment of Daphne questioning the morality of bribing friends to go into danger. That we also learn that Daphne also managed to offend the entire species of dolphins is just another example of the wonderful lunacy that makes this show amazing.

 

"Don't look in their eyes, that just makes them madder."

The other key difference to found in this show is that Scooby and the gang are living in a somewhat more fantastical world than what we've seen in the past, sure the over-elaborate schemes the villains hatch to scare people away were always a bit silly but in Be Cool, Scooby Doo! things reach stratospheric levels of absurdity that one can only assume that if the villains had put as much time and effort into honest work as they did in building robot pterodactyls or abominable snowman costumes they'd be much better off and wouldn't have to worry about a bunch of kids in a van spoiling their fun.

 

How exactly does one go about building a functional robot pterodactyl suit?

Now if in the past you may wondered how this group of mystery solving misfits funded all their travelling from town to town (I've always kind of assumed drugs were somehow involved) but don't expect to finally get answers in this series as not only do we see no signs of any visible form of income but we also find Fred Jones now driving a spectacularly awesome Mystery Machine that not only has a pop-out crime lab and kitchen but it has numerous modes of transportation it can transform into that includes submarine, plane and even a giant robot.  I kept expecting to learn they were being funded by an eccentric billionaire.

 

"More than meets the eye."

As mentioned even the villains stretch the realms of fantasy to the breaking point in this series because even though there are still a fair amount of headless ghosts and amphibian sea creatures to be unmasked and revealed to be nothing more than a security guard or disgruntled employee, there are also some monstrous creations that are staggeringly over-the-top. In the episode “Scary Christmas” Fred is obsessed with solving a Christmas mystery, and is quite upset that no Christmas themed crime is afoot and he really wants something that will cause him to save an orphanage, but instead the gang are pursued by the aforementioned giant pterodactyl, which is strong enough to carry away the Mystery Machine, and in the episode “Giant Problems” Fred dons medieval armor to go toe-to-toe with a two hundred foot faery tale giant.  Of course both the pterodactyl and the giant are revealed to be robotic creations the sheer scale of the “monsters” is simply absurd and just adds the hyper-surreal aspect of the show.

 

"Fee-fi-fo...what the hell?"

Sadly this show was cancelled after just two seasons and thus this brilliantly silly show will become just another footnote in the long history of Scooby-Doo, but one that I will consider a personal favorite as its special brand of lunacy really tickled my funny bone. I must doff my hat to the Cartoon Network and their insane group of writers and animators who brought us such a wonderful and unforgettable incarnation of our beloved Scooby gang.

 

Scooby-Dooby-Doo!

Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (2010-2013) – Review

In 2010 Warner Bros Animation teamed up with the Cartoon Network to produce the eleventh and possibly the best personification of Scooby-Doo and the gang in a two season series that works as a prequel to the original 1960’s Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? Though the series takes place during the time period where our teen-age sleuths are still in high school, before taking the Mystery Machine on the road, they do encounter characters fans will recognize from many of the past incarnations of the show, and it's these nods to past shows and meta narrative Easter Eggs that will make fans of Scooby-Doo easily fall in love with this installment.

The series takes place in and around the town of Crystal Cove, self-proclaimed as the "Most Hauntedest Place on Earth" and its abundance of ghost and monsters provide most of the town’s revenue with tourist dollars. This often results in the Scooby Gang butting heads with Mayor Fred Jones Sr. (Gary Cole) and Sheriff Bronson Stone (Patrick Warburton) as their exposing of the various supernatural threats as nothing more than criminals in masks is considered bad for the town’s tourist based economy, made more awkward by the Mayor being our lovable Fred's dad.

 
Fun Trivia:
• Don Knotts as a random tourist is a nod to The New Scooby-Doo Movies.
• Casey Kasem who originally voiced Shaggy now voices Shaggy’s dad.
• Linda Cardellini who played Velma in the live action movies plays Velma’s friend Hotdog Water.

The element that may catch fans by surprise is that Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated takes the show into a serial format, not something done any of the previous incarnations, with an ongoing story arc that will track a larger mystery across the two seasons, and though it does still incorporate the “monster of the week” elements we've come to now and love, along with some nice tongue-in-cheek references to the formulaic nature of the older versions, it is a show that rewards viewer for tuning in each and every week as more clues are uncovered.

Yet it’s not just the serial format that makes this version stand out from previous incarnations it's the time the show spends letting us get to know our main characters, in ways we’ve never seen before.  No longer are they just two dimensional characters with one simple defining character trait, instead they are fully fleshed out and even given time to change and grow over the course of the two seasons. The show starts with Fred (Frank Welker) as a trap obsessed mess who deeply wants to impress his emotional distant father while also being completely oblivious to the fact that Daphne (Grey DeLisle) is madly in love with him, but overtime he will learn what is truly important in his life. Meanwhile Daphne herself is insecure about being overshadowed by her overly successful sisters and Fred’s failure to see her other than a friend slowly drives her around the bend. Velma (Mindy Cohn) is still the chief brains behind the groups mystery solving ability but in what could come as a bit surprise to many a fan is that the show opens with her and Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) in a relationship, though it’s a secret one because Shaggy is afraid of Scooby (Frank Welker) being jealous.

 

Who could have seen this coming?

In these two seasons the group’s dynamic goes through some serious emotional turbulence that becomes the backbone of the series; we actually care if Fred and Daphne eventually hook and the idea that Shaggy could ever pick a woman over Man’s Best Friend is treated somewhat seriously. Of course the show isn’t an animated version of Beverly Hills 90210 as our heroes will often have to put their own personal issues aside to tackle whatever “supernatural” threat has reared its ugly masked head that week.

It's the over arcing plot of the much bigger mystery that is the centerpiece to this series for in between exposing various residence and visitors as masked monster the gang receives cryptic messages from someone known simply as Mister E (Lewis Black), a shadowy figure who parcels out information that will not only reveal a mystery about a fabulous cursed treasure of immense value but also knowledge of four students and their bird Professor Pericles (Udo Kier) who formed a high school mystery solving club called Mystery Incorporated, a group that just so happened to disappear twenty years ago while hunting down that very same cursed treasure mystery.

 

The original Mystery Incorporated.

Aside from the excellent mystery that spans the two seasons, one that if not solved could very well end the life of everyone on the planet (How is that for high stakes?) the show is rife with references and in jokes for Scooby-Doo fans and movie nerds alike. The Hex Girls from the direct-to-video animated movie Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost make a couple of appearances with Daphne having to go undercover as the lead singer while in another episode The Hex Girls get into a battle of the bands against a group of zombies. We see that Shaggy and Scooby are fans of Fright Fest actor Vincent Van Ghoul (Maurice LaMarche) but old fans will recognize this character as having first appeared in The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, only in that show Van Ghoul was a Warlock voiced by Vincent Price. It’s a fairly nice meta moment and is just one of many great references that are liberally sprinkled throughout the show’s run.

 

We also get to see clips from old Vincent Van Ghoul movies and they are a treat.

Aside from nods to previous versions of of the show movie buffs will also have fun spotting references to such films as Carrie, The Shinning, Nightmare on Elm Street and in one particularly hilarious moment when Sheriff Bronson Stone casually opens the puzzle box from Hellraiser and then casually slams the door in the face of oncoming cenobites. The gang even runs into author Harlan Ellison, who is speaking at a neighboring college, and he gets into trouble after slamming local author H.P. Hatecraft (Jeffrey Combs).  Of course Combs is known for playing H.P. Lovecraft in various horror films which just adds an extra layer of fun for horror buffs.

 

Harlan Ellison voices himself here and has fun poking at his acerbic persona.

Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated not only references previous Scooby-Doo shows and various horror movies but it also kind of creates a Hanna-Barbera shared universe with random cartoon characters from their other shows making guest appearances; such as Captain Caveman, Jabberjaw and Speed Buggy and The Funky Phantom.

 

It’s the ultimate team-up.

One of my favorite episodes has Blue Falcon and Dynomutt teaming up with Mystery Incorporated to take on a Dragon-Man robot, and even though they often teamed up on past shows this time out we get a new origin where find out that Blue Falcon was once a normal security guard working for Johnny Quest’s dad at Quest Research Laboratories when an attack by Doctor Sinn left his faithful guard dog mortally wounded, a couple of cybernetic parts later and Dynomutt is born.  Though Dynomutt is still depicted here as the lovable goofball he was back The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour we get a much darker more violent version of Blue Falcon, one who is more a Frank Castle/Punisher type vigilante than he is of the Batman mold.

 

He has a bird themed utility built and a predisposition for violence.

To date Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated is easily my favorite version of the show and it’s not just because of the fun references to beloved moments from my childhood but by the fact that this run actually goes pretty dark at times, with threats that are genuinely terrifying and a mystery with serious stakes. Despite the shows "darker" tone at times the two seasons still have plenty of goofy instances for younger viewers to get a kick out of, and I particularly love the level of insanity Fred’s Rube Goldberg inspired traps achieve at times, but when season two rolls around, and the main mystery becomes even more prominent, the dangers to Scooby and his friends are simply nail biting at times.

 

The retro design of the show is also quite gorgeous.

The only downside is that though season two does wrap up the over-arcing mystery in a very satisfying manner, and I must say having the mystery span across two whole season is petty daring on the producers part, it teases what could have been a great third season but sadly it was cancelled. On the plus side the follow up series of Be Cool, Scooby-Doo if not as dark and mystery centric as Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated was it more than makes up for it in being bizarrely brilliant and outright nuts. So if this particular run of Scooby-Doo managed to slip by your nerd radar I highly recommend you give it a shot as all 52 chapters are vastly entertaining.

 

Note: Velma’s mom runs a horror museum that sports a statue that terrifies Fred and Daphne.