That Darn Cat (1965) – Review

or Disney, the 1960s saw the release of a couple of animated classics — One Hundred Dalmatians and The Jungle Book, and also the lesser received The Sword in the Stone, but in their live-action division they pulled out all stops with their big budget adventure films like In Search of the Castaways, as well as solid family dramas such as the Fred MacMurray film Follow Me Boys. Yet as good as those films were, it was the Disney comedies that kept the studio afloat. Today we will look back at Disney’s That Darn Cat, a screwball comedy with a little romance and a dash of danger.

As in the book it was based on, Undercover Cat by Gordon and Mildred Gordon, That Darn Cat follows the misadventures of a Siamese cat named DC — which of course stands for "Darn Cat" — whose nightly prowls raise quite a degree of ire amongst the neighbors (leaving muddy paw prints on cars or stealing food out of neighboring houses), but when DC wanders into a tenement apartment occupied by two bank robbers and the poor bank teller they are holding hostage, things get a bit tense … and a bit screwy. The hostage, one Miss Margaret Miller (Grayson Hall), manages to slip DC’s collar off and replace it with her wristwatch, after quickly scratching a message for help on the back of it, and when DC’s owner, Patricia "Patti" Randall (Hayley Mills), discovers her cat’s new accessory, she quickly deduces that the watch came from the kidnapped bank teller. She informs cat-allergic FBI agent Zeke Kelso (Dean Jones) of her theory, and despite this leap in deduction, the FBI take her seriously. What follows is roughly two hours of hilarious hijinks as FBI agents try to tail a cat in the hopes that it will lead them to the villains and the poor woman.

 

Haley Mills and Dean Jones, two titans of Disney films.

That Darn Cat would be the exit picture for Hayley Mills from the studio — she wouldn’t return to Disney until 1986 with the sequel to The Parent Trap — but it was the beginning of a long series of Disney films for actor Dean Jones. The two actors work off each other beautifully in this film, but not in any kind of romantic way — we have Patti’s older sister Ingrid (Dorothy Provine) to provide that — as Mills and Jones bounce off each other with both verbal and physical comedy, all while futilely trying to wrangle the cat. The film’s climax will throw this odd couple into a good degree of peril — much as you’d expect to see in a Hitchcock thriller — but as stated, there is no romantic sparks between the two, despite Patti finding Agent Kelso attractive. So there may not be sparks between Patti and Kelso, but something does develop between Kelso and Ingrid, and as with many films of this type, there is of course romantic foil to contend with. Providing the romantic rivalry in this film we have Gregory Benson (Roddy McDowall), a lawyer who drives Ingrid to work, but whose carpool designs have a more overt nature, as he sets his sites on Ingrid. McDowell portrays the perfect mother’s boy cad, whose desire for the girl is most definitely not about true love, and he is certainly no match for a cat.

 

Comic relief or sexual predator, you decide.

In the few scenes they have together, Dorothy Provine and Dean Jones have excellent chemistry. That they end up together by the film’s end will surprise no one, and McDowell is the typical strawman fall guy in this dynamic, as he's never really in the running as a credible romantic foil, but instead he's a target for slapstick humor. Yet the film also throws in another “love interest” to complicate matters, this in the form of Patti’s sort of boyfriend Canoe (Tom Lowell), a pipe-smoking man-child whose life seems centered on surfing and raiding the Randall’s fridge. Tension is caused when he spots Kelso lurking about, mistaking him for a romantic rival — the FBI’s involvement being kept secret so as not to tip off the kidnappers — and he along with Roddy McDowall, traipsing around in the dark, provide much of the film’s physical comedy.

 

What the hell kind of name is Canoe anyway? The 60s sure were weird.

One of the more interesting elements in That Darn Cat was the portion of the film dealing with the bank robbers and their hostage. The villains are portrayed by Neville Brand, who has appeared in such films as Stalag 17 and DOA, as he brings a great deal of threatening gravitas to the film, but it’s his partner in crime, played by the great Frank Gorshin, who is the real standout here, as he is simply chilling as killer/bank robber Iggy. Of course, Frank Gorshin is known by most audiences as the Riddler from the Adam West Batman series, but it's films like this that show us just how scary he can truly be. The poor hostage is in constant fear, as she repeatedly overhears their plans to murder her and how best to get rid of the body when they do, and it’s these dread-filled moments that create an interesting counterpoint to the comedy elements of the rest of the film.

 

“Riddle me this, Disney!”

Director Robert Stevenson was one of the best and most prolific directors at the Disney studios, helming such classics as Old Yeller to Mary Poppins, and he has a deft hand with comedy, as he’d prove later with such entries as The Love Bug and Blackbeard’s Ghost, which would re-team him with Dean Jones. That Darn Cat is simply one of many live-action gems out of the Disney vaults that have mostly been forgotten — even though it was remade in the 90s with Christina Ricci, which is a film that actually should be forgotten — and if you happen to come across this piece of Disney history one afternoon while surfing channels, do yourself a favor, check it out; you won’t be sorry you did.

Note: The film has a supporting cast of Hollywood greats that include Elsa Lanchester, William Demarest and Ed Wynn.

Reign of the Supermen (2019) – Review

How does one adapt a storyline that introduced four new characters, ran across multiple comic book titles, and is over four hundred pages long, all in a ninety minute animated film? Well, with the Reign of the Supermen we get to see Warner Bros. Animation and DC Entertainment giving it their best shot, but do they hit the mark? Working as a direct sequel to their 2018 animated feature Death of Superman, this film encompasses the events following Superman’s death at the hands of Doomsday, and his inevitable return, but to capture the scope and grandeur of the “Return of Superman” storyline, major changes had to be made, some working quite well, while others I’d have to say were a little less so.

 

Reign of the Supermen

The film opens with the world mourning the death of Superman, though some people believe mankind should step up and be their own superhero, but self-help talks alone will only get you so far, and without Superman around, crime in Metropolis has begun to get out of hand. Filling in the red boots of the fallen Last Son of Krypton are four very different heroes; first we have The Eradicator (Charles Halford), a visor-wearing Superman with a very “Dirty Harry” approach to meting out justice — as in he kills bad guys without a second thought; next there is Superboy (Cameron Monaghan), a hormonally challenged clone of Superman who seems more interested in hitting on women than fighting crime; then there is John Henry Irons AKA Steel (Cress Williams), a man in an armored suit who is trying his best to stop high-tech weapons from flooding the streets; and finally there is Cyborg Superman (Jerry O'Connell and Patrick Fabian), who is the most disturbing of this quartet of Supermen, and not just because of his half-robot look.

 

Can Lois love this Heart of Steel?

The Death of Superman told a very condensed version of the original comic book story, but with Reign of the Supermen, we not only get an immensely abridged version of what comic book readers had experienced back in the 90s, but we are also given a completely new story, with an entirely different villain … well, kind of. The first act of Reign of the Supermen does move several beats from the source material, with the various "Supermen" fighting over the rights to be the one and only Superman — except for Steel who just wants to honor the fallen hero — and we do get a nice added moment with Lois Lane (Rebecca Romijn) sitting down with Wonder Woman (Rosario Dawson), as they bond over their past relationships with The Man of Steel, but once the backbiting and super punching over “Who is the real Superman?” plays out, the mystery is basically forgotten by the screenwriters, as at about the thirty minute mark the movie essentially chucks what was found in the comics into the dustbin.

Note: With a ninety minute running time there was just no way four new Supermen could be fully realized, so Steel and Eradicator appear as almost glorified cameos here.

I will now discuss key differences between the comic books and this animated adaptation, obviously this will include spoilers, so stop reading now if you want to enjoy the full “mystery” of the Reign of the Supermen untainted. In this movie, we find Lex Luthor (Rainn Wilson) promoting his new hero, Superboy, who is sponsored and bankrolled by LexCorp, but the press conference is attacked by the Eradicator, who is looking to kill Lex — Luthor being a known if unconvicted criminal — which then leads to a massive super brawl, for as it turns out John Henry Irons/Steel was also in attendance — he’s there looking into LexCorp's weapons turning up in the hands of criminals — and so Superboy, Steel and then Cyborg Superman all battle it out with the Eradicator. It’s the timely arrival of Cyborg Superman that drives away the Eradicator, and it is this victory which puts the cyborg ahead of the  running for being The Real Superman, and this angers Luthor to no end, him wanting his “Superboy” to be the one and only hero of Metropolis. To fix this, he gets Superboy the top spot in The President’s security detail, for the ceremonial launching of the Justice League Watchtower, but when a boom tube opens, and Parademons terrorize the event, Superboy is defeated and Cyborg Superman is declared the "real" Superman when he saves The President of the United States.

Note: In the original comics, it was President Bill Clinton who declared Cyborg Superman to be the “real” Superman, after being saved by him during a terrorist attack, while in the animated film we get President Dale, who is clearly a stand in for Hillary Clinton.

Getting the Justice League out of the way was an important element in both the comic and this adaptation — they are a force to be reckoned with and having them around would certainly complicate any evil plan. In the comic book they were told by Cyborg Superman that the aliens, who had attacked and destroyed Coast City (killing over seven million people), had fled into space, and that Cyborg would stay and fight the Eradicator, who he claimed led the alien assault, while the Justice League would pursue the alien armada into deep space.

In Reign of the Supermen there is no destruction of Coast City — an event which set up the rise and fall of Hal Jordan — instead, the Boom Tube that had opened, and let the Parademons in, collapses and falls onto the League, appearing to have killed all of them. This is all kinds of bullshit. Are we to believe that none of the Justice League could move out of the way of a slowly falling portal? That they just stood around like a bunch of idiots?

 

Over half the Justice League can fly or has super speed, for Christ’s sake.

The movie then diverges even further from the source material, by having Cyborg Superman creating a new peacekeeping force, one to replace the presumed dead Justice League. This is done by turning regular people into a modified meta-human army he calls his Cyber Corp, using some advanced form of superpower-giving technology. Lois, of course, recognizes these modifications as being of Apokoliptian nature, and that the true villain of this piece is of course the villainous Darkseid (Tony Todd), and also discovers that Cyborg Superman is actually Hank Henshaw, who died in The Death of Superman, after the Man of Steel was a no-show when his space shuttle was destroyed by meteors.  In this adaptation, Henshaw has become Darkseid’s lackey, just to get some sweet revenge on Superman.

 

They even add in some bullshit that Darkseid created Doomsday.

Now Darkseid is easily one of the most prominent villains in Superman's rogue's galley, a villain who can give the entire Justice League a run for their money, but he was not the architect behind the attack on Earth in the comics. In the Return of Superman storyline, Hank Henshaw was still revealed to be Cyborg Superman, also still pissed at Superman for supposedly letting him and his crew die, but he was no puppet to Darkseid. He had posed as Superman to destroy his reputation, and had forcibly recruited the alien warlord Mongul, as part of an elaborate revenge plot against Superman's adopted home, but still, he wasn't Darkseid's puppet.

 

This is much cooler than him being a Darkseid lackey.

Making Darkseid the “man behind the scenes” completely undercuts the threat of Cyborg Superman. When the actual Superman (Jerry O'Connell), who eventually wakes up from his Kryptonian healing matrix takes on Cyborg in this movie, he’s not fighting the chief threat to Earth, which would be Darkseid, instead the film ends with our hero basically fighting a mechanical henchman. In the comic storyline, Cyborg Superman was so powerful that he had made Mongul his bitch, an alien who had in the past gone toe to toe with the real Superman, and only the team-up, consisting of Superman, Superboy, Supergirl and Green Lantern, was able to stop Cyborg Superman’s plan to turn Earth into a new Warworld.

In this movie we later discover that the Justice League weren’t actually dead, but simply trapped in another dimension, to eventually be saved by Lex Luthor hacking a Mother Box, and they spend the last act of the film working with Superboy and Steel to take down Cyborg Superman’s lame Cyber Corp, while a weakened Superman — death and rebirth takes a lot out of you — dukes it out with Cyborg Superman aboard the now launched Watchtower. Superman wins by stabbing Cyborg in the head with a crystal from the Fortress of Solitude, which contains the Eradicator’s essence — him having been revealed to be a Kryptonian defense system all along — and thus the day is saved.

 

A clear happy ending, because they omitted the destruction of Coast City.

Aside from containing four new Supermen, and the revelation that Cyborg Superman was actually a villain, there really aren’t too many similarities between this animated movie and the comic books it was supposedly based on. In the comics, Supergirl was key to taking down Cyborg Superman, yet she doesn’t even warrant a cameo in Reign of the Supermen. In the comic book, Superboy was not a clone created by Lex Luthor — he was a clone to be sure, but he’d been grown in the Cadmus labs, after they’d briefly acquired the corpse of Superman, and not by LexCorp. In the comics Luthor did want Superboy to sign with LexCorp, and fight alongside Supergirl — who post-Crisis on Infinite Earth was not Superman’s cousin but actually synthetic protoplasm created by Lex Luthor — but the young and impulsive clone ended up signing with a shady entertainment lawyer.

 

Though the movie does capture Superboy’s hormonal issues quite well.

There was simply no way that a ninety minute animated movie was going to be able to encompass the four hundred-plus pages that made up the epic tale that is The Return of Superman, but in truncating the backstories of the four Supermen, the film is left feeling a little hollow, and with the Justice League crammed in — and embarrassingly disposed of — in such a lazy fashion, the Reign of the Supermen was bound to come across as a rushed and haphazard endeavour. On the other hand, the animation is quite nice, giving us some really fun action set pieces, and the voice casting is still one of Warner Bros. Animation and DC Entertainment's best achievements, and I really look forward to more of Tony Todd as Darkseid.

Comic book purists will find much to gripe about with this adaptation, and its rushed characterizations will bother others, but there is still much to enjoy with this outing, I just think the Reign of the Supermen would have worked a lot better as a two-parter.

 

And I could certainly do with a proper movie starring Steel.

Elseworlds: An Arrowverse Crossover (2018) – Review

To say that DC’s theatrical attempts have had a rather bumpy run of things would be a vast understatement, yet on the small screen their collection of heroes have met with a fair amount of success — I myself enjoyed the first few seasons of Arrow, and season one and two of The Flash and Supergirl were quite entertaining — but as these shows drag on, the abilities of the showrunners to juggle such a diverse group of heroes has been sorely put to the test. Case in point, Elseworlds, a crossover which may have looked good on paper, failed miserably in the execution.

Originally, in the pages of DC comics, the Elseworlds stories contained “imaginary” adventures of some of our favourite DC heroes — Batman hunting Jack the Ripper or infant Superman landing in Russia instead of Kansas — but now the DC Multiverse has incorporated some of these stories into proper continuity, which brings us to the Arrowverse. In what has become an annual event, this Elseworlds three parter brings The Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl together to fight a threat to reality itself (Legends of Tomorrow gave this crossover a pass) as an all-powerful being called The Monitor (LaMonica Garrett) strides across the multiverse, leaving destruction in his wake.

 

He has the “Book of Destiny” but none of The Endless show up to take it back.

We are first introduced to The Monitor as he destroys Earth-90 — where Barry Allen (John Wesley Shipp) is the last of Earth's Mightiest Heroes to stand up to this mysterious book-wielding figure. We then jump to Earth-1 where The Monitor hands over the book to John Deegan (Jeremy Davies) — who comic fans may recall is Doctor Destiny — and asks him to, “Reshape the world as you see fit.” Giving a supremely powerful artifact to a “mad doctor” is, of course, going to mess things up pretty badly, and thus, the following day, Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) wake up to find themselves living in each other's lives; Oliver is the speedster known as The Flash and Barry is the masked vigilante Green Arrow. Oliver and Barry spend a little time exploring their new identities — Oliver having a hard time controlling the speed force while Barry has to get used to shooting arrows and kicking ass without super speed — and when they try and explain to their friends at S.T.A.R. Labs what has happened to them, they are disbelieved, knocked unconscious, and locked up in one of S.T.A.R. Lab's containment cells. There is a lot wrong with this, and we’re not even twenty minutes into the first episode of this crossover.

 

“You have failed this City!”

The first question that came to my mind was, “Why are Oliver and Barry the only ones aware of the changes in their reality?” Did Deegan have some arcane reason for leaving these two with the memory of the original reality intact? Was this an element that The Monitor snuck in as part of his “Big Test” — he’s apparently rewriting reality to test out worlds to see if they are capable enough to stop an upcoming crisis, yet he never explains why this requires a mortal stooge like Deegan for this to work — but if that is the case, this is never explained. This is called lazy writing, and falls into the category of plot crutches such as “A wizard did it.” This also raises a big question as to how Barry can function at all as Green Arrow; if he has retained his memory of being The Flash, how is he able to fight and shoot like the real Oliver Queen?  In this new reality where Oliver Queen has the power of speed, stopping criminals at super speeds can still work — he may not be as good at it as Barry but super speed is damn effective even if used by a novice — but Green Arrow has no super powers, so unless muscle memory is more effective than I’ve been led to believe, Barry should have gotten his ass kicked while trying to be Green Arrow.

 

“Who needs years of training on a deserted island?”

Then we have the added stupidity of Team Flash not believing in the whole “Freaky Friday” body switch thing, which is insane because this is the kind of crazy shit they deal with on almost a weekly basis, so them immediately locking them up is ridiculous. Luckily, Barry is able to convince Iris (Candice Patton) to open a portal so that they can travel to Earth-38, where they hope to get help from Supergirl (Melissa Benoist), their theory being that the changes to their reality may not have affected other worlds. This turns out to be the case, but not only does Supergirl recognize them for who they really are, she is also able to recruit her cousin Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) to help them on their mission to correct reality on Earth-1. Good thing they did, because once they return to Earth-1 they soon find themselves battling the robot know as A.M.A.Z.O — the super adaptoid who can copy the powers of any meta-human it encounters — but really all that was needed to defeat the robot was Team Flash building an off switch for Barry to shoot into its eye. And how exactly did they pull this off? Well Cisco (Carlos Valdes) and Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker) reverse-engineered A.M.A.Z.O’s operation system and whipped up a virus to wipe out its CPU, and all of this is done in a matter of seconds. Star Trek: The Next Generation was known for pulling such technobabble nonsense out of their collective asses, but even by Geordie standards, this was absurd — they didn’t know of the robot's existence until now, and yet somehow these yahoos could still reverse-engineer the thing in a hot minute.

 

The bigger crime here is wasting A.M.A.Z.O. as a throwaway villain.

Superman returns to Earth-38 to keep Lois safe — from what, we don’t know, but as Lois is constantly getting into trouble he’s probably right to be concerned — and so Barry, Oliver and Kara head to Gotham City to hunt down Deegan (Cisco had used his “Vibe” powers to show them that The Monitor and Deegan were in Gotham), and while visiting the home of the Dark Knight, they are arrested, but then quickly bailed out of jail by Kate Kane (Ruby Rose), Bruce Wayne’s cousin who has been running Wayne Enterprises since Bruce vanished three years ago. She informs them that Deegan is at Arkham Asylum, and thus the group rushes off to retrieve the “Book of Destiny” from this madman.

A few Stray Observations:

• We see John Diggle (David Ramsey) and his A.R.G.U.S. Team fighting the son of Deathstroke, none of whom think to shoot the dude in his unprotected head.
• Oliver doesn’t want the team to tell Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) about him and Barry switching identities, but being the fact that she was brought into help solve the problem, how is that even supposed to work? This is simply for the sake of bad comedy and the continued ruination of Felicity’s character.
• Oliver hacks the GCPD database to find the location of Deegan, but since being fired five years ago, there is no known address for him. Yet Kane, minutes later, informs Kara that Deegan works at Arkham Asylum. I guess this is why Oliver needs Felicity, because his computer skills suck.
• Oliver is not yet comfortable with his speed powers, so the idea of him doing a “Super Speed Reconnaissance” of Arkham is kaboshed, but why doesn’t Kara use her Super Speed?
• Caitlin/Killer Frost gets into a fight with Nora Fries, and she loses. *sigh*
• Canisters of the Scarecrow’s fear toxins are broken open, causing Oliver to hallucinate Reverse Flash and Barry to see Malcom Merlin, but why is the fear gas causing them to see each other’s main nemesis?
• Batwoman knocks the two out of their hallucinatory state, and tells them to leave Gotham, and once again this is not how Scarecrow’s fear gas works, a punch in the head does not end the effects of the toxin.

 

“I told you to get out of Gotham, and don’t come back until my series starts.”

Supergirl retrieves the “Book of Destiny” from Deegan — though he manages to escape because the plot requires this to happen — and the group returns to A.R.G.U.S. to figure a way to use the book to restore reality, but The Monitor just steals the book back and hands it to Deegan, telling him to, “Do better, think bigger.” Which means this whole trip to Gotham and finding Deegan was not only a complete waste of time, but also pointless … well aside from introducing Batwoman (and to be fair that was the only reason I tuned back in to the Arrowverse).

Note: Supergirl uses her X-Ray vision to see how much of Batwoman’s body is covered in tattoos, and suddenly dozens of fanfics leap into existence.

So Deegan rewrites a new reality, where Barry and Oliver are criminals known as the Trigger Twins, who have super powers, and Deegan has made himself this reality's Superman, and we are still left wondering why our main protagonists are left with their memories of previous realities intact. Meanwhile, Kara is being held prisoner in this new reality’s version of S.T.A.R. Labs — under the grumpy supervision of the Earth-1 version of Kara's adoptive sister Alex Danvers (Chyler Leigh) — and I’m left wondering, “Why is he now blending the reality of multiple Earths?” Did Deegan even know of the existence of Earth-1 till now? Did opening the book a second time widen his scope of knowledge? Once again, the showrunners don’t think such trivial things need to be explained, because they have the whole “A wizard did it” explanation to fallback on, in the form of The Monitor.

 

And why exactly would Deegan choose to make his version of Superman dark?

Barry and Oliver track down this reality’s version of Cisco, who is apparently a crime lord here, so that he can use his portal-making abilities to get them to Earth-38 to retrieve the real Superman, and the reason why Superman took a break to “protect his Earth” is once again brought into question, considering all of reality is in danger, but of course, the obvious answer is that the bad writers always have a hard time figuring out ways to handle Superman’s incredible power set, without tossing kryptonite into the equation. So, the crossover wraps up with Alex, Barry, and Kara finding the “Book of Destiny” inside Barry’s Time Vault — Deegan calls it his Fortress of Solitude in this reality — and they give it to Superman to operate because cosmic artifacts are something he’s dealt with before, but then Deegan gets the book back and starts to alter reality all over again … and damn, this getting old. Oliver confronts the Monitor, giving the usual heartfelt speech about humanity, inspiring hope, and other such bullshit, and he then returns to shoot the book with an arrow enhanced by the Monitor.

 

They also get to defeat A.M.A.Z.O. again, so that’s nice.

A Couple More Stray Observations:

• Oliver and Barry manage to escape Deegan/Superman by knocking over a crane, forcing him to save innocent lives while they escape, but being it would take Superman less than a minute to catch the crane, I don’t see why he couldn’t have just caught them after catching the crane — he does have super vision and super speed.
• Supergirl is able to talk Alex Danvers into freeing her by pointing out that she knows her adoptive sister is a lesbian. This is certainly an interesting tactic, and maybe in future we can hope to see Alex hooking up with Kate Kane.
• To impede Deegan’s reality altering progress, Barry and Kara slow down time by speeding around the Earth in opposite directions … WTF? How exactly is that supposed to work? Barry states that, “If Supergirl and I travel in opposite directions, going just over Mach 7, it should create enough centrifugal force to slow the Earth’s rotation.” Superman did this in his first movie, reversing time to save Lois, but that is as bullshit then as it is now, because this would most likely result in ripping the planet apart, not reversing time. And wouldn’t two super people, who are going in opposite direction, just negate each other?

Note: That we got to see John Wesley Shipp as Barry Allen, from the 90s Flash series, was easily my favorite moment in this crossover.

Deegan is incarcerated at Arkham, looking now much like the comic book incarnation of Doctor Destiny, and Kara and Clark return to Earth-38 where we get a nice moment where Clark and Lois (Elizabeth Tulloch) reveal to Kara that Lois is pregnant, and that they will be returning to Argo City for an extended period of time — because at least one of the writers had read Larry Nivens essay “Man of Steel Woman of Kleenex” — and that they are leaving Earth's protection to Supergirl, stating, “The world doesn’t need Superman if it has Supergirl.” That’s a nice sentiment and all, but didn’t he save their asses a couple of times in this one crossover alone?

 

I do love that the Fortress of Solitude has a barbecue.

Comic book fans will of course know that this entire event was only to set up next year’s big event, as the crisis that The Monitor was alluding to would be “The Crisis on Infinite Earths,” and though I doubt a television version of such an epic event will come close to what we saw in the comics, I do hope it’s at least not as much of a convoluted mess as their television version of Elseworlds.

 

Do you think they’ll have the balls to kill off Supergirl?

The most depressing thought to me is that the writers believed they were telling an actual Elseworlds story, but they weren't; we don't see an 18th century version of Green Arrow teaming up with Allan Quatermain, or the Speed Force being gifted to Sherlock Holmes. What we got instead was a lame identity swapping shtick, which is not at all what the Elseworlds comics are about. Now, I will admit there were some fun moments in this "Elseworlds" crossover, and I do look forward to seeing more of Ruby Rose as Batwoman, but the writers of these shows are just so monumentally bad at their jobs, it’s just staggering. And I know it can’t be easy to juggle the continuity of a comic book multiverse, or balance the power sets of various heroes, but it looks like the showrunners here didn’t even care to try.

 

See you again in the fall to see how they pull this off.

The Car: Road to Revenge (2019) – Review

In 1977, Universal Pictures released a nice little horror film called The Car, which had James Brolin and Ronny Cox dealing with a demonic car that was terrorizing their small Midwestern town. Not, over forty years later, we get a sequel to that horror classic…well, kind of, but not really. Universal Pictures is once again the distributor, but fans of the original will be hard pressed to find any similarities between their beloved classic and this supposed sequel.

 The film takes place in the not so distant future — your basic low budget cyberpunk setting — where criminals are tried, convicted, and executed all in the same day, and even in the same place, so it's nice to see that the future is all about convenience, but as harsh as the judicial system seems to be, crime itself is still running rampant in this dystopian city. District Attorney Caddock (Jamie Bamber) wants to see the streets cleaned up, even if he has to be an asshole about it, but when he comes into possession of a certain data chip, one that belongs to the notorious crime lord Talen (Martin Hancock) who runs a human trafficking ring, while also dabbling in illegal cybernetic enhancements, a group of said cybernetic goons are sent to retrieve the chip.

 

These guys are The Devil’s Rejects' rejects.

Torture fails to make Caddock give up the data chip, so they toss him out of his high rise office window, where he crash-lands on the roof of his own luxury sedan. Homicide Detective Rainier (Grant Bowler) is put on the case, and his first step is to track down a woman named Daria (Kathleen Monroe), who was the last person known to have seen Caddock alive. Daria had a complicated history with the deceased, her being an ex-girlfriend with a past drinking problem, that wasn't helped by Caddock being a controlling dickhead. Talen’s minions also wish to have a few words with Daria, hoping that she may have some idea as to where the data chip is located, and that is when The Car rolls in. Turns out that when Caddock pancaked onto the roof of his car, his soul fused with the vehicle, and now the driverless automobile prowls the streets seeking revenge, as well as the continued stalking of his ex-girlfriend.

 

Is this director G.J. Echternkamp’s idea of an imposing killer car?

By this point, it’s obvious that for anyone who has seen the 1997 original, The Car: Road to Revenge is not running by the same playbook, as in the original, it was made fairly clear that The Car was some incarnation of The Devil himself, while in The Car: Road to Revenge we are dealing with a car possessed by a vengeful spirit. Basically, we’re talking a bargain basement Christine, but with a standard Tales From the Crypt plot, and as the film progresses, Echternkamp looks to make up for any lack of continuity, or originality for that matter, by tossing in random moments of nudity and extreme gore. This pretty much fails at every level. The only shining light amongst this used car lot of crap is the chemistry between the two leads; Bowler and Monroe really seem to be enjoying themselves, and the script even allows them some fun banter, when not being interrupted by the puerile garbage that makes up the rest of the script. But whenever we start to think the film might try something interesting, or at least to not be openly insulting, the script forces characters to do the standard dumb things people are apparently required to do in a horror movie.

 

Pull the bloody trigger, you complete idiot!

But just when you think this movie is a sequel in name only, with not one single plot element to connect this thing with the original, Ronny Cox shows up as some junkyard dude. Now this cannot be the same character that Ronny Cox played in the original, as not only was the character a cop, but going by this film’s “futuristic” timeline, he’d be long dead, so maybe this is just a cute casting nod to the original film, but no, that is not the case. At some point in the film, The Car is practically destroyed by Talen’s minions — by gunfire no less, which is something that couldn’t even scratch the original Car — and Ronny Cox's junkyard mechanic come’s across the wreckage and decides to fix it up, but the damage is too extensive, so he must use a “donor car” to rebuild the vehicle, and the donor car looks like The Car from the original film.

 

Does this make sense to anyone else?

• Is the donor car just another customized 1971 Lincoln Continental Mark III, or is it the actual Devil car from the original movie?
• If this thing was The Car, what was it doing in this dude's garage? And how and why The Car ended up here would easily have made a better movie than the one we got.
• After killing Ronny Cox, the “new” Car proceeds to drive through the city, mowing down innocent civilians, left right and center. Before it was just knocking off the gang members who murdered Caddock, so why is it now murdering people at random?
• This seems to imply that parts from the donor car have made it more evil, yet it still seems to have the hots for Caddock’s ex-girlfriend. So what the fuck is controlling The Car, is it Caddock or The Devil?

 

This is one of those sequels that seems designed to piss off fans.

The 1977 original ended with a perfect set-up for a sequel, during the end credits we saw that The Car had survived being blown up by Brolin and Cox, and was now heading into Los Angeles, but the filmmakers behind The Car: Road to Revenge decided to ignore such notions, and instead made a movie that is more a mash-up of Robocop 2 and John Carpenter’s Christine, than anything to do with the original film. This film is so bad that you won't find any of the actors listing this thing on their IMDB page. I know one must not expect too much from a direct-to-video sequel, but goddamn it, I’ve waited over forty years for a sequel to that classic horror film, and this is the crap we got?

 

This film deserves to languish in the used car lot of hell.

Bumblebee (2018) – Review

What happens when you get the man behind such animated films as Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, and give him a live-action Transformers movie? Well, the answer to that is you get a movie that is pretty much the exact opposite of the Michael Bay atrocities — which have made billions of dollars for some unimaginable reason — and Bumblebee is easily the best in the franchise. Granted, that this is a very low bar, but director Travis Knight manages to pack more heart and humanity into his little Transformers film than all five of Michael Bay's installments put together.

Bumblebee is either a prequel to the Bay-run Transformers franchise — Note: Michael Bay is listed as producer of this prequel but he did little more than cash a cheque — or if the film does well enough, it could be considered to be a soft reboot of the series, and here’s hoping this movie keeps bringing in the dough because so far it’s only managed to pull in a little over $150 million on a $135 million dollar budget. To put that into perspective, Transformers: The Last Knight took in over $600 million worldwide on a budget of $217 million, and the Last Knight was a hot pile of garbage.

Please see this movie, don’t make Bumblebee cry.

Taking place in the year 1987, the movie opens with the fall of Cybertron, with the evil Decepticons forcing Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) to scatter the remaining Autobots across the galaxy, with Bumblebee (Dylan O'Brien) being sent to Earth to secure it as a rendezvous point for the Autobots. Unfortunately Bumblebee lands right in the middle of some kind of military training exercise, being run by badass Colonel Jack Burns (John Cena), who immediately considers the Autobot to be some kind of hostile invader. Things get even more complicated when a Decepticon arrives hot on Bumblebee's heels, and the ensuing fire fight not only results in the death of most of the Colonel’s men — which goes a long way towards exacerbating his hatred of space robots — but Bumblebee himself is severely damaged in the fight, losing his voice and memory.

 

Note: There are no references to Bumblebee fighting Nazis in WWII.

Enter Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld), a teenager having trouble moving past the death of her father, stuck with a terrible job at a local amusement park, a stepdad who gives her a book on the importance of smiling for her 18th birthday, and an annoying little brother who thinks he’s the next Bruce Lee. But more importantly than all this, Charlie is also in desperate need of a car. Finding a beat-up old Volkswagen Beetle in her Uncle’s junkyard seems to solve one of those problems, but when it's quickly revealed to be a sentient robot, her problems move from domestic to intergalactic. Turns out fixing Bumblebee — so named because of the sounds he makes — activated a beacon of some sort, which nearby Decepticons hear and follow to Earth, in their continued hunt for Optimus Prime and the Autobot resistance.

Bumblebee is a sweet movie about a girl, her robot, and the importance of family, and sure there are explosions and chase sequences throughout this entry, but those are just the action-packed toppings on top of a well-layered cake. We not only come to care about a damaged robot, lost and alone and surrounded by enemies, but Hailee Steinfeld’s Charlie is an actual human being with not only a character arc, but actual growth as a person, and she’s also incredibly likable, which isn’t something that can be said about any of the male leads in the other Transformers movies. There isn’t the frenetic chaos that is to be found in the Michael Bay film, and Travis Knight’s history in animation has allowed him to depict transforming robots in a more organic and believable way, and we become more emotionally involved with Bumblebee and his plight in more ways than any other character we’ve seen before.

It’s clear that Knight has taken heavy inspiration from Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant — there is one particular moment when Bumblebee goes apeshit that is very reminiscent of the Iron Giant becoming a "gun" and letting loose on the army — and it is the budding relationship between Charlie and Bumblebee that is the heart and soul of this movie. That is not to say that this movie doesn’t have some serious action moments: at one point, one of the Decepticons makes a horrifying observation about humans, say it likes “how they pop,” and the human military themselves are no white knights either, launching some very brutal attacks against our little Autobot. But I especially love that John Cena’s character isn’t just a moustache twirling villain, he could easily have gone all Captain Ahab with his hatred of robots, which certainly wouldn’t be all that unjustifiable, yet instead we get a more nuanced character than what you’d expect to find from an antagonist in a Transformers movie.

 

Note: At no point in this film does Bumblebee pee on anyone.

Now this is a far from perfect movie; the military’s approach to the handling of teenagers believed to be in league with alien robots seemed a little too easy-going for me to buy completely, and of course it is openly derivative — Brad Bird could seriously sue Paramount here — and there are certain elements that don't quite get proper payoffs, but overall, Bumblebee is a joyous adventure film that is fun for the whole family, and is proof that you can actually make a good movie based on a decades-old cartoon that was basically a toy commercial. Will Charlie Watson someday re-team up with Bumblebee? Only time will tell, but until then, we can at least enjoy the one good Transformers film we’ve got under our belt, and we can dream of more to come.

 

This is my kind of love story.

The Concorde... Airport '79 – Review

With three successful entries in their Airport franchise, Universal Studios finally crashed and burned with the fourth installment, The Concorde: Airport '79. It’s a fact that the Airport movies were never critically darlings, often called relentlessly ridiculous, if not out-and-out silly at times, but they were all successful at the box office to varying degrees. This was not the case with Airport ’79.  With this last installment the franchise met its ignoble end, as the filmmakers gave viewers a movie, whose seemingly endless implausibility’s made the previous entries look downright sensible by comparison, and basically broke the audience into gales of laughter.

 The main plot of The Concorde: Airport '79 deals with arms manufacturer Kevin Harrison (Robert Wagner), who has been dealing illegally with foreign governments during the Cold War, and his efforts to cover-up these crimes by killing television reporter Maggie Whelan (Susan Blakely), who has come into possession of documents proving his company’s involvement. Now, this at first looks to be an interesting storyline for a movie, and certainly a plausible scenario, but then we spend two minutes with Maggie, the dumbest most gullible reporter on the face of the Earth, and our ability to suspend disbelief is broken. Not only is a man claiming he has proof that Harrison has been dealing arms to communist countries, but he is murdered right in front of her — she only escapes with her own life because of the sheer incompetence of the assassin — and yet, after numerous attempts to destroy the plane she is on, Maggie is still talked down from going to her network bosses with the story, by Harrison himself. And why would she listen to the man accused of selling weapons to North Korea, and who may have ordered the murder of a whistleblower?

 

Turns out she is in love with him, because why not.

That Maggie runs to cry on the shoulder of the man who most likely ordered her murder completely divorces our ability to feel any sympathy for her; I don’t care how deeply in love you are, there is a thing called “survival instinct” that should be kicking in right about now. He gives her some bullshit excuse that these accusations are nonsense, that it’s probably some blackmail scheme to take down his company, and she agrees to hold off reporting on the story. This of course allows him to have a henchman reprogram his company’s new Buzzard surface-to-air missile to blow up the Concorde that she is taking to Paris.

Now, I may not be a genius businessman but having your own test drone fly off course and blow up a plane full of international passengers — the Concorde is on a goodwill flight to the Moscow Olympics — doesn’t seem like a wise business decision. Even if you manage to escape criminal prosecution for the “accidental” death of over a hundred people, your company would most likely be sued into oblivion, so why not just have another hitman meet her in Paris?  As murder plots go, blowing up a Concorde to kill just one person, is just one step up from Snakes on a Plane.

Note: The Buzzard drone is designed to take down fighter jets, but the Concorde is able to outmaneuver it with aerobatic stunts that would most likely have torn the plane’s wings off.

And what noble flight crew manages to pull off such incredible aerial feats? Well returning for the fourth and final time is Joe Patroni (George Kennedy), who along with Capt. Paul Metrand (Alain Delon) and flight engineer Peter O'Neill (David Warner) manage to keep the Concorde flying in the face of insurmountable odds. And aside from the dangers of killer drones, we also must suffer the blatant sexism of this franchise, as it hits new lows with this installment; for example, we get Chief Stewardess Isabelle (Sylvia Kristel) commenting, “You pilots are such... men” when the flight crew are all chatting during their coffee break, and Patroni responds, “They don't call it the cockpit for nothing, honey.” Practically every moment with George Kennedy in this movie is cringe-inducing, especially the sex scene that follows Metrand setting Patroni up on a blind date with a prostitute, and it’s all downhill from there.

 

In the list of things “never to see,” George Kennedy post-coitus is near the top.

The Concorde: Airport '79 is a disaster in every aspect of the word: there is not one aspect of the screenplay that makes a lick of sense, and characters behave and respond in ways that are inexplicable to anyone with even a small degree of sanity. Ludicrous moments after ludicrous moments are piled on as if the producers believed that inundating the audience with so much stupidity could beat them into submission. Not only does the Concorde survive a killer drone attack, but it also survives an attack by an F-4 Phantom II fighter jet, and then later suffers a sabotage that results in the plane’s cargo hatch opening, causing explosive decompression and a forced crash landing. This may seem absurd at first, but let’s break down this film’s plot into basic points, to see just how insane this movie actually is, because as you will come to understand, “absurd” barely covers what we get in this film.

Disaster Break Down:

• Harrison hires a killer to murder a whistleblower who could expose his illegal arms deal, and the killer for some reason waits until the man has entered Maggie’s house before shooting the poor bastard.
• Harrison orders his flunky to reprogram his company’s killer drone to take down the Concorde, despite the repercussion this would have on his company if this plan succeeded.
• Patroni is able to outmaneuver a drone by doing stunts that the Concorde is simply not capable of performing, but luckily the drone is taken out by a pair of F-15 fighter jets, who manage to reach the threatened Concorde in record time.
• With the failure of the drone attack, Harrison orders hired mercenaries in an F-4 Phantom to shoot down the Concorde. This is certainly a rational next step.
• Patroni sticks his arm out of the cockpit window to shoot off flares, to divert the F-4 Phantom’s heat seeking missiles away from the Concorde’s engines, despite the fact that the heat of the Concorde’s engines greatly exceeds that of a flare, and this somehow works.

 

Hollywood magic at its best.

• With its engines damaged, the Concorde plummets to the ocean below, yet it manages to ignite one of the engines at the last second so that they can pull up in the nick of time.
• The more maneuverable enemy fighter for some reason cannot pull up in time and it crashes into the sea.
• The Concorde performs an emergency landing that requires experimental nets to slow the plane down. This is because during the attack, its reverse thrusters and hydraulic brakes had been damaged.
• The head of the airline, Eli Sands (Eddie Albert), who was aboard the plane with his latest trophy wife (Sybil Danning), vows the plane will be fixed and ready to continue to Moscow the very next day. This is beyond preposterous, as after taking that kind of damage it’d be lucky to be flight-worthy in month, if ever. All those crazy maneuvers would have seriously compromised the structural integrity of the Concorde.
• Maggie has dinner with Harrison because she still hasn’t clued in to the fact that her boyfriend has been trying to kill her. Dumbest reporter ever.
• One of the repair crew members is a paid saboteur, and he rigs one of the cargo hatches to open mid-flight, and this tactic is chosen because a bomb isn’t a sure thing.
• Turns out explosive decompression is also not a sure thing, as the Concorde manages to safely crash land in Austria.
• Maggie survives to finally report on her story, and we get a quick shot of Harrison exiting the picture.

 

This has to be about the most awkward way to shoot yourself.

And of course it wouldn’t be a proper Airport movie if it wasn’t exploding at the seams with gratuitous characters, ones that serve no purpose other than to pad the film's run-time, and Airport ’79 is certainly no exception; as the film’s “subplot” is about the Concorde’s goodwill trip to the Moscow Olympics, we are introduced to reporter Robert Palmer (John Davidson), who is having a secret love affair with Russian gymnast Alicia Rogov (Andrea Marcovicci), then there is the big bear of a Russian coach named Markov (Avery Schreiber) and his deaf daughter (Stacy Heather Tolkin), next is a beleaguered mother (Cicely Tyson), whose son desperately needs a heart transplant — sadly there are no singing nuns to comfort her — and then for comic relief we have Charo as a woman trying to smuggle her dog aboard, and how could we forget Martha Raye as the passenger with serious bladder problems, and finally Jimmie Walker as a stoned jazz saxophonist, who won’t let anything harsh his mellow.

 

He brings new meaning to flying high.

To say that Concorde: Airport ’79 is a bad movie goes without saying, but it does fall into the category of being “so bad it’s good” as the level of absurdities that roll out every couple of minutes are truly staggering, with special visual effects that give new meaning to the word special. Then there is George Kennedy, who after being nothing but a glorified cameo in Airport ’77 is finally given center stage here, and he dives into this role with a sexist abandon that will leave you gobsmacked. This is a movie that has to be seen to be believed — my review could never truly do this film justice — and though it did bomb at the box office, it did pave the way for Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Brothers to release their disaster spoof Airplane! the very next year, so that’s kind of nice.
Note: The film received such derisive laughter upon release that Universal Pictures decided to market it as a comedy, with the tagline: "Fasten your seatbelts, the thrills are terrific. . .and so are the laughs!"  Nice try guys, but no one's buying.

Disaster Safety Tip #1: If you see George Kennedy on, or even near a plane that you are about to board, do not take that flight, take the next one, or just bloody well walk.