Moontrap (1989) – Review

Blending horror and science fiction dates back to almost the beginning of cinema — with such outings as the 1910 silent version of Frankenstein — but sci-fi horror movies to do with outer space really kicked into gear with films like It Came From Outer Space and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and then hit their peak in the 70s and 80s with Ridley Scott’s Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing. But along with those classics came a slew of bargain basement endeavors, ranging from the entertainingly bad like Roger Corman’s Galaxy of Terror to the just plain bad as was the case with Don Dohler’s The Alien Factor, and in the middle of the pack is the film we will be looking at today, Robert Dyke’s Moontrap.

By the late 1970s, America had clearly won the space race — having planted the flag on the moon and flipped the bird to the Commies — but come the 1980s, America started to consider space travel to be a little blasé, with space shuttle launches no longer getting much national coverage at all, and films like SpaceCamp floundering in the box office as a result, but such worries didn’t stop producer/director Robert Dyke from coming up with his exciting action-adventure flick Moontrap, where intrepid astronauts would do battle with alien forces hell-bent on conquering the Earth; but who could stand in the way of an insidious alien menace?

 

Enter Pavel Chekov and Ash Williams.

On a routine space shuttle mission to collect a malfunctioning satellite, mission commander Colonel Jason Grant (Walter Koenig) and fellow astronaut Ray Tanner (Bruce Campbell) encounter a massive derelict spacecraft, but due to its orbital decay, it will soon burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Grant volunteers to perform an EVA (extravehicular activity) and he discovers a strange reddish pod — the only thing on the alien craft not burned up — but along with the pod, he retrieves a desiccated corpse of a human. Back at NASA, carbon dating reveals that the corpse originated from the moon and is some 14,000 years old.

Science Note: The Carbon 14 method only works for creatures/objects that lived or were created in the Earth's atmosphere, and thus would not be helpful in determining the age of things from the Moon.

Grant and Tanner get into a pissing match with a government stooge named Haskell (Reavis Graham), who practically accuses NASA official Barnes (John J. Saunders) of concocting this whole thing just to get more funding, but Tanner points out that if they don’t go to the moon, to see what technology could be found on a hidden alien base, the Russians surely will. Meanwhile, back in the lab, that little reddish pod opens up, a little robot probe pops out and it begins to combine the desiccated corpse with the equipment in the lab, to create a killer cyborg. This results in some poor NASA employee being brutally murdered and a S.W.A.T. team mobilizing to combat the alien invader, and during all this action all I could think of was, “Does NASA actually have a S.W.A.T. team?”

 

Just how often is NASA attacked by killer cyborgs?

The cyborg survives a fury of weapons fire from S.W.A.T., but Grant manages to sneak into a ventilation duct, which allows him to get above the creature, and he blows its head apart with a well-placed shotgun blast. The mission to the moon is greenlit, with the last Apollo rocket being taken out of the mothballs, and soon Grant and Tanner are on some kind of “Search and Destroy” mission, with their friend Beck (Tom Case) manning the orbital command module, while Grant and Tanner take the lunar lander to the surface to hunt for the mysterious base. At this point, one has to be wondering, “Who are making these decisions?” I can see Grant and Tanner wanting to be part of this mission, the last Apollo mission being cancelled before Grant had a chance to moonwalk, but an alien cyborg had just attacked Earth, and yet their response is to send Abbot and Costello to investigate? Worse is that these two guys are only equipped with a moon buggy and a couple of space Uzis. I know the filmmakers here were dealing with a low budget, but couldn’t they have swapped out a couple of those S.W.A.T. guys for some Space Marines to go along with Grant and Tanner? We saw that cyborg firing lightning, as it held off all those S.W.A.T. dudes, so what did they expect two bumbling astronauts to do if they found an entire lunar base full of them? Did they even have a plan?

 

“Do we tell them we’re from the Red Cross?”

What money Moontrap had in its budget clearly went towards the special effects, as the model work and matte paintings are all really quite splendid, but the designs for the mysterious lunar base were maybe a little too good, or at least a little extreme, because the entrance looked bigger than the Great Temple of Ramses, and a line from Walter Koenig stating, “No wonder we never saw it from orbit,” made little to no sense.

 

Did it somehow camouflage itself into the lunar landscape?

They discover that this “base” is the ruins of an ancient human civilization, and inside it they find a woman in suspended animation, inside some kind of pod surrounded by human skeletons, and she is awoken by our hapless heroes — her name is Mera (Leigh Lombardi) and that’s about all we learn about her — but they barely have time to exchange names before being attacked by one of the cyborgs, who Mera later reveals are called the Kaalium. Grant and Tanner make quick work of the cyborg with their space Uzis — which is surprising considering a whole passel of S.W.A.T. guys couldn’t manage to do shit against one of them — and the newly formed trio exit the ruins and head back to their lunar module.

 

Lucky for them, Mera has her own spacesuit.

Things go from bad to worse when they discover that the Kaalium have made off with the lunar module, but perseverance is their middle name, and they decide to follow the Kaalium tracks, to hopefully retrieve their ride home — being the vehicle can only get them into orbit, and not back to Earth, so finding it is only step one — and then matters are made even worse when further attacks result in Tanner being killed, and then poor Beck is pulled out of orbit and explodes on the lunar surface, so things don’t look too good for Grant and Mera as they seem to be stranded on the moon. There is a nice little moment where a despondent Grant turns to Mera — after he’s constructed a nice little space pup tent — and says, “I woke you up just so you could die with me,” but this then leads to a sex scene between the two, which seems only here to add a little more nudity — we also got some naked breasts earlier in the film when Grant and Tanner visited a strip club — and the whole thing is just so out-of-the-blue and unearned that it kind of puts one off.

 

Lucky for us the movie picks up a bit when Cyborg-Tanner peaks in the window.

Grant is able to easily dispatch the horrifying creature that was once his friend, but unfortunately he and Mera end up being captured by the Kaaliums anyway, and the two are taken aboard the alien ship to be used for spare parts. Heroic Grant manages to free himself, and handily beats to death one of the Kaaliums trying to dissect Mera — these cyborgs do seem a lot easier to kill than the one we first encountered — and while exploring the Kaalium ship, they discover the landing module, which has been adapted into the alien machinery, and Grant deduces that the Kaalium have been on the moon for 14,000 years just waiting around for replacement equipment, and now with the lunar lander’s parts, the Kaalium are free to continue their journey to Earth.

 

I guess the Kaalium didn’t have Intergalactic Triple-A.

Grant starts a self-destruct sequence on the landing module — Question: Was this added to the ship for this particular mission or are self-destruct devices standard NASA issue? — and as the clock counts down, a NASA space shuttle arrives on the scene — which had been sent up to destroy the approaching alien vessel — but before the shuttle can lock on with its missiles, Grant and Mera are attacked by a Kaalium crew member, and upon firing his space Uzi, he discovers that he can use the gun as propulsion to get them out of the ship before it explodes. Grant and Mera make it to a safe distance — cough *bullshit* cough — before the thing goes kablooey, and they are picked up by the space shuttle.

 

Grant and Mera and their happy ending...or is it?

Robert Dyke’s Moontrap is not a terrible movie; it just seems like more of a raft draft than a finished product, as we are left with a few key unanswered questions:

• How did the Kaalium end up stranded on the moon?
• How did mankind colonize the moon 14,000 years ago?
• Mera was put in suspended animation so that she could warn future generations of the Kaalium threat, but did this plan rely on us finding her before the Kaaliums found us?
• Why do Kaaliums need organic parts stolen from humans?

 

“Tonight on Alien Chop Shop!”

Moontrap is a nice little sci-fi/horror flick, the effects are surprisingly good for such a small film, and Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell are both a lot of fun to watch — as they toddle along a lunar surface that clearly has Earth’s gravity — and the alien cyborgs are truly quite frightening. If this film’s premise had been given to one of the major studios, we could have been looking at a sci-fi classic, but alas, what we ended up with was a quaint little gem that most people have likely forgotten about.

Avengers: Endgame (2019) – Review

How does one go about even contemplating wrapping up a storyline that started back in 2012 with the first Avengers film — not to mention it's also the culmination of eleven years and twenty-two films — and give fans an ending that will be both exciting and emotionally fulfilling? Well, with Avengers: Endgame, the Russo Brothers somehow managed to pull it off. The journey was not always perfect, but the ride was more than I could have ever hoped for.

In the Avengers: Infinity War, half of the population of the universe had been wiped out of existence by the snap of Thanos's (Josh Brolin) fingers, so what do our group of heroes  —those that survived, that is — do in such a situation? Let's just say it takes a heavy toll, with some members of the team going into rather dark places to handle their grief. We find the Avengers have scattered themselves all over the planet, trying to make sense of the new world order, with Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and War Machine (Don Cheadle) still holding out hope that The Snap can be reversed, bringing their friends and family back from the dead. Enter Scott Lang aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) who at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp found himself trapped in the quantum realm after The Snap, and it's his lucky return from this exile that brings hope back to our beleaguered heroes. Realizing that time functions differently in the quantum realm, Scott theorizes that they could build a device that would allow them to navigate their way back through time, which leads to the group deciding to hunt down the Infinity Stones to steal them from different periods in time, thus performing something they call a "Time Heist."

Note: It's best not to think too hard on the "time travel" as depicted in this movie as it is both contradictory and nonsensical at times.

This, of course, leads to getting the band back together again — once again, those that are left — which includes a reluctant Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), who is quite happy with his current life with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and their five year-old daughter, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) who has seriously gone to the dark side of vigilantism, and finally Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) who both have had major changes in their lives Post-Snap. Now, the first hour of this three hour superhero epic is mostly spent assembling all the pieces required to get the main plot of Avengers: Endgame going, sprinkled with a nice amount of drama and levity, all to get us to one of the single greatest superhero confrontations in the history of film, and I'm not being hyperbolic here, the big action set-piece of this movie alone is worth more than the $10 dollar price of admission. It is basically comic book splash pages brought to life.

As amazing as this cinematic feat is, and it truly is as breathtakingly fun as one could wish for, there still are a few bumps along the way. In this year's Captain Marvel film we were introduced to Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) who by the end of her origin story had reached such levels of cosmic powers you were left wondering if Thanos would even be a threat to her, then you have Thor who by the end of Infinity War had reached a whole new level of power of quite staggering proportions, and thus the idea of Thanos lasting more than a minute and a half in a straight up fight seemed all the more questionable. Not to get into spoilers, but the Russo Brothers manage to handle one of these problems better than the other and as well-orchestrated as the attempt was, some fans may still feel a little cheated.

Avengers: Endgame is sprinkled throughout with callback's and references to events from the previous twenty-one films and never once do these moments come across as cheap fan service; it all goes towards making this installment really feel like a final chapter — though, of course, phase four is just around the corner so it's not all that final — and with literally hundreds of characters to address, this is no small feat. No matter what criticisms can be laid at the feet of this installment — and this film is most likely going to be nitpicked by many — one thing that can't be said is that it lacks heart, as this movie is a rollercoaster of emotions that will have you gasping in shock one moment before laughing uncontrollably, and then cheering with exultation as our heroes rise to the challenge. Over the past two decades, we've grown to love this group of misfits, from the arrogant Tony Stark to the noble Prince T'Challa, and the Russo Brothers do the almost impossible by giving everyone a moment to shine.

As mentioned, this is a long film, with multiple Lord of the Rings type codas, so the pacing could be an issue to some, but I was having so much fun the time literally flew by, and if audiences have managed to make it through the previous twenty-one films, I can't see anyone honestly holding the film's length against it — just make sure you go to the bathroom ahead of time — and no it's not a perfect film, anything hinging on time travel is doubtless going to have some wrinkles in it, but Avengers: Endgame will be most known for giving us one of the most satisfying, tear-jerking, exciting, action-packed adventure superhero films ever put to film.

 And where will the Marvel Cinematic Universe be going after this? Well, we have Spider-Man: Far From Home out this summer, and with that more adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Black Panther in the offing. I'm more than confident that Phase Four will be just as exciting and fun as the previous ones. Excelsior!

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (2019) – Review

Nancy Drew has been solving mysteries going on 90 years now, and as such this teen sleuth has constantly been evolving with the times. In films, she first appeared in the 1930s film series starring Bonita Granville, which ran four films concluding with Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, then she made her television debut in The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries back in the 70s, where she shared billing with her male counterparts, then she got a second shot at television with a 90s show simply titled Nancy Drew — sadly this one was a dud and only lasted 13 episodes. Then, in 2002, Disney Studios put forth a Nancy Drew movie in the hopes of kick-starting a new series, but it failed to garner much praise and is mostly forgotten. Nancy got her next break back onto the big screen with the 2007 Nancy Drew movie starring Emma Roberts, and though not a box office smash, it was still a delightful little outing. All of this brings us to the 2019 release of Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, starring the young actress who played Beverly in the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s It.

When a character has been solving crimes for nine decades, you’re going to see a lot of changes, some cosmetic while others a little more drastic; for instance, in the original 1930 book of Nancy and the Hidden Staircase, Nancy’s father gave her a revolver for protection, which unless the NRA plans on their own remake, this isn't something modern audiences can expect to see any time soon, but it’s stuff like computers and social media that truly shake up the world of Nancy Drew. With 2019’s Nancy and the Hidden Staircase, the filmmakers decided to go the route of telling a Nancy Drew origin story, where we learn what brought her into the world of teen sleuthing.


In this adaptation, we find Nancy Drew (Sophia Lillis) and her father Carson (Sam Trammell) as recently arrived residents to the rural town of River Heights, having moved there after Nancy’s mother died and her father being unable to handle living in the city they loved together.  Nancy isn’t finding it too easy settling into a small community after growing up in Chicago — being in a town that has not one but two horses is a bit of a challenge. We first meet Nancy as she skateboards her way down the center of Main Street — showing a complete disregard for traffic laws — and when she soon discovers that her friend Bess (Mackenzie Graham) has been a victim of cyberbullying, she and her other pal George (Zoe Renee) form a trio of vengeance and set forth to dish out some “restorative justice,” which involves taking down local rich boy, and all around douchebag, Derek Barnes (Evan Castelloe). This involves sneaking into the boys’ locker room and rigging a showerhead to release a chemical that will turn Derek’s skin bright blue — using some kind of magical time release dye — and streaming his humiliation live online, but unfortunately this act does constitute as a crime, which results in Sheriff Marchbanks (Jay DeVon Johnson) sentencing her to community service. Lucky for us, this brings her into contact with Flora (Linda Lavin), an elderly and eccentric shut-in who seems to be having ghost problems, and before you can say “Scooby-Dooby-Doo,” Nancy Drew is on her way to solving her first mystery.

Flora lives in a historical mansion, Twin Elms, which she believes to be haunted, so Nancy volunteers to investigate this ghostly phenomenon — it certainly beats picking up trash in the park — and she is joined on her haunted sleepover by Helen Corning (Laura Wiggins), who is not only Flora’s niece but also the girlfriend of Derek Barnes. Can you say awkward? Helen falls into the category of High School Mean Girl, being bitchy and catty to those she considers beneath her social standing, but this film fights against the cliché by having her slowly being won over by Nancy and her friends, eventually becoming one of the gang.

 

Think Cordelia Chase from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Sophia Lillis is simply perfect as the teenage sleuth, with her take on the character being a confident, redheaded millennial who personifies the classic character’s best traits — intelligence, independence, and an unwavering belief in justice — while also keeping everything fun and exciting, never getting bogged down with too much teen drama. Where Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase missteps is in the mystery itself, and considering this is primarily a movie revolving around a crime-solving teen, that is a pretty big misstep. While watching this movie I had to wonder if the writers had even read the original book, or even seen the first movie adaptation for that matter, because the mystery depicted here is not only ridiculous — with supernatural phenomenon being created by crooks that would be literally impossible to manufacture in the real world — but it misses the biggest element from the book, that there were two houses and a hidden staircase that revealed a tunnel which connected them. This movie, strangely enough, calls Flora’s home “Twin Elms” which could have been a clue to there being a second house, one that is linked to Flora’s, but sadly all we get is a hidden staircase that leads to a secret passageway and a massive cellar.

 

How can you not be aware that you have catacombs in your basement?

The plot of the original book dealt with your basic “locked room mystery” with Nancy being brought in to figure out how valuable items were going missing from a Civil War-era mansion, items from rooms that were securely locked. Now, in this updating of the mystery, we find Nancy, Helen and Aunt Flora fleeing from invisible forces — being attacked by cupboards and drawers opening violently on their own, witnessing objects levitating in the air, and even a faceless spectral figure. And how were such supernatural phenomena being orchestrated? Well the cupboards and drawers had poles attached to the backs of them and were manipulated from inside the secret passageway — though this is possible, the fact that Flora didn’t notice broom handle-sized poles attached to all her drawers I found a bit unrealistic — but what of the floating candles and faceless spectres that terrorized our trio? Turns out that the villains were pumping a powerful hallucinogen throughout the house’s air conditioning, which of course would not work as depicted in this movie, because there is no way to ensure that each person would witnesses the exact same hallucination. During the candle floating sequence, Flora comments, “Oh god, I hate this part,” which implies that the villains are somehow able to repeatedly trigger specific hallucinations, and not just cause an old lady to see pink unicorns or a chorus line of naked Elvis impersonators.

 

"Happy haunts materialize. Grim-grinning ghosts come out to socialize."

Sure, one can defend this by pointing out that “It’s just a kid’s movie, don’t take it so seriously,” but decades of Nancy Drew mysteries didn’t have to rely on such cheap theatrics, so why now? Even the villain’s motivation doesn’t pass the smell test, which has something to do with scaring Flora into selling her home so that they can build a new rail line through town — which sounds more like a plot to an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! — but with Flora refusing to sign, things quickly devolve into kidnapping and planned murder. Of course, a person signing over their home moments before being murdered would most likely raise a red flag or two, so I'm not sure that these villains have thought things through.

As ridiculous and nonsensical as the plot is, director Katt Shea has managed to wrangle together a talented cast, who do their best to sell the wacky shenanigans, and the updating of the Nancy Drew mysteries allows our heroine to be computer literate, able to cleverly access security cameras, and even break into the school science lab to analyze clues. This Nancy Drew isn’t the squeaky clean sleuth of the 1930s, as she’s got a definite edge to her in this installment, one that allows her to break the rules to solve a case. As mentioned, this movie works as an origin story, with Nancy discovering her calling as a mystery solver, and I look forward to see how they develop her character with further installments. Will she maintain her rebellious nature, or will she settle down and become a more stable heroine? In whichever direction they decide to take this incarnation of Nancy Drew, it looks to be a fun ride.

 

Hardy Boys eat your heart out.

Hellboy (2019) – Review

In 2004, visionary director Guillermo del Toro adapted the Mike Mignola comic Hellboy to the big screen — it didn’t make much money — then in 2008, Del toro followed up that film with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, a film even better than the original — and it also didn’t make much money — which of course in Hollywood parlance means it’s time for a REBOOT. This led to the big question, “How does one go about rebooting a series based on comic property that has failed to produce box office gold with its first two swings at bat?” Well apparently, director Neil Marshall, and the people at Lionsgate, thought going for a hard “R” would do the trick, maybe get some of that Deadpool money. Sadly, it takes more than a little gore and a few “F” bombs to make a successful movie.

Do you like films with seemingly endless and tedious exposition? Boy do we have the movie for you. With this reboot of Hellboy, we basically get two hours of people sitting around talking about the plot, then Hellboy will leave to punch a monster before arriving at a new location so that he and his pals can sit around and talk about the plot some more. Whenever someone isn’t reiterating the events we’ve already had explained to us, ad nauseam, director Neil Marshall will then punish us with one of forty or sixty flashback sequences that populate this film — I may be exaggerating a tad, but God does he overkill it with these things — and when we aren’t being subjected to massive expository dumps, our main characters will take side quests that have pretty much no bearing on the plot. If this film had been properly edited, it would be about as long as an episode of Supernatural.

 

This movie is so jam-packed it should have come with CliffsNotes.

So what exactly is the plot of Neil Marshall’s Hellboy, you ask? Well, in an opening prologue, we learn that back during the Middle Ages a witch named Nimue “The Blood Queen” (Milla Jovovich) was betrayed by her coven and dismembered by Merlin and King Arthur. Her body parts were then placed in separate magically sealed chests and spirited away to the four corners of England. We’re told that she had planned to unleash some deadly plague to wipe out that pesky scourge we call humanity — looking at the world today you can't really fault her — and something about finding a demonic mate to rule a new world. As far as villains go, Nimue is about as boring and generic as it gets. The movie teases us with some complexity to her character, with Nimue meeting with Arthur to work out some kind of truce and then being betrayed, which could have led to her being a sympathetic character, but the screenplay pretty much ditches all that to give us another snarling harpy bent on world domination.

 

“Hellboy, have you heard of something called the Me Too movement?”

Then we have Hellboy (David Harbour) as a disgruntled employee of the B.P.R.D. (The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) who is sad that he was forced to kill a friend and fellow agent, that said agent having been turned into a vampiric luchadore — damn but does that sound like a better idea for a movie than what we get here with cliché witches and lame prophesies — and things are made worse by the strained relationship between Hellboy and his adoptive father Professor Broom (Ian McShane), a man who shows not one ounce of fatherly compassion or concern about the fact that he has been sending his son out to do battle against a cadre of monsters on what looks to be a never-ending mission. I love Ian McShane to death, but this version of Broom is more in keeping with McShane’s Al Swearengen character from Deadwood than the kindly father figure from either the comic books or the Guillermo del Toro movies.

 

“God rest the souls of that poor family... and pussy's half price for the next 15 minutes.”

In this two-hour reboot, we find Hellboy encountering the aforementioned Lucha libre vampire. After that, he’s sent off to England to aid the British version of the B.P.R.D. in hunting three giants, he then hooks up with an old friend (Sasha Lane) who just so happens to be able to talk to the dead, and then visits with the British M11 agents in their secret headquarters, where he is partnered up with an agent (Daniel Dae Kim), a man with a personal grudge against monsters and considers Hellboy a threat to the world’s safety. Hellboy has a tussle with an ex-changeling pig monster, one that looks a lot like Bebop from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, gets briefly shanghaied by Baba Yaga, who is pissed at him for taking one of her eyes, and then Hellboy has a nice meeting with a briefly resurrected Merlin (Brian Gleeson). Now with all this going on, Hellboy does manage to cross paths with Nimue once or twice, you know the actual villain of this movie, but with the amount of clutter in this film, she's lost amongst all the noise.

 

Here’s Team Hellboy, don’t ask me their names as I’ve already forgotten them.

Any one of those encounters listed above could have been made into a solid Hellboy movie, but instead they are all crammed into this one film, and because of this, they are all drastically shortchanged, especially Nimue, who once again I must point out is the film’s primary antagonist. I feel obliged to keep pointing this out because clearly Neil Marshall was unaware of her importance. I have to believe that the filmmakers were more concerned with getting that precious “R” rating than whether or not they had a solid story to tell. The result was a disappointing mishmash without any heart or soul, which are two key components in telling a good Hellboy story.

As for that “R” rating, well all they managed to do was stuff obtrusively bad gore into lame sequences, and create moments that were chocked full of terrible CGI monsters rampaging through the streets of London, which is truly a shame because we do get practical effects and make-up used to create many of the creatures in this film, and they are all quite good, but the film undercuts this wonderful work by shoving cheap computer-generated images in our faces.

 

Shouldn’t this thing be off fighting Scooby-Doo and the gang?

Neil Marshall has a solid resume with this genre, having given us such films as Dog Soldiers, Doomsday, and the Descent, but with his take on Hellboy we get none of the fun or terror found in his earlier works. All the jokes fall flat, which is pretty bad considering the Hellboy comics are basically horror-comedy, and none of the characters develop into anything remotely memorable, and when words like “prophecy” and “destiny” are bandied about, we can only roll our eyes in despair. There is some solid action sequences to be found in this movie, choregraphed fights that you can actually follow, and Harbour does try his best with the material given — some of it being pretty bad — but he's mostly guilty of not being Ron Perlman.

I was sad when I first heard that Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman were not going to be allowed to finish the story they had worked so hard on, yet I was not going to hold that against Neil Marshall and David Harbour; I truly wanted this film to succeed because I love that character, but sadly, the end result was certainly not a case of third time's the charm.

Note: The film teases us with further stories, even promising us the return of Abe Sapien — who was greatly missed in this outing — and more of the wonderful 1930s vigilante Lobster Johnson (Thomas Haden Church), but I honestly doubt we will be getting a fourth Hellboy movie any time soon.

The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo (1985) – Review

n five decades of Scooby-Doo mysteries, there is one show that stands apart from the rest, and that would be the 1985 series The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. It stands apart not because it had the gang encountering real ghosts and monsters (for in the second season of Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo they already started dealing with actual ghosts), but because it was in the seventh incarnation of Scooby-Doo that the showrunners first introduced the idea of an ongoing story arc. The show would deal with Scooby and friends trying to round up thirteen “ghosts” that had escaped The Chest of Demons — which did kind of make the amount of episodes rather finite — but even as limited as this show’s concept was due to early cancellation, it still failed to get the story completed, that is until 2019 with Scooby-Doo and the Curse of the 13th Ghost.

 A modern viewer looking back at The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo may posit the question, “Where in the hell are Fred and Velma?” Sadly, it was due to poor ratings that network brass decided to revamp the series by introducing Scooby-Doo’s rambunctious nephew Scrappy-Doo — to be fair, this did save the show from cancellation — but come the fifth incarnation of the show, Scooby-Doo and Scrappy Doo, the network also decided to drop poor Fred, Daphne and Velma from the cast — though Daphne would return for The New Scooby and Scrappy Doo Show and carry on without Fred and Velma right through to the show we are talking about today, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo.
This series finds our gang, consisting of Shaggy (Casey Kasem), Daphne Blake (Heather North) Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo (Don Messick), being thrown off course while on a trip to Honolulu via the Himalayan mountains, where a couple of bumbling ghosts — Weerd (Arte Johnson) and Bogel (Howard Morris) — have plotted to trick our heroes into opening the Chest of Demons, a magical artifact which houses the thirteen most terrifying and powerful ghosts and demons to ever walk the face of the Earth.

 

It’s at this point we realize that maybe a guy in a mask is a better threat.

Even as a short-lived series, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo raised a few questions — the whole real ghosts and demons being a given — with the biggest question being, “When exactly did they trade in The Mystery Machine for a Mystery Plane and how did they pay for it?” Throughout the many incarnations of the Scooby-Doo show, I’ve always been left wondering, “Where does the money for all this mystery solving come from?” In all their globetrotting adventures we never see the gang getting paid for exposing amusement park owners as mask-wearing criminals, so were we to assume that they were independently wealthy and that ghost hunting was their choice of philanthropy? Even weirder than seeing them flying around in a private plane is the fact that Daphne seemed okay with Shaggy and Scooby as pilots.

 

What state issued these idiots a pilot’s license?

Another most notable addition to the Scooby-Doo canon is the appearance of Flim Flam (Susan Blu), a pint-sized con artist who we first meet as he’s being chased by a mob of townsfolk — him being guilty of selling a supposed miracle drink called “Lotsa Luck Joy Juice” which he claimed could remove unwanted curses, jinxes and evil spells, while also working as a rocket fuel and being a darn good dandruff remover — and Flim Flam's sole purpose in this show seemed to be in trumping Scrappy-Doo in the obnoxiously annoying category. For much of this show's thirteen episode run, we find Scrappy and Flim Flam working together — pulling off the disguise gags that were the staple of Scooby and Shaggy’s antics — which of course left little for our regular cast of characters to do.  Shaggy and Scooby were basically relegated to running and hiding while poor Daphne was given even less to do — which considering her old job revolved around her mostly getting tied up by the villain, that’s saying something. This was all made worse by the fact that Scrappy and Flim Flam were basically just carbon copies of each other’s characters. They had almost identical, very annoying character traits, with the only difference between them being that one of them was apparently human.

 

That Flim Flam and Scrappy never returned as regulars is no surprise.

Rounding out the cast of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo was Vincent Van Ghoul (Vincent Price), a renowned magician and warlock who was enlisted to help the gang when the Chest of Demons was opened by Shaggy and Scooby, and his role in the show was much in keeping with the 1970s television show Charlie's Angels, as each week he’d inform our heroes of the activities of one of the escaped “ghosts” and he'd point them in the right direction. Though Vincent would give them much needed aid, often via crystal ball communications or magical rescues, he mostly worked as their disgruntled boss — though once again it's not as if he was paying them for any of this — and he would only rarely become directly involved in a particularly ghostly encounter.

 

"See no evil, speak no evil, get me off this show!"

As for the ghosts themselves, well this was probably the weirdest aspect of the show, because they don’t really come across as being all that ghostly — that they came out of something called the Chest of Demons being a big clue to this — as they run the gamut from zombies to witches to demons, with only Weerd and Bogel providing the show with regular ghostly appearances. Was this supposed to be a case of these creatures having been killed sometime in the past, and now our gang was to do battle with their ghostly versions? If so, none of them acted in any particularly ghostly manner, and can you even have a ghost of a zombie or a demon? The first “ghost” the gang tracked down was the warlock Maldor the Malevolent, who didn't let being dead slow him down any as he easily bent reality and conjured up dragons to fight our heroes.

 

Maldor even turns himself into a giant to terrorize Scooby.

Another unique characteristic of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo was the constant breaking of the fourth wall — mostly handled by Scrappy and Flim Flam, of course — which provided some decidedly weird moments. For example, in the episode with Maldor the Malevolent their battle with the evil warlock was interrupted by a “Special Editorial” where Scrappy Doo accosted a woman named Loretta Cut-it-Out from the Bureau of Television No Nos, and who had raised concerns about the use of fire during the dragon sequence (fire being a dangerous element for children). Scrappy then accused her of being “Anti-Dragon.” It’s clear that the show’s writers were having fun taking pot shots at the television Standards and Practices of the time, which had violence in morning cartoons being constantly under fire from parent groups, and this was a really fun and meta point in the show. Maybe if they'd done a little more of this type of humor we'd have developed a little less hate for Scrappy-Doo.

Note: It was Standard and Practices that prevented such shows as the Super Friends from allowing Batman and Robin to punch bad guys.

This show went into even stranger areas with such episodes as "That's Monstertainment," where our heroes were trapped inside an old black and white monster movie; or in the episode "Scooby in Kwackyland," we find that the villainous Demondo has trapped them in the newspaper comics section. Then there was the episode “It’s a Wonderful Scoob,” where Vincent Van Ghoul takes a depressed Scooby to the future to show him what the world would be like if he didn't return to ghost hunting, and during that episode we also discover that kids are actually watching The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, as if it was a live broadcast of real events.

 

Even Ronald Reagan steps in to plea for Scooby’s return to the show.

It’s these meta-moments that older viewers will find most entertaining, while younger viewers — like my six year-old niece — will most likely still be asking, “Where’s Velma?” and though this is far from the trainwreck that the following show A Pup Named Scooby-Doo was, it still suffers from the painful comic stylings of Scrappy and Flim Flam, and even the dulcet tones of Vincent Price can’t save The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo from falling flat more times than not. This all led to the show being cancelled before the last ghosts were caught — though I doubt even audiences of the time were keeping score — and we had to wait three decades for a proper conclusion.

Stray Observations:

• Daphne trades in her standard purple dress for a more modern jumpsuit.
• The Mystery Machine isn’t just replaced by a plane; the gang also drives around in a cool red van that works as a strategic all-terrain mobile command unit, one that has an inflatable ducky raft.
• In the episode “It’s a Wonderful Scoob,” Scooby meets future Daphne and Shaggy, but for some reason Flim Flam is still a kid and Scrappy is still a pup.
• In the episode "Reflections in a Ghoulish Eye," the Scooby Gang encounter a character that is an homage/rip-off of Martin Short’s Second City character Ed Grimley, “I must say.”
• In the episode "A Ship of Ghouls," we get a flip on a standard Scooby trope, with the ship’s captain having his mask pulled off to reveal he is a ghost.
• Episode titles for Scooby-Doo have always been pun-centric, but The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo adds a little wrinkle by going with song title puns, such as "To All the Ghouls I've Loved Before, "Me and My Shadow Demon," and "When You Witch Upon a Star."
• Scooby-Doo and his friends never did catch all 13 ghosts. Only 11 of them were shown being caught, which means that even after the release of Scooby-Doo and the Curse of the 13th Ghost  we still have one more ghost unaccounted for.

  

Math was never a strong suit with this group.

When a show runs on for about five decades there is going to be some high points and some low points, and I'd say this particular run was at most a mid-point in the history of Scooby Doo, and though The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo does contain two of the more reviled characters in the show’s history, the idea of a story arc was a noble effort, one that sadly wouldn’t again be attempted until 2010 in the series Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated. There is still enough on hand to make this show worth a watch, even if it’s just to listen to the awesome voice work of the always entertaining Vincent Price.

 

Vincent Price, Master of Comedy and Terror.

Dollman (1991) – Review

Science fiction stories about tiny protagonists have been around for quite some time; Universal Pictures adapted Richard Matheson’s story of a man shrunken due to exposure to a radioactive cloud into the classic film The Incredible Shrinking Man, and of course Disney’s popular Honey I Shrunk the Kids dealt with the classic idea of a scientist and his shrinking ray, but it was the late 60s television show Land of the Giants, created by legendary producer Irwin Allen, that dealt with a small group of space travelers who found themselves dragged through a space warp and onto a world of giants, that is the closest inspiration I can find to Charles Band’s cinematic “masterpiece” Dollman.

 If you are unaware of the name Charles Band and his production company Full Moon Entertainment — which introduced such classics to the world as the Puppet Master and Trancer franchises — you have probably led a more sedate and sheltered cinematic life than my own, for Band and company were mostly known for producing low budget exploitation flicks, with lots of gore and nudity, while not worrying so much about the creation of nuanced characters or substantive stories. It is with the film Dollman, whose title character was played by the great Tim Thomerson — who also played the lead hero in the Trancer films — that Charles Band clearly wanted to start another franchise with his 13 inch Dirty Harry. She, this was not to be, aside from a cameo in the 1992 film Bad Channels, and crossover sequel Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, this idea was pretty much doomed from the beginning, for as cool as a concept of a pint sized super cop was, these classy filmmakers had neither the skills nor the budget to effectively pull it off. Someone should have pointed out to them that if your effects-work is worse than what we’ve seen on a television show made back in the 60s, then maybe you need to rethink your premise.

 

Dollman vs. Bad Opticals.

The premise of Dollman is fairly simple; we’ve got badass hero Brick Bardo (Tim Thomerson), who tries to keep the streets clean on planet Arturos from all the scum and villainy, and Bardo is basically your standard cliché cop — suspended from the force and prone to blowing away villains rather than arresting them — and when he attempts to chase down his greatest enemy Sprug (Frank Collison) (who due to numerous violent encounters with Bardo is now just a floating head), they end up in a brief space chase where he and Sprug fly their respective spaceships through a strange energy band, which sends them to Earth. Unfortunately, for these two on our Earth everything is larger by a six to one ratio. Bardo crash-lands in the South Bronx, in a territory run by gang leader Braxton Red (Jackie Earle Haley), and his first encounter is with gang members who aren’t too fond of Neighbourhood Watch leader Debi Alejandro (Kamala Lopez), and so Bardo must step in and save the day.

 

Groger Blaster, the most powerful handgun in the universe!

Aside from the “shrunken hero” aspect of Dollman, there isn’t an ounce of originality to be found in its short eighty minute run-time; we have Deb as the noble Hispanic mother, who wants to keep her young son (Humberto Ortiz) from joining one of the local gangs, and she gets no help from police Captain Shuller (Eugene Robert Glazer), who is more interested in getting sound bites than actually cleaning up poor neighbourhoods. This could easily be one of the crappy Deathwish sequels, with Tim Thomerson stepping in for Charles Bronson by way of Dirty Harry, because the whole aspect of him being a thirteen inch cop with a gun doesn’t really add much to the story. For most of the film’s run-time he and his ship just sit on Deb’s kitchen table, where neighbours pop in to occasionally gawk at him, and none of the film’s shootouts would have been any different if he’d been a full sized cop — well other than him being a slightly smaller target to shoot at — but these gangbangers are so bad at their jobs, they probably would have missed him even if he was eight feet tall and stationary.

 

To be fair, it does make hiding easier.

About the only interesting element of this film was the hinted-at relationship between Braxton and Deb, that he had in the past ordered his men to leave her alone — even though she is a thorn in the side of his organization — but we never find out exactly why this was the case. Did they grow up together as friends but then drifted apart when he joined a gang? The film doesn’t have time to explore this kind of thing, too much random violence to fit in, which is a shame because the only standout performance in this film was the one given by Jackie Earl Haley. He is given a brief villain monologue at the end of the film, one that hints at him being an actual flesh and blood character, but then he blows himself up, so let’s not worry about that.

 

Jackie Earl Haley, this film’s MVP.

It’s obvious that director Albert Pyun had virtually no budget to work with, as for the most part the “cop in a land of giants” premise is handled by either long POV sheets of Brick Bardo running through rubble or him standing in front of rubble — this version of the Bronx consists mostly of rubble — all because they had no money to build scale sets or props. The film also seemed uninterested in dealing with how a thirteen inch dude could take on a gang of street thugs in any creative capacity whatsoever, as he mostly just shoots them with his hand cannon — which on his world pretty much explodes people while on Earth it just makes fist-sized holes in people — so not much different than any other cop vs. thug scene in any generic action film. The one time they try to do something different — with thirteen inch Bardo sneaking up on a gang member — they completely fuck it up, because they have Bardo knock a guy out with a long pipe … well, long if you're thirteen inches high, but when used against a regular sized dude, it’d be like hitting somebody across the head with a knitting needle, which is not going to knock someone out.

 

“From Hell’s heart, I poke at thee!”

Is Brick Bardo supposed to be made of denser matter, and that's why he is able to hit people with the proportionate strength of a regular sized person, like Marvel’s Ant Man? If Charles Band and Albert Pyun had bothered to put more than ten seconds of thought into this film’s science fiction premise I’d be very much surprised, because the one scene where he sneaks through a small drainage pipe is the only moment where he kind of utilizes being tiny … oh, he does hang onto the gang’s car door so that he can follow them to where they have Deb held hostage, so I guess that’s two times he exploits the advantage of being small, but even the scene in the drainpipe is a big disappointment. He encounters a rat, but instead of a cool “man against rat” fight, the rodent just scurries away, probably to audition for the remake of Willard.

 

“Go ahead, make my millennia!”

There’s not much fun or substance for even the most forgiving of genre fans to focus on, and aside from Jackie Earl Haley’s performance, and whatever enjoyment you can get out of Tim Thomerson’s Dirty Harry impression, Dollman is a lost effort, for as a whole, the film is fairly predictable and forgettable.

Couple of Stray Observations:

• On the planet Arturos we hear a news report that seems to be framing Brick Bardo for the death of a bunch of hostages, when in reality he saved them all, but this idea of a corrupt media is never addressed again as we never come back to this planet.
• Deb is able to pick up Brick Bardo’s ship as if it weighed about as much as an actual toy. So is his ship made out of some super light polymer material?
• The villainous Sprug is found by Braxton’s gang and he offers them his “dimensional fusion bomb” if they help him get home, but he also tells him that this particular device has a ten second fuse and that everything within three parsecs will be sent to another dimension, forever. Now, I’m sure that these idiot gangbangers don’t know that a parsec is a unit of length used to measure astronomically large distances between objects beyond our Solar System — which certainly wouldn’t leave much of  South Bronx, or Earth for that matter, if that thing went off — but even taking into account their lack of “scientific knowledge,” who would want a bomb with only a ten second timer? Doesn’t seem very safe to me.
• When this apparent “dimensional fusion bomb” does go off, detonated by a dying Braxton, all we get is a very bright light. No real explosion, and certainly nothing disappearing into another dimension, and our heroes are definitely standing closer than three parsecs away.

 

I guess the moral of the story here is, “Don’t trust a floating head.”

At its heart, Dollman is just a cheapy sci-fi action flick, one laden with gore and “F” bombs to titillate teenagers, but if a viewer goes in expecting more, than that viewer may find themselves briefly entertained, but I myself found writer/producer Charles Band to be guilty of wasting a clever premise, as well as Jackie Earl Haley’s performance, in a movie that barely crawls out of the gutter long enough to get your attention. There are certainly worse examples of the genre, and even worse outings by Full Moon Entertainment, but Dollman doesn’t even fall into the category of “So bad it’s good.”

Note: The planet Arturos consists mostly of rubble, which funnily enough looks a lot like the South Bronx we later visit, and matte paintings borrowed from the television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Shazam! (2019) – Review

In this seventh installment of the DC Extended Universe, the people over at Warner Brothers do something the guys at Marvel haven’t really dealt with, the existence of superheroes from the point of view of kids — you know, the target audience the original comics were aimed at — and with Shazam! director David F. Sandberg does just that, and it’s rather refreshing.

With this film we get the origin story of Captain Marvel, and no I don’t mean the Captain Marvel who is teaming up with the Avengers to save the universe from Thanos, we’re talking about the hero Billy Batson, the one found in the Shazam comics, but this confusion is understandable considering the legal history of the character. Captain Marvel was created by Fawcett Comics back in the late 30s, and whose popularity started to exceed that of DC’s flagship hero Superman, which resulted in a whole bunch of lawyers being brought in and Fawcett Comics eventually ceasing publication of comics with the Captain Marvel-related characters. Case closed, but not quite. Then in the 70s, DC Comics licensed the character from Fawcett only to then run into problems stemming from the fact that over at Marvel they now had their own hero by the name of Captain Marvel, which forced DC to publish their comic under the title "Shazam" — the word that Billy Batson uses to transform into Captain Marvel — and due to this change, over time many people took to identifying the character as "Shazam" instead of "Captain Marvel," which then led to DC officially changing the character’s name to Shazam in 2012. Have we all got that straight now?

 

We now bring you Mister Sparkle Fingers.

With the movies flowing out of the DC Extended Universe being criticized for being too dark and gritty — with Batman and Superman killing villains left right and center — the studio has been making some quick course corrections to fix this perception, and now with Shazam! we get an even more comedic entry into the franchise, one that stars the title character from the television comedy Chuck. What's even more odd here is when you consider the fact that this comedic superhero film is coming from director David F. Sandberg who is known for such horror films as Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation. He is certainly not an obvious choice for the subject matter, as this film is basically a superhero version of the Tom Hanks film Big, but as this particular superhero film does have some actual horrific elements to shake things up, I’m not completely surprised. I mean if James Wan, the creator of The Conjuring Universe can give us Aquaman, why not?

 

Thus the Rock of Eternity now looks a little more frightening.

The hero of this movie is a young boy named Billy Batson (Asher Angel), who was separated from his mother at an early age, but even as a 14-year-old delinquent, he clings to the hope of a reunion, and has since become obsessed with tracking down his birth mother. This obsession has resulted in him bouncing from one foster home to another until finally landing in the group home run by Victor (Cooper Andrews) and Rosa Vazquez (Marta Milans) — who aren’t running a secret sweatshop, so that’s nice — and Billy “befriends” his crippled roommate Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), a kid who has his own obsession with the numerous superheroes that now populate the world. When Bill defends Freddy from some school bullies, this results in him being transported to the Rock of Eternity, the mystical lair of the Wizard Shazam (Djimon Hounsou), where he is told that Shazam has been protecting the world from an invasion of the Seven Deadly Sins, which he keeps locked up inside some seriously creepy looking statues. Shazam has been looking for a pure soul to take on his powers and become his “Champion,” but unfortunately, the villainous Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong), who as a child didn’t pass Shazam’s test to become a champion and was harshly rejected, has now returned and released the Seven Deadly Sins into the world. Billy is certainly not “pure of heart” being a bit of a selfish prick, and with a serious flexibility when it comes to stealing, but the wizard is desperate, and thus Billy Batson is given the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. What a 14-year-old kid would actually do with such powers is the crux of this film.

The key theme of Shazam! is the idea of what really makes up a family, and with this the screenwriters do an admirable job illustrating the message that “family” truly comes from those you care about and those who care about you, not necessarily those that are blood related. Of course, this film isn’t all about personal growth and understanding; we’ve got a lot of comedy on deck. The bulk of the film’s run-time deals with Billy and Freddie figuring out how his powers as Shazam work — Does he have invisibility? Is he fireproof? What about laser vision? — and this stuff is brilliantly funny, as is the chemistry between Asher Angel and Jack Dylan Grazer, which is what truly holds this film together. Unfortunately, the pacing is a bit of an issue as the story they are telling certainly didn’t warrant a two-hour-plus run-time, and some of the drama between the two boys could have been easily trimmed to fix this.

I should also point out that the tonal shift with the arrival of Sivana, and the monstrous Seven Deadly Sins, could catch some viewers off guard, especially younger ones, as the trailers certainly didn't allude to scenes of monster carnage resulting in multiple murders including heads being bitten off. So parents, be warned that there are some quite frightening scenes that could scare the little ones.  Yet it’s when the villainous plotline moves front and center that the film starts to stumbles the most, and Mark Strong, who is no stranger to playing the heavy, isn’t given much to do other than chase after Billy and offer cliché speeches — which are not excused just because the screenwriters make fun of them — and the monsters themselves offer no consistent threat. What these creatures can and cannot do is never made clear by the filmmakers.

Stray Observations:

• The Seven Deadly Sins don’t look much like representations of their specific sins, with gluttony being the only one with a fitting appearance. I’d say they're more in keeping with the average monsters that Hellboy would be comfortable punching.
• If the Seven Deadly Sins have been imprisoned inside the Wizard’s statues all these years, why does the world still suffer from greed, pride, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth? Clearly the writers lifted this idea from the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box, but then forgot the part about the sins never being put back inside.
• None of the monsters use aspects of the sins their named after. Wouldn’t it have been cool to see Lust or Gluttony using their aspects to torment the hero?
• When freed, these monsters can turn to mist as to avoid being punched, an ability they forget they have later on.
• Silvana gets his powers from being possessed by these Sins/Monsters, but his power level doesn’t seem to fluctuate, even if he’s down to just one of the Sins residing within him.

 

“Wait a minute, aren’t you Sinestro?”

Easily the most stand-out element of this movie is of course Zachary Levi’s ability to channel his inner child, and he clearly had a blast with the part, but as fun as Levi was with the comic shenanigans (like getting shot in the face or tossing muggers around), his portrayal of Billy Batson wasn’t quite on point with what Asher Angel was doing earlier in the film. Levi gives us that wonderful schism between an adult body and the mind of a teenage boy, but it leaves out the fact that the Billy we’ve seen is a distrustful, over-defended kid who has definite issues with authority. The Zachary Levi version of Billy is so completely divorced from the one Asher gave us that it’s all but impossible to reconcile that they are the same person. Sure, being given immense powers would change you, but we really don’t see any of the young Billy in Levi’s performance.

Shazam! is an immensely fun movie, and Zachary Levi is a hoot as the title character, but when the final act arrives it does devolve into your standard superhero slugfest, and the fact that we have another two-dimensional villain to thrash doesn’t help much. In conclusion, I’m still able to heartily recommend seeing this film as there are some solid moments of both comedy and action, and it certainly is a step in the right direction for DC and Warner Brothers, I just wish they’d worked a little harder on the nuts and bolts of the plot because the overall message of the film, about what it means to be a family, was really well done.

Note: This is not the first live-action incarnation of Shazam, as he first appeared on screen back in the 40s with the serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel, then later on, there was a godawful kid’s show in the 70s called Shazam!