Mega Time Squad (2018) – Review

What would you do if you had a time travel device? Would you visit the Cretaceous Period and ride a dinosaur? Or would you hunt down and kill baby Hitler? Maybe you’d just go back far enough to tell your younger self not to sign up for a certain dating app — I’m totally not mentioning this because of a certain something that happened to me back in the 90s — but the possibilities are virtually endless, that is, unless you are a complete idiot, one who is so far out of his depth that the eventuality of drowning in one’s own stupidity is an almost certainty. This brings us to writer-director Tim van Dammen's fantasy/comedy Mega Time Squad, a nice little cinematic jaunt through time and space.

 The protagonist of Mega Time Squad is a small-time New Zealand flunky named Johnny (Anton Tennet), who works for a local crime boss named Shelton (Jonny Brugh), who is very concerned about a Chinese gang muscling in on his territory. Now, Johnny fancies Shelton’s sister, Kelly (Hetty Gaskell-Hahn), who we first see as she is constructing an explosive vest for her brother, and it’s her advice to John that he leave Shelton’s little gang and step out on his own, stating, “Your nuts are probably bigger than you think,” which leads to Johnny and his best mate Gaz (Arlo Gibson) deciding to double-cross Shelton by robbing the Chinese gang and keeping the money for themselves. The size of Johnny’s nuts is certainly debatable, trying to knock over a Triad establishment is more a matter of stupidity than courage, but things get even weirder when Johnny also steals an old Chinese bracelet/amulet for his wannabe girlfriend Kelly, as this bracelet also happens to be an ancient device that allows the wearer to travel back in time.

 

There’s a good chance this guy also deals in Mogwai.

Before departing the Chinese antique store/Triad establishment, the proprietor (Tian Tan) warns Johnny about the amulet: “Listen, temporal dislocator, very dangerous, if you use it, a day will come when the demon will consume you.” As Johnny is a rather dense individual, cryptic warnings are wasted on him, and he just asks “Hey bro, if she doesn’t like this can I bring it back, like exchange it?” I’m not sure Johnny understands how crime works, and this leads to the fundamental flaw in the film: Johnny is so incredibly moronic that one has to wonder how he manages to dress himself in the morning without written instructions, and thus what follows is a little harder to swallow.

 

Dumb and Dumber the Kiwi version.

When Gaz betrays Johnny to Shelton, there being no honor among thieves, things go south rather quickly, and Johnny finds himself on the run from both his old friends and Triad operatives, but lucky for him, it turns out that the charm bracelet is actually a primitive time machine, which permits the wearer to be transported back far enough to avoid whatever trouble they were facing. It also "duplicates" its user — as in, if you go back in time, then run over and stop your earlier self from activating the device and going back in time, you end up both staying — and this results in Johnny being able to create numerous “clones” of himself, who aid him in getting out of a variety of jams. The problem I have with this stems from the fact that these other Johnnies aren’t any brighter than the original, so them putting any kind of plan together is rather suspect, and their creation of the "Mega Time Squad" is even less believable than the idea of a time traveling bracelet.

 

This is a case of five heads not being better than one.

The key issue I have with Mega Time Squad was that writer-director Tim van Dammen seemed more interested in the comedy aspect of his movie while giving almost no thought to the mechanics of his story’s time travel element — I’m not sure if Dammen has even heard of the word paradox — and this undercuts any tension the film was trying to build. If the viewer doesn’t understand the rules, and anything is seemingly possible, it becomes harder for the viewer to be invested in the events.  Now, I’m not saying your time travel movie has to be as intricately thought out as something like Shane Carruth's Primer, or as complicated as the Spierig Brother’s Predestination, but you should at least strive to work harder than those who put half-assed drivel like Project Almanac together. Mega Time Squad does go into interesting areas, such as John discovering that he can’t trust the other versions of himself — this leads to some particularly nasty and fun moments — and the relationship that develops between Prime Johnny and Kelly is rather sweet, but with the film being only eighty-minutes long, Dammen doesn’t have much time to explore anything thoroughly.

 

"I'll go all Hot Fuzz on your ass!"

Where the film does work best is with the comedy, not a Back to the Future level of comedy, but Dammen’s oddball collection of morons and misfits are all quite entertaining, and seeing a film depicting some of the true dangers of firearms, from repeated ricochets to how loud they are in confined spaces, gave me quite a few chuckles. And as the film dealt with a "magic" bracelet, some of my time travel objections aren't as heavy as they'd normally be for a film in this genre, so it gets a bit of a free pass there ... but just barely.

Will Johnny get the girl? Can his gang of temporal clones survive the demon of the amulet? What about that explosive vest we saw Kelly making? All these questions and more are delightfully answered in Tim van Dammen's Mega Time Squad, a film that may not have nailed the science fiction element all that well, as it leans heavier on the fantasy than the science, but it hit the comedy stuff right out of the park.

Brightburn (2019) – Review

What if Ma and Pa Kent had found an evil alien baby instead of Superboy? This is the basic premise to the horror film Brightburn, where writers Mark and Brian Gunn give us a dark fantasy tale of a being with incredible powers, one who doesn’t seem to care about Truth, Justice or the American Way.  Now, this is certainly not the first time we’ve seen this kind of superhero “What If” story; Mark Miller’s Red Son dealt with a world where Superman had landed in the Soviet Union, and even regular-ass Superman has gone evil from time to time — curse you Red Kryptonite — but producer James Gunn isn’t playing around in DC’s Extended Universe, so instead we will be seeing knock-off versions of Martha and Jonathon Kent. Also, there will be lots and lots of gore.

Sweet but sadly infertile couple Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle Breyer (David Denman) have been praying for a child. Unfortunately, the prayers are answered by rather suspect channels. A spaceship lands next to their Kansas farm — because of course it’s Kansas — and inside the ship is a little baby boy. The now happy couple decide to keep the child and raise him as their own, which is honestly a more dubious prospect than this movie depicts. Exactly how do you just tell people you’ve adopted a kid? Wouldn’t schools and the like need proper documentation of where this kid came from? Regardless the Breyer family have twelve happy years with their loving son Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn), who seems to be a bright and well-adjusted kid if considered a bit nerdy by his classmates, but when “puberty” hits, something inside Brandon is triggered.

 

“Here’s your problem, someone set this kid to Evil.”

The crashed ship, hidden inside the family’s abandoned barn, which seems to have awoken a malevolent force within Brandon, and before you can say “A strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men,” the kid is exhibiting superpowers such as increased strength and speed, invulnerability, flight and heat vision. He quickly uses these powers to dispatch anyone he deems to be a threat, in a rather gruesome fashion, while his poor mom lives in the land of denial. Now, it is the parental dynamic that is probably this movie’s greatest strength, as you can understand a mother’s desire to believe in the best of her child, and when she sobs, “Whatever you've done, I know there is good inside you!” it is a truly heartbreaking moment. Elizabeth Banks does a fantastic job and her performance is simply topnotch, she remains grounded and believable despite the craziness that abounds, and David Denman provides solid back-up to her character as a dad who quickly starts to wonder if bringing an alien child into their home was a good idea.

 

“Come on honey, what could go wrong?”

As a horror film, Brightburn does provide some solid suspenseful moments, with Brandon stalking and murdering his “enemies” in a variety of brutal ways, and director David Yarovesky has a deft hand with these moments, keeping viewers on the edge of their seat. But as the 90 minute run-time starts to wind down, we begin to realize that  there isn’t much else going on other than “What if Superman was Evil?” We get hints that Brandon may be some kind of alien cuckoo, sent to Earth as a forefront to an alien invasion, but no time is spent developing this as we quickly jump to Brandon going into Super-Slasher mode. We get the local sheriff (Gregory Alan Williams) attempting to tie all these grisly murders together, but aside from a strange symbol appearing at all the crime scenes — which he amazingly deduces is the stylized initials of Brandon Breyer — this investigation thread doesn’t end up going anywhere.

 

Note to Parents: A serial killer sketchbook is a clear sign that something is wrong with your kid.

With a staggeringly low budget of $7 million dollars, this is a surprisingly impressive movie when it comes to the visuals; the evil superhero moments are all depicted quite well, and as mentioned, the cast all put in excellent performances. Sadly, when the credits roll, we are left with a feeling of “So that’s it then?” as the overall story is on the thin side. In 2012, Josh Trank’s Chronicle gave us a superhero tale of the corruption of power, while in this film the Gunn family didn’t delve any deeper than “Oh boy, that kid sure is evil” and the result is the lesser for it. Brightburn is still quite an entertaining little horror film, but the greater potential that was left on the table is a tad disappointing

 

Question: When Brandon cobbled that costume together was he intentionally going for a serial killer vibe?

Road Games (1981) – Review

The 1980s were literally exploding with slasher films — with the likes of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger quickly becoming horror icons — so it’s not surprising that other countries would try and cash in on the genre, which did lead to such gems as Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. But down under in Australia, during the Ozploitation explosion, there was a staggering amount of cheap knock-offs and retreads of various genres, with horror being one of the more exploitative of the group, which brings us to the film we will be looking at today: Richard Franklin’s Road Games.

Road Games follows the cat-and-mouse shenanigans between truck driver Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach), who is always quick to point out to anyone that, “Just because I drive a truck does not make me a truck driver,” and a serial killer (Grant Page) who is butchering women and dumping their dismembered bodies along desolate highways. What makes Road Games stand out from many of its contemporaries is that our protagonist here is a man, and not the standard "final girl" — eventually, he picks up a runaway heiress (Jamie Lee Curtis), but her inclusion in this film works more as an extended cameo that looked to be simply cashing in on Curtis's horror cred — with Stacey Keach being center stage and on screen for most of the film’s hour and forty minute run-time, making Road Games more in keeping with Steven Spielberg’s Duel, rather than any of the teen slashers that were populating local theaters at the time.

 

Stacey Keach, when you can’t afford Sean Connery.

The basic plot of Road Games revolves around a serial killer who has been picking up random female hitchhikers, butchering them and then leaving their body parts in various places across the Australian Outback. It’s while he is disposing of his latest victim, a young woman who apparently liked to play the guitar in the nude, that he catches the eye of Patrick Quid, whose rig was parked outside the motel that our killer was using as his current scene of the crime. Quid wonders why a man, who he had seen enter the motel with an attractive woman the previous night, was now so interested in the garbage bags sitting outside at the curb, bags that Quid’s lovable dingo also finds of interest. Later on, Quid learns of a series of grisly murders and the current hunt for another missing woman, which leads him to start to ponder the idea that the man he saw the night before could be the killer everyone is looking for. Later, spotting the man trying to bury more trash bags in the middle of nowhere, his suspicion increases.

 

He’s not watching Raymond Burr, and that is certainly not Grace Kelly behind him.

Eventually, Quid picks up hitchhiker Pamela Rushworth — played by Jamie Lee Curtis — who he’d passed by before but now picks up so that she can become his partner in sleuthing … briefly. He fills her in on his theories of the “Man in the Green Van” while also admitting that this could all be part of his active imagination, which is what keeps him sane on these long hauls. And after a heated discussion on the nature of the killer, such as his motives and an apparent dislike of women, they come across the mysterious green van parked by a gas station. Unfortunately, while Quid is busy confronting an innocent man in the nearby restroom Pamela investigates the van on her own, only to discover that the killer is still inside.

 

These two would never pass the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys test.

Once realizing he’s cornered the wrong man, Quid rushes outside to discover that the green van is now gone, but after a quick pursuit, he comes to the strange conclusion that Pamela was a willing passenger, so he breaks off the chase. This is what makes Patrick Quid such an interesting character, as well as a terrible terrible hero, for though Quid constantly quotes the likes of Emily Brontë and Robert Frost, while listening to classical music and books on tape — often accompanying them with his harmonica — he doesn't come across as all that bright, and when it comes to solving a mystery, he veers between being obsessed with the killer to being apathetically uninterested him, all within a matter of moments.

And just how obtuse is Quid?

• He assumes that Pamela has ditched him for the green van dude with no real evidence to support this; this is especially weird when you consider that Pamela was onboard with the whole “This guy is a serial killer” theory.
• Later that night, he hears a couple having sex in the woods and assumes that Pamela and the van driver are fooling around. Turns out to be honeymooners.
• He suspects that a human carcass has been added to his cargo of hanging sides of pork, but he just brushes that idea off, despite the evidence to support it.
• The guy at the truck weigh station says that his load is several kilos over what is in the paperwork, but this still doesn’t seem to pique Quid’s interest.

 

"If I keep thinking happy thoughts everything will be okay."

Quid does finally confront the killer, after what could possibly be the slowest car chase in cinema history, and Pamela is then discovered gagged and bound in the van — this after the cops, who were part of this insanely slow chase, try to arrest Quid for attacking the serial killer — and everyone gets a happy ending. Well as happy as one could expect when it’s revealed that the meat he suspected of being human was, in fact, human meat. This was discovered as one of the victims' severed heads falls on a poor woman cleaning the trailer after the meat had been unloaded. This means Quid never voiced his suspicions to the police about the possible additional human cargo, and now a lot of people in Perth are going to be tasting long pig for the very first time.

 

Maybe they could send some of that meat to Mrs. Lovett's pie shop.

Road Games owes much to the Hitchcockian thriller, especially when the film throws in the whole “Wrong Man” element into the mix, with the cops suspecting Quid of being the serial killer, but it also has the authorities being about as effective as your typical cops found in most slasher films (as in not at all), and this all adds up to making Road Games a rather fun psychological thriller, with a dash of slasher camp.

Now, Road Games is certainly not without its problems; the pacing is a bit slow even for a film of this type, the villain is rather forgettable, the cinematography isn’t all that impressive or inspired — certainly not on par with other Aussie films like Russell Mulcahy's Razorback — and a few years later, Rutger Hauer would star in The Hitcher, which would take this premise into much darker and frightening territories. But Stacey Keach’s wildly eccentric truck driver is able to elevate Road Games beyond its station, and though this movie is far from being a genre classic, it does have enough on hand to make it a film I can recommend to fans of the genre.

I do like the cool German poster for the film.

A-X-L (2018) – Review

Do you remember the fun 80s science fiction comedy Short Circuit? The one where a robot designed for war is hit by lightning and somehow this installs it with life and sentience, causing it to go on the run and befriend a sweet civilian protagonist? This is basically the same premise of writer/director Oliver Daly’s sci-fi adventure film A-X-L, but instead of a miraculous lightning strike, this movie goes with the dumbest "artificial intelligence" put to film as its focal point. The level of stupidity in this script is only matched by the number of clichés per minute of screen-time.

 The hero of this movie is Miles Hill (Alex Neustaedter), an underdog motocross racer whose chief nemesis is Sam Fontaine (Alex MacNicoll), a rich kid who has his sights set on the beautiful Sara Reyes (Becky G), a plucky teen whose mom works for the Fontaine family as a maid, but Sara falls in love with hard-luck case Miles instead of the rich douchebag. If there were a template for generic teen dramas, this movie would hit every point — with cliché’s lining up as if on some kind of timetable — and someone should have told the filmmakers that throwing in a robot dog would not hide the lack of originality on display here. The robot itself is one of the laziest contrived elements I’ve seen in quite some time — and I’ve sat through every Transformers movie — as A-X-L’s blossoming artificial intelligence is one of the most moronic concepts in the history of science fiction. I get that the filmmakers were going with a sci-fi version of “A boy and his dog,” but the contortions the script had to take so this would be possible is beyond the pale ridiculous.

 

"Whose a good boy?"

A-X-L (Attack, Exploration, Logistics) is an advanced next-generation artificial intelligence robot that was designed by private contractor Andric (Dominic Rains) — insert standard evil scientist cliché — and it was to follow in the steps of the “war dogs” that have fought alongside man over the millennia. So the film’s plot, if you can call it that, has to do with A-X-L escaping from Crane Systems because they’ve been abusing it, which leads to the first of many questions: "How exactly does one abuse a robot dog?" Did they not take it for walks? Did they punish it with a hit across the nose with a rolled up piece of aluminum? Or maybe they just forced it to watch this movie? Well, apparently A-X-L had been repeatedly shot during field testing, but being it is a weapon of war, how is that considered abuse? When Andric programmed A-X-L’s logic algorithms did he, for some bizarre reason, include pain receptors and the ability to feel fear? The artificial intelligence in this movie is of the standard trope that it will “evolve” over time, but in this case, you have to admit that's not very conducive to a weapon of war, and in this film we see A-X-L apparently afraid of fire. How effective can your combat robot be if it shows this level of fear?

 

Was this thing designed to invade Candy Land?

Sure, you’d want your robot dog to have a certain level of self-preservation, but at one point in the film, it is practically destroyed by asshat Fontaine’s flamethrower — and don’t ask me why a rich motocross dude has a flamethrower — and it shows no willingness to defend itself or even run away from the threat. These are not key traits you want in your military asset. Even stranger is that there is an element that has A-X-L biometrically bond with a soldier — in a way that negates any other commands by its creator — and this is supposedly there to replicate the loyalty of actual dogs, but we are talking about a machine, not a living breathing creature. A machine's loyalty should just be a matter of proper programming, not emotional bonding. The artificial intelligence designed for A-X-L is way too complicated; all it should need to know is what the commands are and what's the targets — anything more is just asking for trouble. If the filmmakers had wanted to make a film about a teenage boy befriending an advanced robot dog, they should have gone the Iron Giant route and had A-X-L come from outer space because not one component of this robot's design makes a lick of sense.

 

“I am Superman!”

Right from the outset A-X-L and Mile’s relationship is completely unbelievable; when Miles first encounters A-X-L, the robot dog goes into “pursuit mode” — it needs fuel and the motorbike is a likely source — and it viciously chases after Miles, but after our hero is able to evade this weapon of war, by doing rad motocross stunts, he then goes back to check on the thing, a creature that for all intents and purposes was trying to kill him. This isn’t Elliot checking out the backyard shed to find a cute alien; we're talking about a massive robot dog that was attempting to take you down. Miles is simply one of the lamest and uninteresting characters put to screen, but it's not just Mile's character that doesn't work, the script does no one any favors — it’s bad on every level.

Stray Observations and Spoilers:

• Military-funded scientists create a robot dog that somehow develops the desire to escape.
• They didn’t think of installing a remote kill switch so they have to send a swarm of drones to find it.
• When A-X-L is first found by Miles, the robot dog is wearing a muzzle. Were the designers actually aware that it could turn on its masters and bite them?
• A-X-L likes to run and frolic like a real dog, it even chews a metal pipe as if it were a bone, but why would these doglike traits be programmed into a robot built for combat?
• Why can A-X-L only communicate via a cellphone? There is no logical reason a combat robot, even one in dog shape, shouldn’t be able to just talk to its masters.
• A-X-L attacks asshat Fontaine, who was getting into it with Miles and Sara, but Miles calls off the robot dog before it can harm the big bully. Once again illustrating that its attacks are really kind of lame.
• Later that night, Fontaine returns with his gang of friends to destroy A-X-L with a flamethrower. Now Miles had told A-X-L not to harm Fontaine, which apparently puts the jerk into some kind of “protective” status in the robot’s mainframe, but Fontaine can’t know this, so his showing up at night to fight a giant killer robot dog makes no sense; him calling the authorities would have been more likely.
• The appearance of Thomas Jane as Miles’ grease-monkey dad serves no purpose other than adding a little “star power” to the proceedings.
• The movie ends with a destroyed A-X-L rebuilding itself after its self-destruction — which it did to prevent being captured by the military — and it reaches out to Miles. This ending is almost a complete lift from The Iron Giant, which again begs the question, “Why not just go with the whole alien robot thing in the first place?”

 

And why exactly does A-X-L come equipped with a disco laser light show?

It’s clear that A-X-L was intended to be a “family friendly” adventure flick — there is surprisingly little violence in a film about a combat robot dog — but even if you let slide all the teen drama clichés, and by God, is it all very paint by numbers on that front, we’re still left with a film that insults the viewer’s intelligence at every turn. Then to top it all off, it is quite apparent that writer/director Oliver Daly really loves motocross as there is so much screen-time spent on Miles and his buds driving around on their bikes — doing EXTREME stunts — that we at times forget we are supposed to be watching a movie about a robot dog. The only truly positive thing I can say about this film is the actual dog itself looks pretty cool, the CGI is top notch and the design itself is quite good, but none of that comes close to making this a film I could ever recommend watching.

Note: The evil scientist in this movie is too idiotic to be considered a threat for even a second of the film’s run-time.

Cold Skin (2017) – Review

A major question that has been raised in many a horror and science fiction stories is, “Who exactly are the monsters?” Now, going by such works as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Rod Serling’s The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, it’s pretty clear that mankind are the true monsters here — there being enough war and genocide to back up that statement — but this fact does not stop writers from returning to that well, over and over again, just in case we have forgotten that as a whole, mankind is a bit of a loss. This brings us to Xavier Gens' 2017 movie Cold Skin, based on the Albert Sánchez Piñol novel of the same name, where we see two men face off against a monstrous force, before looking into the mirror to discover the truth.

 As the movie opens, after giving us your standard horror movie quote by Nietzsche, we are introduced to our protagonist (David Oakes) — we never learn his true name, he is simply referred to as Friend — as he is being dropped off on a remote island in the South Atlantic. He is to take over the position as the resident meteorologist on the island, to apparently monitor wind and ocean currents, but Friend quickly learns that the man he was apparently replacing is now nowhere to be found, and the only other inhabitant on the island, a brutish lighthouse keeper named Gruner (Ray Stevenson) — whose lighthouse seems to have been converted into a medieval castle — tells Friend that the previous meteorologist had died of typhus. Now, any fan of the genre will almost immediately suspect that no one on this barren island is ever going to die of something as simple as typhus. Soon after, he discovers his predecessor's journal, which documented strange amphibious creatures who attack from the sea, and included a quote stating that, “Darwin was wrong.” Friend, after reading this, soon finds himself under siege from a group of humanoid sea creatures.

 

"Is it too late to resign my commission?"

With twelve months until his relief ship is expected, Friend must make the best of things, so he tries to team-up with the misanthropic Gruner, who rebuffs him at first until Friend reveals that he has a rifle and about a thousand rounds of ammunition, which are the perfect ingredients for Gruner’s one-man war on the creatures he calls Toads. The big surprise to Friend is in the discovery that Gruner has not actually been living alone, that he cohabits in the lighthouse with a female creature (Aura Garrido) that he’s “tamed” and who he treats with equal measure as both pet and sex slave. Over the course of the film, Friend will form a relationship with the creature — dubbed “Aneris” (which is "a siren" spelled backwards) — but whether this particular relationship ever becomes sexual is left rather ambiguous, though Gruner does at times seem to become rather jealous, the script kind of abandons this thread so we don't have to worry about that, and the three of them form a rather disturbing family.

 

"So...does she do windows as well?"

The Character of Gruner is equal parts Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, the marooned nutter Ben Gunn from Treasure Island, and Charlton Heston from The Omega Man, with his unwavering desire to see the extinction of this particular species, but we don’t really get much more than a glimpse into what kind of man he was before his time on the island — as in what drove him to take such an isolated job in the first place and why he wants to kill every single “Toad” he can get his hands on.  Friend does find a photograph showing that Gruner was once married, but what happened in that relationship remains a mystery, and as good as an actor Ray Stevenson is, the script doesn’t give him a lot to work with. We clearly aren’t meant to be too sympathetic to his character's plight, as he is clearly physically and sexually abusing poor Aneris, but then we aren’t given much of a backstory to Friend either. In Albert Sánchez Piñol’s book, Friend was a disillusioned fighter for Irish independence, who took this position as a meteorologist to flee his brutal past, but in the movie, we have no idea what motivates him. He seems quite eager to join Gruner on his extinction plan, even after developing feelings for Aneris, which kind of skews his moral compass, and even though they did try and kill him first, they’ve been at war with Gruner for God knows how long, so you can’t really blame them for their “kill first” protocol when it comes to arriving humans.

 

"The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad."

The look of Cold Skin is a testament to cinematic bleakness, with overcast days followed by pitch black nights, and our cast of characters scrambling across windswept rocks in their attempts to not only survive this seemingly endless war, but to win it. Which brings us to my biggest problem with Cold Skin: the fact that this “war” has gone on for who knows how long, against a literal horde of these creatures who attack night after night, and should have realistically ended Gruner’s life ages ago. Even taking into consideration the fortifications he’s added to the lighthouse, wooden spikes and steel shutters, it’s made abundantly clear that Gruner in no way could survive this kind of overwhelming onslaught. Even worse is that the film gives no explanation as to why the creatures only attack at night; they clearly aren’t harmed by the sun’s rays, (like the mutants from The Omega Man), as we see Aneris wandering around in the daylight with no ill effects — she doesn’t even need to wear sunglasses. So the idea that these creatures, who we soon learn are quite intelligent, wouldn’t have ambushed him some time during one of his many daylight excursions to the spring for water is beyond ridiculous.

 

"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries."

Then we get Friend finding a necklace that was worn by one of the sea creatures, which makes him realize that it's possible that they aren’t simply mindless monsters to be slaughtered, and this would have made narrative sense if we hadn’t already seen him bond with Aneris. Did he think she was some kind of special aberration, that the rest of her kind were just soulless beasts? More egregious is the fact that the idea of these amphibious humanoids as "not simply monsters" was telegraphed from almost the beginning of the film; so a third act's “startling reveal” just doesn’t work, and makes the whole “We were the monsters all along” theme fall flat on its face.

Note: We also get no clear reason as to why Aneris stays with the abusive Gruner, and I don’t buy his “whipped dog” analogy as she does continue to visit her "people," so it's not like she's been ostracized by them.

Now there is a lot to enjoy when viewing Cold Skin; all three leads give fantastic performances, the make-up effects that turned the beautiful Aura Garrido into a fish person is simply marvelous, cinematographer Daniel Aranyó creates a mysterious world of light and shadow — one that really draws you in — and director Xavier Gens has a deft hand when it comes to the big action sequences. I just wish they’d done a few more passes on the script and polished off a few of those narrative rough spots.

 

This film would make an interesting prequel to The Shape of Water.

Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery (2015) – Review

Scooby-Doo and the gang have been hooking up with celebrities since the 70s in their series The New Scooby-Doo Movies, where they teamed up with such notables as the Harlem Globetrotters, Sandy Duncan, Don Knotts, and Tim Conway, and it didn't matter if they were fictional characters or not as they also hooked up with Batman & Robin, The Addams Family, and Josey and the Pussycats. Then in 2015, for the twenty-fifth entry in their direct-to-video movie series, the rock group Kiss was brought into the world of Mystery Incorporated, and with this installment, Scooby and the gang learn how to rock and roll all night and party every day.

The rock group Kiss is no stranger to the world of Hanna-Barbera; back in 1978, they partnered with the renowned animation house to create a live-action made-for-television musical-fantasy film called Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, where the legendary rock group used their superpowers to defeat a disgruntled inventor to save an amusement park. What is interesting about Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery is that this animated movie is also about the famous rock group using their superpowers to save an amusement park, which is doubly odd when you consider the fact that the group hated how Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park turned out, as it made them look buffoonish and goofy, and for years no one who worked for the group was even allowed to mention the film in their presence. Gene Simmons has since stated that "It's a classic movie... a classic movie if you're on drugs."

 

Was this the group's chance to right a cosmic wrong?

The plot of Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery deals with a particularly nasty entity called the Crimson Witch, who has been terrorizing both guests and employees of the Kiss World amusement park. Mystery Incorporated arrive on the scene to team-up with Kiss to not only save the park from financial ruin, but to ensure that their Halloween concert is allowed to go on as scheduled. Of the group, Daphne (Grey Griffin) is the more excited member when it comes to this particular mystery, what with her having a super crush on Starchild (Paul Stanley), much to the dismay of Fred Jones (Frank Welker) whose not-so-hidden jealousy puts him at odds with the rockstar. Not to mention the fact that rock and roll isn't exactly Fred's bag, as he repeatedly touts the brilliance of his favorite acapella group The Ascot Five, over that of the group Kiss.

 

I'm kind of with Fred on this one.

The film starts out as your typical Scooby-Doo mystery, with the gang arriving on the scene and encountering the specter/witch, Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby (Frank Welker) bounce back and forth from running in fear and feeding their apparently bottomless stomachs, but there are two key elements which will make this particular Scooby-Doo movie stand out. First, there is the aforementioned jealous Fred, with him constantly trying to get between Daphne and her uber-crush on Starchild, but we also have the dilemma of whether or not there is an actual supernatural threat on hand, rather than some dude in a mask. Now, the gang running into actual ghosts is nothing new, that idea was even the basic premise of the short-lived series The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, and their first straight-to-DVD movie Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, which had Fred trying to take the "mask" off a real zombie. In the case of Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery, it's not only a matter of whether or not the Crimson Witch is fake or the real deal, but it also puts into question the possibility that Kiss themselves are some sort of cosmic-powered super beings.

 

Could the fate of the world be in the hands Kiss?

The voice of reason is once again Velma Dinkley (Mindy Cohn), who constantly points out rational explanations to the events around her — which does kind of put her at odds with past movies and shows where the supernatural beings were revealed to be real — but her debunking and pointing out the obvious in this movie is one of the show's best elements. So who exactly is behind the Crimson Witch? Is it Chip McGhoo (Doc McGhee), the band's concert manager, who would like to see the park fail so that the boys would spend more time touring? Could it be Delilah Domino (Pauley Perrette), the park's head of security, who from the start was very much against meddling kids helping with the mystery? What about Chikara (Jennifer Carpenter), the park's resident fortune teller, who thinks Velma is a doubting fool whose blindness could doom them all? Is the befuddled park manager Manny Goldman (Garry Marshall) trying to cover up the park's problems for his own nefarious reasons? Or is it the special effects wizard Shandi Strutter (Rachel Ramras), whose technical abilities would make creating a demonic witch rather easy.

 

Is it Rita Repulsa from the Power Rangers?

What is decidedly weird about Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery is the insane cosmic backstory given to us by fortune-telling Chikara, that the members of the rock group Kiss are descendants of an alien race of super-powered beings from the mystic realm of Kissteria, where they are the protectors of the mythical Black Diamond, an all-powerful jewel that if the Crimson Witch were to get her evil claws on, would allow her the power to release The Destroyer, a creature of unimaginable power that could end the universe. Yeah, that's not the usual supernatural backstory Scooby-Doo and the gang are used to coming across. It's so out there and bizarre that I have to give bonus points to the writers of this movie for coming up with a batshit mythology that makes Scientology look sensible by comparison. Velma, of course, thinks this is all razzle-dazzle hokum, part of the Kiss World propaganda, but when the Crimson Witch tears a hole in the fabric of reality, and Kiss and the gang end up battling for their lives in another dimension, she starts to doubt her previous held staunch beliefs.

 

This other dimension clearly owes a lot to comic book legend Jack Kirby.

In this movie, the key member of the group is clearly Starchild, what with his relationship with Daphne being a primary running joke, but what about the other three band members? Well, never fear, they do have some time to shine. We get The Demon (Gene Simmons) breathing fire and basically acting like a bully and an ass for most of the picture; then of course there is also The Spaceman (Tommy Thayer) and The Catman (Eric Singer), who are both here just to add their particular powers and voices to the cosmic battle, and though they all have a few fun moments, we are still left with a more important question: "Does this film make up for the abomination that was Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park?" Well, let's just say that both fans of Scooby-Doo and the group Kiss will most likely get a kick out of Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery. It has the group singing a few of their classic songs, the Scooby gang have some nice characteristic interplay — once again, the jealous Fred being a highlight — and the animation ranges from good to simply spectacular, with, as mentioned, a definite comic book feel to it, which is fitting considering Kiss did appear in a Marvel Comic back in the day.

 

Seriously, I'm surprised Marvel didn't sue over this. That's bloody Galactus!

As an installment in the ever-growing canon of animated movies, starring everyone's favorite mystery-solving Great Dane, Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery is a solid entry for fans of all ages to enjoy. The look of the film is leaps and bounds above many of its predecessors — only on par with the series Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated — and overall, it's one of the funniest entries, not to mention trippiest. I missed this movie when it was originally released, so I'm just glad I took the time to go back and give it a look, and if you haven't seen this little rock and roll gem, I recommend you take the time as well.

 

“I was made for lovin' you baby. You were made for lovin' me.”

A.I. Rising (2018) – Review

The best of science fiction stories will often be those that explore social and political aspects of the world we live in, while often trying to extrapolate where we as a people may end up in the future, and now with director Lazar Bodroža’s R-rated science fiction thriller, we get a film that not only does this, but also answers the question, “What would happen if you fell in love with HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey?”

Based on a 1980s short story by Zoran Neskovic, A.I. Rising (also known as Ederlezi Rising) is set in a socialist dystopian future some fifty years from now, where corporations are apparently setting up colonies on Alpha Centauri. Astronaut Milutin (Sebastian Cavazza), a veteran cosmonaut with numerous trips to Mars under his belt, is sent on a long space flight to deliver an ideology to the colony there, and along for the ride is Nimani (Stoya), an android designed to respond to the cosmonaut's desires, who will also work as nurse, psychiatrist and to keep him focused on the mission, as well as being the perfect sex toy to Milutin.

 As we are first introduced to Milutin, we see a man without much humanity left — there are hints of past failed relationships that may have driven him into space — and his treatment of Nimani as a “fuck toy” will not have many viewers on his side. The Ederlezi Corporation has programmed the android with many subroutines that Milutin can access through a variety of drop-down menus, “Do you want a naïve woman, one who is new to sex?” A click of a button later, and you have a coquettish girl who you can then rape to spice things up. Or you can choose the “Argumentative” setting which can then be followed quickly by the “Make-Up Sex” designation, all to fill out any particular fantasy you could come up with, and being this is a long space voyage, I can "sorta" understand the variety being important. But the moral quandaries of this situation isn’t lost on Milutin, and it's his decision to emancipate Nimani that becomes the key arc of the story, which leads to such questions as “Can artificial intelligence move beyond its programming into pure self-awareness and sentience?”

Lazar Bodroža’s A.I. Rising is a science fiction gem that explores themes that have been addressed in such films as Metropolis and Blade Runner, yet done here with a graphic flair all its own. That Bodroža is a visual artist-turned-director is quite apparent when you see just how beautiful this film looks — from the smart use of Belgrade’s socialist architecture to the wonderful sets and costume provided by Aljosa Spajic and Senka Kljakic. But what makes this film stand out from its many predecessors is the characters on hand, who are so amazingly brought to life in what is basically a two-person stage play — we do get a couple of scenes with an Ederlezi corporate “Social Engineer” (Marusa Majer), but 90% of the film is about the interactions between Milutin and Nimani — and Sebastian Cavazza gives a very thought-provoking portrayal of a broken man trying to be better, a character who audiences will have, at times, problems sympathizing with. Then we have Stoya’s wonderful acting as the android Nimani, and her ability to switch personalities on a dime is a tour de force of acting, with Nimani being the film’s rational and emotional driving force as Milutin’s many flaws and delusions are exposed.

 

In space, no one can hear your existential crisis.

This film will certainly not be for everybody, its languid pacing mixed with overt sexuality will not be to everyone’s tastes, but it does explore some very pertinent themes that are becoming more and more relevant each and every day as it tackles serious relationship issues between men and women in the guise of a science fiction movie. It’s also great to see the Siberian film industry producing such quality gems, giving Hollywood a run for their money. I would recommend this film solely on the basis of how gorgeous it looks, with its collections of amazing shots of the ship gliding through deep space, but it’s the heart of the story, and the acting on display here, that makes this a film not to be missed.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979) – Review

When George Lucas’s space fantasy film Star Wars broke box office records, it wasn’t too surprising that many Star Wars rip-offs were quick to follow, with Roger Corman leading the pack with such films as Star Crash and Battle Beyond the Stars, but television producer Glen A. Larson managed to create not one, but two television shows that owe much of their genesis to the success of Star Wars. Universal teamed up once again with Larson in bringing a big space adventure to the small screen — and as in the case of Battlestar Galactica, the pilot of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was given a theatrical release  —but where Galactica was a taught space drama, with survivors of a genocide fleeing across the cosmos, Buck Rogers was more in keeping with the lighter tone of the Saturday morning serials it was most known for, which themselves had greatly inspired George Lucas in the making of his space opera.

Before we get into Glen A. Larson’s television epic, let us take a quick look at the history of Buck Rogers, a character that got his start way back in the days of pulp magazines, though created in 1938 by author Philip Francis Nowlan for his novella Armageddon 2419 A.D. it wasn’t until Buck Rogers had become a syndicated comic strip that the character's popularity really began to grow, and it would get even bigger as it moved on into radio plays and eventually a Saturday morning serial, starring the great Buster Crabbe as Buck Rogers. The original origin story of Buck Rogers dealt with the character of Anthony Rogers, a veteran of World War One, who, while investigating reports of unusual phenomena in an abandoned coal mine, found himself trapped during a cave in. Exposed to radioactive gas, Rogers falls into "a state of suspended animation," where he remained for 492 years. In fact, in the first Buck Rogers story, he spends no time having cool space battles, but instead he spends most of his time helping America fight the conquering Chinese, or the "Airlords of Han" as they were known, and using the knowledge he gained in the First World War to deal with this new threat.

 

He gets a cool jet pack but the story is light on space battles.

The 1932 radio program was most notable as being the first science-fiction program on radio, and it introduced some of the more futuristic elements to the Buck Rogers canon, but it was the Buster Crabbe serials that cemented the character as a cultural phenomenon. In that rendition, Buck Rogers and a friend were caught in a blizzard and were forced to crash their airship in the Arctic wastes. In order to survive, they inhaled their supply of Nirvano gas, which put them into a state of suspended animation, and they awoke 500 years later to find that a tyrannical dictator named Killer Kane now ruled the entire world. In this rendition of Buck Rogers, we do get some cool airship battles — as cool as you can get on a dime store budget — but nothing really in the vein that would spark the bloodlust of a 70s Star Wars fan.

 

The serial didn’t even have a Death Star for Pete’s sake.

In the year 1979, producer Glen A. Larson wasn’t about to waste valuable screent time with our hero messing around in some stupid cave or getting caught in a blizzard, not when real life NASA was readying itself to launch their very first Space Shuttle, so now we have astronaut Buck Rogers (Gil Gerard) piloting a NASA spacecraft, one that looks an awful lot like the Space Shuttle. The movie opens with the dulcet tones of William Conrad as he narrates the necessary backstory, “The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America's deep space probes. In a freak mishap, Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William "Buck" Rogers, are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life-support systems, and returns Buck Rogers to Earth, 500 years later.”

Note: This would then become part of the television show’s opening credit sequence, which is more proof that the 70s had some of the best television show openings ever.

After that informative opening sequence, we find frozen Buck drifting in space as it passes by the alien flagship Draconia, a massive space dreadnought that is headed to Earth for a trade conference, which is under the command of Princess Ardala (Pamela Hensley) and her aide de camp, Kane (Henry Silva). Buck’s strange spacecraft — its type not having been seen for 500 years — is immediately tagged as a threat and fired upon, but at the last minute, Kane decides to spare the craft and investigate things further. Our hero is revived from his cryogenic sleep, and immediately catches the eye of the Princess, him being a definite step up from the glowering Kane, but before love has a chance to bloom, Kane comes to the conclusion that this supposed frozen astronaut is just an elaborate ruse of the Earth’s Defense Directorate, and to prove it, they pack Rogers back into his shuttle and send him on his merry way to Earth. Unfortunately, poor Buck, who still has no idea he is 500 years out of step with the times, doesn’t know that the Earth is now protected by an energy shield, one that will disintegrate his spacecraft if he tries to fly through it. Kane’s theory was that if Rogers is a spy they will let him through, if not he blows up and good ole Buck is no longer anyone’s problem.

Note: In the comic strip, Killer Kane was romantically involved with Wilma Deering, but after Wilma left him for Buck Rogers, he became a criminal and Buck's mortal enemy. In this incarnation, we only get a quick reference to him being a defector from Earth to the Draconian Realm.

Buck’s spacecraft is intercepted by a squadron of ships from the Earth’s Defense Directorate, led by Colonel Wilma Deering (Erin Gray), who immediately distrusts Rogers and suspects him of being a member of the space marauders who has been harassing the space lanes which keep food and supplies flowing to Earth — a nuclear holocaust has wiped out the planet’s ability to sustain itself — and she believes that Buck has been sent to scuttle the trade negotiations between Earth and the Draconians. Of course, these pirate attacks have all been staged by the Draconians, forcing Earth to seek a treaty that will result in them unwittingly opening up their defenses to the invaders. Colonel Deering is so eager to have the aid of the Draconian empire that she blows off Buck’s claims that flagship Draconia is far from a defenseless peace envoy, and that it is armed for invasion.

Note: In the pulps and serials, Wilma Deering mostly held the spot of the damsel in distress, with Buck Rogers having to rescue her from the clutches of various villains each and every week, but in this incarnation, she’s not only shown to be a capable fighter, but she’s also the commander of Earth’s entire defense forces. Her being a woman in such a position was pretty much unprecedented at the time.

Buck is interrogated by Dr. Elias Huer (Tim O'Connor), the leader of Earth's Defense Directorate, and the A.I. computer Dr. Theopolis (voiced by Howard F. Flynn), who is a member of the Computer Council, and they both seem sympathetic to our hero's plight, but Buck is still saddled with a robot drone named Twiki (body played by Felix Silla and voiced by Mel Blanc) as some kind of babysitter/minder. It’s here that Rogers first comes to grips with the fact that everything and everyone he knew is long dead, and on top of that, he learns that Earth has been rebuilt over the centuries in his absence, following a nuclear holocaust, and now the only thing left is this one big city surrounded by a desert wasteland.

 

Needless to say, Buck doesn’t take it all that well.

Buck decides he has to see things for himself, and he vows to escape the city and search the ruins of Old Chicago for evidence of his family’s demise. I’m really not sure what Buck was hoping to accomplish with this trip, aside from endangering Dr. Theopolis and Twiki, who accompanies him on this foolhardy mission, because it’s not like there’s any chance his family not only survived the nuclear war but then somehow managed to live another five hundred years to wait up for him. Buck does find the grave of his parents, which is in remarkably good condition considering the likelihood of gravestones being legible after 450 years is about nil, but Rogers doesn’t get much time to mourn as the trio are soon set upon by the mutants inhabiting the ruins. Lucky for them, Wilma and a detachment of soldiers arrive in the nick of time to pull their collective fat out of the fire.

Note: The idea of New Chicago being the lone shining city, surrounded by a planet-wide wasteland of radioactive fallout and mutant scavengers, didn’t survive past the movie as later in the series we see beatific landscapes outside New Chicago, with no ruins of any kind in sight.  We also never hear of the mutants again.

Wilma may have saved Buck from becoming dinner for some nasty mutants, but his troubles are far from over, a Draconian tracking device is found aboard his ship, and so the authorities accuse Buck of espionage. He is put on trial by the Computer Council and Buck is sentenced to immediate termination, but Wilma, who has started to warm up to this brash man from the past, persuades Dr. Huer to test Buck's claims against the Draconians by requesting a meeting with Princess Ardala aboard her flagship under the auspices of proving whether or not Buck had ever been aboard.

Note: New Chicago is completely run by the Computer Council, and these “Quads” as they're called, were not programmed by man but were programmed by each other over the generations. Dr. Huer explains to Buck, “You see, the mistakes that we have made in areas, well, like our environment, have been entirely turned over to them. And they’ve saved the Earth from certain Doom.”

That this series touched on the idea of the technological singularity, wherein super-intelligent computers would continue to upgrade themselves at an incomprehensible rate, and then go even further by exploring the idea that it would not end with mankind’s demise, as we'd see in The Terminator franchise, but instead our salvation, is as surprising as it is impressive, especially when you take into account that this was just something written as a television pilot. But alas, such brief glimpses of actual science fiction were few and far between when the series went into production.

 

This is certainly not how I imagined Skynet forming.

Kane not being too happy with this surprise “visit” has a squadron of Draconian marauders, painted to look like pirates, “attack” their flagship as a diversion, but Buck manages to destroy them single-handedly, and it’s a good thing too, because the fighter pilots of the Earth’s Defense Directorate really suck at their job. Earth’s forces apparently use computer-controlled maneuvers in combat, which are quickly shown to be utterly useless against the marauders, and it's Buck’s fighter pilot skills that manage to save the day.

Note: After Buck takes out the marauders, Colonel Deering comments, “Look, I don’t know what went wrong with our combat computers, but…thank you," yet we never do find out what went wrong — apparently, there was a ditched subplot that involved an Earth Directorate fifth columnist who had sabotaged the combat computers, and the absence of this scene is evidence as to why story editing is so very important.

Even though Princess Ardala and Kane denied having ever met Buck Rogers before, and certainly not offering up the fact that it was them who had planted the homing device on his ship in the first place, Rogers gets a stay of execution when Princess Ardala requests that he attend her at the upcoming official diplomatic reception. Ardala claims this is so she can personally thank him for “saving” them all from the renegade pirates, but it’s clear she is seriously crushing on the good captain.

Note: Princess Ardala is one of 30 daughters of the Draconian emperor and is quite comparable to Princess Aura from Flash Gordon, who was the daughter of Ming the Merciless. These two royals both led very complicated relationships with both heroes and villains.

Buck Rogers may be innocent of the charges leveled against him by the Computer Council, but he is guilty of trying to revive Disco, and the sight of Gil Gerard and Pamela Hensley “getting down” is about as painful to watch as it is laughable. This attack on our senses does at least provide Buck some quality time with the Princess, where she informs him that she needs "A man, a REAL man to rule by her side," and so Buck slips aboard her shuttle and returns with her to the Draconia. Unfortunately, to accomplish this, Buck had to brush off Wilma, which is pretty cold considering he does this right after giving her a sweet first kiss, and when she discovers he has fled with the Princess, she immediately jumps to the conclusion that Buck has been a villain all along. Of course, this is all clever subterfuge by Buck so that he can drug the Princess and search the Draconia for proof of their ill intentions.

 

The sacrifices a hero must make.

The movie wraps up rather quickly after this point, with Buck sabotaging the Draconian fighters by placing bombs in the fighter’s tailpipes, and Dr. Theopolis and Twiki — who had stowed away on Ardala’s shuttle to follow Buck — are able to alert Earth's Defense Directorate of the Draconian threat, which allows Wilma the time to scramble Earth's starfighters and attack the Draconia. It’s a pretty one-sided battle, with most of the Draconian marauders exploding in the hanger bay or immediately after take-off, while Princess Ardala and Kane manage to escape just before Wilma’s fighters destroy the Draconia.

 Now as space battles go, there is nothing in Buck Rogers in the 20th Century that is going to wow modern viewers, but for its time, the effects were quite decent, and the action fairly thrilling, but what really makes this movie stand out is in the area of character development. Gil Gerard’s Buck Rogers is at times a bit of an arrogant ass, but he’s also full of charm and heart, while Wilma Deering is the first female in science fiction — or at least television science fiction — that is in complete charge of the military, and yet she isn’t portrayed as some hardnosed bitch, but as a fully rounded character, one who is conflicted between what she wants to be true and the actual hard truth, as well as her feelings for Rogers. Then there is Princess Ardala who could have just been your standard space opera femme fatale, but instead we get a woman who is clearly doing everything she can to keep her position and her life — with 29 sisters biting at her heels and waiting for her to fail — and when Buck drugs her so that he can skulk around her ship, you actually kind of feel sorry for her. The dynamic between these three characters was wonderfully executed, and it’s quite a shame that Pamela Hensley only reprised her role as the Princess in three more episodes.

 

I could have done with a lot less Twiki and more Princess Ardala.

When a person looks back at a forty-year-old movie, one that you first saw as a kid, a certain amount of nostalgia will doubtless cloud your vision, but even so, I think Buck Rogers in the 25th Century had a very nice blend of pulp action adventure with a good helping of 70s charm and comedy, all heightened by above average special effects, especially when you take into consideration that this was originally intended to just be a television pilot. If you haven’t seen Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, do yourself a favor and give it a try, you may be surprised by how much enjoy it.

 

This show even has a character called Tiger Man, what’s not to love?