Master of the World (1961) – Review

When mountains shake and nations tremble in fear, when Vincent Price threatens the very world itself, who do you call?  Would the answer "Charles Bronson" surprise you?  In 1961 American International Pictures hoped to capitalize on the popularity of other Verne adaptations such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days, unfortunately, AIP didn’t quite have the budget to compete with the bigger studio’s prestige pictures and the result was Master of the World, a Richard Matheson’s adaptation of the Jules Verne story which pitted one of Hollywood’s toughest screen heroes against a legendary icon of horror.

Based on the Verne stories Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World this movie takes place in the year 1868 when a madman by the name of Robur uses an amazing airship to enforce world peace, but his method isn’t all that peaceful as it relies mostly on bombing nations into submission. When three intruders end up on board his amazing airship things get a little more complicated for poor Robur and the mad genius must decide whether to kill them or let them stay. If this seems a tad familiar just replace airship with submarine and you will easily recognize the plot of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with Vincent Price standing in for James Mason's Captain Nemo and Charles Bronson for Kirk Douglas.

This is quite a departure from the source material as the Robur found in the Verne stories valued personal prestige over anything as trivial as world peace.  In the book Robur wanted his fellow airship enthusiast to agree with him that “heavier-than-air” craft, such as planes and helicopters were more feasible than “lighter-than-air” ones, such as balloons. He didn’t seem to give two figs about nations being at war, he just wanted everyone to say he was the Master of the Air.

 

My vote goes to the man who can build this thing.

The film does include an aeronautic debate but instead of the feasibility of one type of aircraft over another it’s about whether a balloon should have a propeller on the front of the craft or at the rear, and the two men that are at the head of these debates are weapons manufacturer Prudent (Henry Hull) and his soon to be son-in-law Phillip Evans (David Frankham).  Their heated discussion is ended when government agent John Strock (Charles Bronson) arrives to request one of their hot air balloons to survey a mountain crater in Pennsylvania, one that has suddenly started to act more like a volcano than it should.

 

I myself would assume Moses was up there talking to God.

Prudent and Evans agree to help and because the movie needs a female character – none appear in either of Jules Verne’s Robur stories – they bring along Prudent’s daughter Dorothy (Mary Webster), who is engaged to Evans. Shortly our small band of heroes pilot a balloon towards the mysterious mountain but they don’t get much time to survey anything as the minute they approach the mountain they come under attack from a missile barrage, which sends them crashing down inside the crater. That missile simply damages a hot air balloon, rather than blowing it to smithereens, is the true mystery here but with no time to worry about the realistic uses of ballistic explosives the movie quickly jumps to our intrepid group of heroes waking and finding themselves unwitting guests aboard the Albatross, a fantastic airship of Robur’s (Vincent Price) own design.

 

“I’m sure you are all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today.”

The crux of the film deals with the conflict between Evans, who wants to immediately work towards an escape, and with Strock who wishes to hang around until he can find an opportunity to destroy the Albatross from within, of course, the real conflict between these two stems from the fact that Dorothy kind of finds Strock to be a better catch rather than her current and fairly dull fiancé. You’d think with a film that contains the primary threat of Vincent Price as a madman trying to bomb the world into submission it wouldn’t need romantic entanglements  – and you’d be right – sadly the filmmakers begged to differ. The character of Evans is your standard “strawman” rival, who from the outset you know is not going to win the girl, especially if said rival is Charles Bronson.

 

This guy basically has a Death Wish.

Master of the World contains one of the more egregious examples of this clichéd character with its depiction of Evans, a man who constantly calls Strock a coward – ignoring all the evidence to the contrary – and basically being a constant asshole for the film's entire running time, going so far as to tell Strock that he should have stated his intentions in destroying the Albatross to Robur, even knowing that this would result in Strock’s immediate execution because honour demands it. Evans doesn’t even get much of a redemptive moment he’s just a complete pompous jerk for most of the picture, even to the point of attacking Strock from behind and leaving him unconscious as the Albatross goes up in flames. What’s worse is the filmmakers don’t even have the decency to give Evans a noble death, instead he kind of aids Strock at the end, helping to cut the anchor line holding the Albatross to the island they’ve fled to, but even in that act it's more about self-preservation than true heroism.

 

"This means you won't kill me now, right?"

The plot of Master of the World has very little bearing on the source material – Robur’s plan of creating world peace through the destruction of weapons of war is completely cribbed from that of Captain Nemo’s goals – but what hurts the film the most is the obvious limits the film’s budget imposed on the production, they really had no chance of competing with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in that area and it shows. The sets that make up the Albatross are quite nice – with cool matte paintings used to help create the energy absorption engine rooms – but they pale in comparison to those of Disney’s Nautilus. Charles Bronson was a fine action star of the modern period but he was sorely out of place in a Victorian adventure tale, and his character is a pale imitation of Kirk Douglas’ Ned Land. Most of all the thrilling action of Robur’s attacks on the world’s nations consists entirely of stock footage, often from black and white films that were colourized to make them appear unified, and one must admit that when the key element of your movie, the one thing that people have come to see – which would be awesome destruction and spectacle – is just stuff stolen from other better movies, well that’s a problem. Worse is the fact that they didn’t even bother to use footage from the proper time period, at one point Robur bombs Elizabethan London.

 

Now if the Albatross had been revealed to be a time machine as well...

What saves this film from being a complete waste of time is in the performance of Vincent Price – no surprise there – as no one can pull off the character of a mad obsessed genius as well as Price can, not even James Mason. Every moment on screen with Price is a treat, nobody can recite scripture like he can, and his ability to infuse such sympathy and pathos into the character of Robur almost has us wanting him to win in the end.  There is certainly very little sympathy to be found with the war profiteering Prudent and asshat Evans. Sadly, the filmmakers bungled the chance of Robur returning for a sequel as the movie borrows from both Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World, which would have made writing a sequel script a continuity nightmare. This is truly a shame because it was in the book Master of the World  - which was the name of the second book - that Robur returned in a new machine that he dubbed the Terror and it was a craft capable of operating as a speedboat, submarine, automobile, or aircraft.

 

Now that is a movie I'd have loved to see.

Stray Observations:

• The Albatross is fired upon several times from 17th-century navy ships but the canons on these types of vessels would have no ability to fire at an aircraft hovering directly above them.
• Robur has a magical telescope that allows the viewer to see things from a ground-level viewpoint despite them hovering over the target.
• We spend way too much time with the comic-relief cook, whose kitchen is always getting messed up by Robur’s violent aerial maneuvers.
• The Albatross cruises over such stock footage from Laurence Olivier's Henry V, the battle of Trafalgar from That Hamilton Woman (1941), and The Four Feathers (1939).
• Robur orders the Albatross down closer to the battle for no sensible reason – the ship is a bomber and not a strafing craft – and thus he is fully responsible for damaging his own craft. Who needs heroes when the villain is this bad at his job.
• Strock creates a makeshift gunpowder fuse that takes several minutes to reach the explosives, opposed to the few seconds it would realistically take.
• The explosion in the armoury should also have instantly destroyed the Albatross, not merely causing it to slowly crash into the sea, where it “eventually” explodes.

 

Another tragic end to a great Vincent Price character.

Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020) – Review

In 1998 director Renny Harlin helmed a fun little shark movie called Deep Blue Sea, where we learned from Ice Cube that his “Hat is like a shark’s fin” but then two decades later we got the straight-to-video sequel Deep Blue Sea 2 which showed us that maybe a sequel about his hat would have been a better idea. It's now 2020 and here comes Deep Blue Sea 3, a film that posits the theory that genetically modified super sharks aren’t enough of a threat, so why not throw in some evil mercenary to raise the stakes?

The hero of Deep Blue Sea 3 is Dr. Emma Collins (Tania Raymonde) a scientist who is doing her part to save the oceans and its inhabitants from the threat of global warming, but she's not just a scientist she's also a bit of a badass as she's on “friendly” terms with a Great White Shark named Sally so we best take her seriously. In her environmental quest to save the world she is aided by ex-Marine Eugene Shaw (Emerson Brooks), who once fought alongside Emma’s late father and is her stand-in guardian now, then we have the adorkable Japanese intern Miya (Reina Aoi) whose undersea sensors can monitor the birthrate of the neighbouring sharks, and finally, there is MIT geek Spinnaker (Alex Bhat) who has the hots for little Miya.  Start the egg timer on this guy's life-metre now.  This tight little group studies the marine life surrounding the island of Little Happy, a man-made island that has been subjected to flooding due to rising sea levels and it now consists only of our heroes and two of its remaining residents, Bahari (Siya Mayola) and Nandi (Avumile Qongqo), who remain on this sinking place because “It’s the only home we’ve ever known” which seems like a pretty lame reason to stay anywhere let alone on a place that will soon be submerged.

 

One could almost say it’s a good thing that some genetically modified sharks arrived to shake things up.

But are these super-smart sharks the true threat to our band of eco-warriors?  Certainly not, enter the film’s true villains, a boatload of assholes chasing the sharks that escaped the science facility at end of Deep Blue Sea 2.  In that film, a particular nasty shark named Bella had escaped with some of her pups and now we find that the evil big-pharma corporation, the one that hired mad scientist Durant to create super-smart sharks in the hopes this would somehow lead to super smart humans, has now sent a team to clean up the mess by tracking down and killing these genetically engineered monsters as well as protecting their intellectual property rights. Leading this team is marine biologist Richard Lowell (Nathaniel Buzolic), who just so happened to have been an old classmate of Emma’s and possibly more. Along for the ride is a small team of mercs that are led by a moustache-twirling villain named Lucas (Bren Foster), a man who couldn’t have been more cartoonishly evil he’d tied Emma to some railway tracks.

 

"Later I will foreclose on an orphanage."

It's the character of mercenary extraordinaire Lucas where this film massively miscalculates what "fans" of this series want, which is sharks eating people, and sure, it’s not intrinsically wrong to have a human antagonist in your shark movie, the mayor of Amity Island was a fine antagonist in Spielberg’s Jaws, but in Deep Blue Sea 3 the sharks are pretty much sidelined by these evil humans for the bulk of the film.  Worse is the fact that these particular humans are also very bad at being evil. If one word could be used to best describe Lucas it would be overconfidence, as twice his malevolent machinations are hampered by his complete disregard for a quick win. After soundly defeating ex-marine Eugene, in a brutal mix-martial arts-style fight, he doesn’t take the two seconds it would take to kill Eugene, instead, he hands that job off to one of his merc compatriots "Finish him" but who is then hilariously killed by a passing shark.

 

“Heads up!”

Then awhile later good ole overconfident Lucas goes to finish off our lovely heroine, giving her multiple wounds with his combat knife, but then he sets the knife down because, apparently, cutting her throat would be “Too easy” and so proceeds to try and drown her, with less than stellar results.  Emma picks up the discarded knife and stabs him in the chest with it and thus we have a villain who first delegates the murder of a man, at the most idiotic moment possible, and then later forgoes a quick kill for some macho reason, which leaves me left asking “How did this guy land a lob leading a team of mercenaries?" I've seen Bond villains with more common sense than this ass hat.

 

“Hey, shouldn’t I get to eat the bad guy?”

Stray Observations:

• This story takes place near Mozambique so why not have modern-day pirates be the human villains rather than these inept mercenaries?
• People are constantly yelling “Get out of the water!” as if a person surrounded by sharks needed that particular piece of advice.
• As in the previous Deep Blue Sea movies we see sharks swimming backwards despite this being something sharks absolutely cannot do.
• The sharks are now smart enough to know when one of their own is being held hostage at gunpoint. I’m assuming in later sequels we will get shark negotiators and lawyers.
• Emma is on friendly terms with a Great White Shark, you have three guesses as who swims in to save her and the first two don’t count.
• A character is supposedly eaten by a shark only to pop up alive at the end of the movie ala Richard Dreyfus in Jaws.
• The villains plant an anti-ship mine inside the shark nursery, which they plan to detonate so as to kill all the super-smart sharks as well as any witness, guess where that mine ends up?  Hint: These mercenaries came on a boat and they are morons.
• Two different people give passionate speeches before suddenly being eaten by a shark.

 

Did Samuel L. Jackson’s death teach you people nothing?

As sequels go Deep Blue Sea 3 is a cut above its immediate predecessor as the writers this time out managed to at least cobble together a somewhat group of likable protagonists, but the switch of focus from killer sharks to two-dimensional mercenaries was definitely not a wise decision, which is a shame because what shark stuff we do get in this film is a definite improvement over what we were served up in Deep Blue Sea 2, and I particularly liked that this film showed us that most sharks are not at all interested in eating humans, unless modified by mad scientists that is.

 

“Back off, I have your contracts for Deep Blue Sea 4 right here.”

I’ve seen a lot of bad shark movies over the years and I will grant that this one at least tried to do something a little different, unfortunately, while doing so they sacrificed one of the key reasons people would tune in to watch a Deep Blue Sea sequel, which would be the cool shark attacks. So, if you want to see some decent CGI sharks and a couple of fun kills then by all means check out Deep Blue Sea 3 but please, do yourself a favour and keep your expectations very low.

The Giant Behemoth (1959) – Review

Clones are not an uncommon subject matter when it comes to science fiction or monster movies but in the case of director Eugène Lourié and his film The Giant Behemoth we don’t so much as have a movie about a clone but a movie that is a clone. In 1953 Eugène Lourié was the director and production designer on the Ray Harryhausen monster feature The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms but then six years later he was over in Britain making the exact same movie only now it would be called The Giant Behemoth. Question: Is it still theft if you were involved with the original?

The hero of The Giant Behemoth is marine biologist Steve Karnes (Gene Evans) who lectures his fellow members of the scientific community about the hazards of atomic waste, whether it be from the testing of atomic bombs or the dumping of nuclear waste, and the dangerous effect it poses to marine life. He is heckled for being an alarmist but is quickly justified when a fisherman in Cornwall is killed, suffering from what looks like radiation burns, and his dying words are, “From the sea... burning, like fire! Behemoth!” portends of the dangers to follow. Karnes quickly begins to suspect that this supposed "behemoth" is some kind of large marine mammal that has been mutated as a result of contamination from nuclear testing.

 

"I say old chap, have you read this script?"

After dead fish start washing ashore Steve consults with Professor James Bickford (André Morell) and the two begin their investigations which will take up the bulk of the film until the title creature is finally allowed to appear. As monster movie go The Giant Behemoth had a rather low budget so the creature's limited screen time was to be expected but it could have been worse, originally the threat wasn’t some giant radioactive dinosaur but mysterious radioactive substance found floating around the sea, fortunately for monster fans, the British producers wanted a more clear threat rather than something like glowing seaweed, thus we get a rampaging Palaeosaurus type creature instead of glowing gunk bobbing in the surf.

 

I’d say that was a good call, this definitely beats glowing seaweed.

The bulk of the film works as a science mystery with Karnes and Bickford investigating various locations and then going over their findings in the lab, and very little monster action to be found, but when the monster does eventually make an appearance it does remind one of the classic Brontosaurus attack on London from the 1925 silent film The Lost World but with the added threat of the creature emitting radiation to the point of killing anyone in close proximity. This additional menace is another element “borrowed” from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms as in that film the dinosaur’s blood was radioactive and made those coming in contact with it sick, while in The Giant Behemoth the radiation it emits is more of in an attack rather in the fashion of Godzilla's atomic breath.

 

Soldiers meet their gruesome end at the hands of the Behemoth.

Stray Observations:

• Like in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms there is an eccentric paleontologist for our hero to consult, sadly he doesn’t have an attractive assistant for him to fall in love with.
• Like Ray Harryhausen’s Rhedosaurus the Behemoth is a completely fictional dinosaur, one that has electric eel properties for some reason.
• Stock sound effects were borrowed from the original King Kong, including Fay Wray’s scream.
• Whenever the Behemoth attacks ships on the water a simple puppet is used rather than a stop-motion version of the creature.

 

I’ve seen more thrilling action in my bathtub.

The stop-motion animation special effects were supervised by the legendary Willis O'Brien, who worked on the original King Kong, but the budget he had available on this project was minuscule in comparison and this quite hampered the end result, making The Giant Behemoth something he’d probably leave off his resume as even the attack sequences come across as rather repetitive and boring. When the Behemoth eventually does get his "rampage" on the result is rather fun, with it stomping through the streets of London, crushing and or irradiating all things in its way, unfortunately, it’s a case of too little too late and thus it makes this a hard film to recommend. If you have a thing for stock actors staring thoughtfully at X-rays and maps this film should be right up your alley but if it’s amazing dinosaur action you are looking for stick with films like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and give The Giant Behemoth a pass.

 

I sentence this beast to the Lost World of cheap monster movies.

The Kid Who Would Be King (2019) – Review

When it comes to kid’s films “wish fulfillment” has to be one of the most popular of genres – who wouldn’t want to find out they’re a wizard and get to attend a magical school – but there is always a price for such granted wishes, mainly some villainous bastard will want you dead. In the case of director Joel Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King not only does a bullied kid discover he is “The Chosen One” he must also save the world from darkness and evil. And you thought your middle school years were tough.

The movie opens with a nice animated sequence explaining the history of King Arthur and his evil half-sister Morgana, who once banished by the wizard Merlin gave one final decree before being sent to the underworld, “When you are long gone, when hearts are hollow and the land is lost with weakness, I will return.” The story then jumps to the modern setting where we find the world is pretty much full of despair and corruption. We are introduced to twelve-year-old Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis) who is finding his early days of secondary education to be a bit of a trial, with him and his best friend Bedders (Dean Chaumoo) being constantly bullied by a couple of older students named Lance (Tom Taylor) and Kaye (Rhianna Dorris). It’s while running from these particular bullies that Alex ends up hiding in a nearby construction site where he finds and extracts a mysterious sword that was embedded in a concrete block.

 

This is the Once and Future King?

Later he and Bedders figure out that this sword is the legendary Excalibur – thanks to Google Translate they are able to read the inscription on the blade – and though this seems cool idea at first things take a rather dark turn when a newly awakened Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) sends forth a fiery skeletal warrior, known as a Mortes Milles, to kill the kid and retrieve the magical blade.  Lucky for Alex and Bedders the new kid at school turns out to be the wizard Merlin (Angus Imrie), looking like a teenager due to his ageing backward, and he informs Alex that it is up to him to stop Morgana before she enslaves all of England and the world, also pointing out that he has four days to pull this off.

 

Though Merlin ages backwards he does occasionally revert to looking like Patrick Stewart.

Joel Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King is a fun adventure film, one that can be enjoyed by the whole family as one can't knock its core message of making the world a better place. Alex and Bedders befriend the two bullies – making allies out of enemies as Arthur once did – and most importantly they all learn about the Chivalric Code and that being honest with each other is one of the more important things in life. The film also takes an interesting direction with Alex believing that the key to his mission is in the finding of his estranged father. His mother had stated that he has “His own demons to battle” not realizing that she meant his dad was an angry alcoholic and not a descendant of heroes. It should be noted that the film does play fast in loose with elements of the Arthurian story but it neatly sidesteps this issue by having Merlin state, “Legends are mere rumours whispered down the centuries. Written and re-written, told and re-told, sometimes by the rich and powerful so they can hold onto power.” From this Alex leans that he isn’t a blood relation to the legendary King Arthur and that Excalibur is not handed down by birthright but by individual merit, with the Lady of the Lake granting the sword to one who she believes is worthy of the quest.

 

The Lady of the Bathtub?

Being this is a kid’s film, with a child destined to save the world from dark forces, the writers had to come up with a way to keep adults out of the way and in this case it’s revealed early on that when night falls, and the Mortes Milles crawl up from the underworld, only the rightful bearer of the sword and those he knights can see them.  This is a rather clever way of handling that particular problem but more interesting is that during this time period all the adults actually seem to have vanished as if our heroes are fighting in an alternate dimension. This all leads to Alex and his friends having their final confrontation with Morgana at their school, where Alex will U-knight the entire student body.

 

Cue training montage.

Stray Thoughts:

• The Sword in the Stone and Excalibur are often been depicted as two different weapons, one being owned by Uther Pendragon while the other being created by the Lady of the Lake, but in no version of the myth is it implied that Merlin created Excalibur.
• Alex and Bedders use Google Translate to figure out the Latin writing on the sword’s guard, they then dash up to the attic to find a book on the Knights of the Round Table, but why not just use Google to find out more about on the sword? There is no need to hold a scavenger-hunt in a dusty attic when you have access to Wikipedia.
• Patrick Stewart plays the wizard Merlin but this is not his first time in an Arthurian movie, he once played Guinevere’s father in John Boorman’s Excalibur.
• I know this is a “Kids Empowerment” movie and thus are protagonists are all children, but I don’t understand why Alex didn’t knight any adults for the big final battle.
• Bedders uses a metal duplication spell to outfit all of the student body with armour and swords but for some reason, he decides to duplicate the road sign that he'd used as a shield instead of duplicating an actual shield.
• Even though the kids had a whole afternoon of combat training, as well as a variety of Home Alone type traps to fight off the Mortes Milles, I still call bullshit on the fact that not one kid so much as gets a bloody nose during this fight.

 

Some kids would have died of sheer fright just from seeing these creatures.

As fantasy film aimed at younger viewers The Kid Who Would Be King works rather well – what kid wouldn’t want to wield a magic sword against the forces of darkness – and the appearance of Sir Patrick Stewart as the wizard Merlin is a definite bonus for older audiences, but there is more going on here than just a simple fantasy film as Cornish is clearly speaking to the troubles that face our world today, a world full of Trump craziness and Brexit stupidity, yet Cornish never lets the film become overly heavy-handed with that aspect as the film ends on a mostly uplifting note that could be best summed up by Whitney Houston, “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.”

Code 8 (2019) – Review

What do you get when one of the stars of DC’s television show Arrow tries to crowdfund a low rent X-Men movie into existence? The answer is Code 8, a somewhat futuristic movie brought to us by Jeff Chan and cousins Robbie Amell and Stephen Amell. This is one of those movies that started as a short film which was basically a demo to show investors so as to get enough money to produce a feature film version, now, this idea is nothing new and has been successful in the past, but more often than not you end up with stuff like Josh Baker’s Kin, a project that comes across more like a half-assed television pilot than it does a movie.

The story of Code 8 exists in one of those “alternative worlds” where super-powered people have existed for quite some time but in a complete twist on this, we learn that at one time these “power-enabled” citizens were considered valued members of society, using their remarkable abilities to practically build cities on their own, but now with the advent of automation, these gifted individuals have quickly become the unemployed minorities of the world. And why is this, you ask?  Well, if you have robot assembly lines who needs a guy who is strong enough to pick up a truck? It’s this basic premise that I had the hardest time swallowing because no matter how impressive a robotic assembly line is I simply can’t believe a man who can create lightning or one who can pick up a half-ton concrete divider with his bare hands would find themselves standing outside the local Home Depot begging for menial labour jobs.

 

The military and law enforcement would be begging for this guy to sign up.

The film rolls out the old “God Loves Man Kills” element from the Chris Claremont run of the X-Men comics, with much of society being afraid of these super-powered people, but then it also expects us to believe in the idea that Joe average was once cool with powered people building skyscrapers and spot welding their cars with just the touch of a finger and then with the advent of automation they are suddenly afraid of them.  I’m sure a good science fiction writer could have made this work but even the best writer would have been challenged to work it such an idea into a 98-minute movie as it takes time to do proper world-building and certainly not in the ten minutes this movie provides. In Code 8 Jeff Chan and screenwriter Chris Pare have neither the skill nor the time to pull off such a feat and thus it feels like one of those television pilots that will never get picked up.

 

Not helped by the fact that the two leads are known mostly for their television work.

The “hero” of this story is Connor Reed (Robbie Amell ), a man gifted with the ability to channel great levels of electricity through his hands.  Being a marginalized superhero is bad enough but he also must deal with his mother (Kari Matchett) who is dying and with the medical bills are piling up Connor must make some tough choices. This leads to him becoming desperate enough to work for the likes of (Stephen Amell), a man who runs a super-powered heist crew, who in turn are working for a small-time drug lord Marcus Sutcliffe (Greg Bryk). This little organization has been dealing with a dangerous new drug called “Psyke” which is created from tapping the spinal fluid of the psychically empowered. The movie never gets around to explaining whether or not those people being harvested for their spinal fluids are victims or if they are simply selling it to survive in a world that has turned its back on them, but what this film also fails to do is give us some idea as to where Connor sits when it comes to the idea of his kind being exploited for a designer drug. In fact, we never see Connor having any sort of qualms about his “jobs” facilitating the manufacturing and distribution of illegal drugs. This tends to make him a less than a relatable hero and having him state that he doesn’t want any killings on one of their jobs does not make him a good person.

 

Did Connor never watch Michael Mann’s Heat?

Chris Crane’s production design and Playfight’s visual effects give us a surprising well-built “futuristic society” on was obviously a small budget and what money the producers managed to collect is all there on screen, with robot police called “Guardians” being airdropped by large drones that constantly patrol the city creating a visceral and scary world,  Unfortunately, all the cool bells and whistles in the world can’t help a film that seems bereft of original ideas. We briefly hear of a shadowy evil organization called “The Trust” but that’s something for the sequel –  haha good luck with that guys – as the bulk of the film's running time deals with Connor pissing and moaning about his sad lot in life and his dying mom. The villainous Sutcliffe couldn’t have been a bigger stereotype if they’d shown him tying women to railway tracks and Stephen Amell’s telekinetic crew leader had about as much depth as a puddle in the heart of the Sahara Desert. This film is just chock full of characters one couldn't care less about, and Garret’s crew of super-powered misfits lead the charge in that category. Then we have Sutcliffe and his cronies one of which has the ability to heal with a touch – this character also has a backstory so bland and clichéd that she’s almost immediately forgettable whenever she’s not on screen – and then there are the two cops hot on Connor’s tail, him being the only few Class 5 Electric powered meta-humans around and thus their only suspect. With all these characters to introduce and explain– or not explain – who they are and what their powers are isn’t given time to develop properly and as a result, everything seems kind of short shifted, even the cool Guardian police robots, that look like they were lifted from Neill Blomkamp science fiction film Chappie, are wasted in this film.  I’m actually surprised we didn’t get any cybernetic Robocops in this film.

 

“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”

Code 8 isn’t a terrible film, and it was clearly a labour of love from those behind the production, but overall a film can only be judged by the end result, which in this case was a basic a paint-by-numbers actioner that lives and breathes every cliché in the book. Now, will this make enough money to kick-start a sequel or that promised television series? Who knows and I doubt many will lose sleep over it, and thus I can only recommend this film to die-hard Stephan Amell fans.  I know you’re out there.

Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? (2019-2020) – Review

Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? is the thirteenth incarnation of the Scooby-Doo franchise and at best it is to be considered a soft reboot of the 1972 series titled The New Scooby-Doo Movies, where each episode would feature a new guest star - whether they be real-life celebrities like Cher and Don Knotts or fictional ones like Batman and the Addams Family - unfortunately, this revival of that premise manages to make some of the same mistakes that original show made.

The one change this new series instituted that I consider to be an improvement over the original series is in cutting the running-time back to thirty-minute and episode rather than the bloated hour-long ones of the 1970s show. If you’re not going to be funny at least be short, that’s my motto. This brings me to the major problem with Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? which would be its lack of overall funny material. You can hire comedians like Ricky Gervais and Whoopie Goldberg to lend their voices to your cartoon but you also have to give them something funny to say or react to, not to mention some of the choices the producers made when it came to casting to celebrity' voices is downright bizarre. Now, this was also an issue with The New Scooby-Doo Movies where they’d cast someone like Cass Elliot from the folk-rock music group The Mamas and the Papas when I doubt that even kids in the 70s knew who and the hell she was – I was six-years-old at the time and I sure didn’t – and the same problem exists in the reboot as we get the likes of Australian singer Sia or basketball player Chris Paul as guest stars. I know I’m not the biggest sports fan out there but was Chris Paul the best they could come up with? Were Charles Barkley or Michael Jordan not available?

 

“Sorry guys, everyone else was working on Space Jam 2.”

Even if such guest stars as Wanda Sykes and Ricky Gervais was an attempt at attracting older viewers the writers still managed to fail at creating interesting mysteries for them to solve. Casting the likes of Jaleel White to reprise his role of Steve Urkel and Weird Al Yankovic to lampoon his already lampoonish personality is a clear attempt at cashing in on the nostalgia factor such guest stars would hopefully provide but if that’s all an episode has going for it then you’ve got a problem. On the plus side, later in the season they’d have Mark Hamill playing himself and in that episode, they'd toss in some nice meta-jokes concerning his time giving voice to such characters as The Joker, which was genuinely clever and funny, sadly, this was not indicative of the writing for the bulk of the episodes as most the celebrities they landed were lacklustre at best.

 

Jim Gaffigan, seriously?

When it comes to the guest stars of a more fictional nature such as Batman, Wonder Woman and The Flash, the show fares slightly better, but only slightly. The Scooby gang running into superheroes is nothing new but the series and its lack of any sense of continuity tends to make things a little confusing. In the episode “What a Night for a Dark Knight!” the gang encounter Batman (Kevin Conroy) as if for the first time when they’d already run into both Batman and Robin years ago in The New Scooby-Doo Movies episode “The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair,” and then we have the direct-to-video film Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon which depicted Wonder Woman as a fictional comic book character, yet here she is appearing in the flesh in the episode “Scooby of a Thousand Faces.”

 

“Suffering Sappho, Wonder Woman, you’re just a comic book character.”

Easily the episode I had the most fun watching was “One Minute Mysteries” where we find Barry Allen aka The Flash (Charlie Schlatter) wanting to spend time eating with Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby-Doo (Frank Welker), because these two are the only ones who can keep up with his super-metabolism, but their dinner is constantly interrupted by the rest of the Mystery Inc. who need Shaggy and Scooby to be bait for their latest trap. To keep his eating buddies on hand Barry dons his Flash costume and proceeds to solve all of Mystery Incorporated’s mysteries using his super speed. Captain Cutler’s Ghost, Miner Forty-Niner, The Creeper and half-dozen other classic villains all fall to the Scarlett Speedster, much to the chagrin of Fred (Frank Welker), Daphne (Grey Griffin) and Velma (Kate Micucci) who find themselves feeling rather useless next to a Justice League member. This episode was not only fun but it had some amazing animation as well – the visuals of time slowing down while The Flash manipulated objects was amazing – and it also had some dramatic moments with the gang all about to be blown to smithereens while The Flash runs to the rescue. This was the kind of thing I wanted out of Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? not so much Steve Urkel from Family Matters and whatever crap he was getting into.

 

I could have lived the rest of my life without hearing “Did I do that?” on a Scooby-Doo cartoon.

Though I found the episodes starring DC superheroes to be some of the more entertaining entries, which is not surprising considering the rather uninspiring field of guest stars the show had to offer throughout the season, but one of the more interesting entries was when the gang ran into Penn and Teller, the notorious bad boys of magic, in the episode “The Cursed Cabinet of Professor Madds Markson!” where find that the Scooby gang was offered a million dollars if the could stay in Las Vegas' most haunted hotel – clearly a nod to William Castle's The House on Haunted Hill – with Velma eager to debunk the idea of real ghosts, but what makes this episode great is that they've teamed up with Penn and Teller who are renowned for exposing fakery. It’s a charming episode with Penn Jillette truly wanting to be scared but who has become jaded over the years.

 

If this was a perfect world we’d see a poster of these guys adorning Velma’s bedroom wall.

Stray Observations:

• In the episode “Peebles' Pet Shop of Terrible Terrors!” there is a dog resembling Bandit from Hanna-Barbera's Jonny Quest. Could this show be considered a prequel or did Jonny simply get rid of Bandit at some point?
• In previous incarnations of Scooby-Doo the character Sherlock Holmes had been treated as if he were a real person but in the episode “Elementary, My Dear Shaggy!” he’s considered fictional and thus the Scooby gang don’t even meet the “real” Sherlock Holmes, instead, he’s just some nut job impersonator.
• It’s never made clear why in “What a Night for a Dark Knight!” the Joker impersonated Man-Bat to kidnap Alfred, and with the real Man-Bat easily identified as still being in Arkham it didn't even work as a good misdirect.
• Though voiced by Kevin Conroy this Batman drives around in Adam West’s Batmobile for the 60s Batman television series. That was kind of cool.
• In the episode “Scooby of a Thousand Faces” the Scooby gang to do their best to stop Wonder Woman from slaying the Minotaur because they know it’s always a guy in a mask.  That they were able to stop Wonder Woman from doing so is the real mystery here.
• The final villain in “One Minute Mysteries” is unmasked to be The Joker but when The Flash points out that Joker is a Batman villain and not one of his rogue's gallery, a second mask is pulled off revealing it to be the Trickster, voiced by Mark Hamill, which is brilliant as he has played both characters in the past, Joker for the Batman: The Animated Series and The Trickster for the live-action Flash television series.
• The show mostly follows the classic format of “Man in a Mask” yet in “A Mystery Solving Gang Divided” we do get an unmasking of a regular crook but there is also an actual supernatural element in the form of the Funky Phantom from the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon the Funky Phantom Crew, which was a blatant clone of Hanna-Barbera’s own Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! so having them show up as a rival mystery-solving gang was rather clever.

 

“We’d sue you for copyright infringement if we weren’t owned by the same studio.”

As for the show’s overall tone, it was kind of all over the place. The few episodes that have the self-referential aspect of Be Cool, Scooby-Doo where they'd point out some of the sillier tropes of the classic mysteries, but for the most part this aspect was quickly set aside for your standard Scooby-Doo plots and half-assed attempts at comedy. As to the look of the show, the animation is on par with What’s New Scooby-Doo? and is fairly decent as a whole – if you ignore some glaring animation mistakes like the Mystery Machine suddenly appearing in a shot as if by magic – but it’s definitely a step back from the likes of Mystery Incorporated with its stunning art designs, nor did it have the more stylized fun Be Cool Scooby-Doo. There just isn’t anything special about Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? as it simply tries to capture some of that nostalgic feel by tossing in several celebrities of note, most of whom will cause younger viewers to scratch their heads and ask questions like, “Who in the hell is George Takei?”

Note: I love George Takei, I actually got to spend an afternoon with him and he was as funny and as charming as one could have hoped for, but he’s certainly not a celeb your average kids is going to connect with.

Avalon High (2010) – Review

With the release of Disney Channel’s Avalon High back in 2010 it's clear that the studio was looking to strike gold again with another Meg Cabot based property– having made a killing with their adaptation her book The Princess Diaries – unfortunately, with a made-for-television budget and some massive creative liberties to the source material Avalon High was destined to end up in the dustbin of history.

We are first introduced to Allie Pennington (Britt Robertson), the daughter of two medieval literature scholars who had recently taken positions at the local college, who as the new girl at school she finds herself running into the standard high school drama or at least the standard drama you'd find on a Disney television show about high school. There’s not really much of a plot to this film, much of the interesting stuff from the book was ditched to make this a more family-friendly outing for the Disney Channel, and thus we mostly get a light fantasy version of High School the Musical but without the music.

 

They’d have been better off remaking the musical Camelot.

Allie is plagued by strange dreams of medieval knights battling on a beach, which includes a blonde female knight on a white charger taking on a Black Knighted figure, which terribly undercuts the big twist reveal at the film's end as the identity of the blonde knight is pretty damn obvious. As the movie progresses we are introduced to class nerd Miles (Joey Pollari) whose head-splitting psychic visions of the future quickly peg him as this film's version of the reincarnation of the wizard Merlin, then we have Will Wagner (Gregg Sulkin), the senior class president, star quarterback and Home Coming King, who will be leading his team to the State Finals, and who is, of course, the reincarnation of King Arthur. Next, there is Marco Campbell (Devon Graye) the school’s resident bully, who as well as being Will’s stepbrother his plotting and basic asshole behaviour has Allie and Miles believing he must be the reincarnation of the vile villain Mordred. Finally, we have Lance Benwick (Chris Tavarez), the Avalon High School football team's cornerback and best friend to Will and the beautiful Jennifer (Molly C. Quinn) who is the football team’s head cheerleader and Will's girlfriend, these two clearly corresponding to the roles of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere from the legends of King Arthur.

 

This is the love triangle that will destroy a kingdom?

Allie and Miles are partnered together in her European History class by their teacher Mr. Moore (Steve Valentine), who assigns them a research paper on something called “The Order of the Bear” which, with the help of Allie’s parents, they learn was a group of people who believed that in a time of great need King Arthur would return and bring a new age of enlightenment, but the prophecy also states that a returning Mordred would do everything in his power to destroy this new Arthur and prevent it from happening. When Allie discovers that Lance and Jennifer are having an affair behind Will’s back she becomes determined to stop the tragedy of Camelot repeating itself, which is made quite difficult by the fact that Allie seems to have rather deep feelings for Will herself.

 

Could we be looking at a love quadrangle?

With Marco snarking in the background and threatening her to silence about Lance and Jennifer’s affairs – which she believes is because he plans to reveal the infidelity at a more emotionally damaging time – and with the lunar and eclipse and meteor that will herald the returning Arthur mere days away and Will’s teammates turning on him for dumbass reasons, Allie is hard-pressed to figure a way of preventing the fall of Camelot before it even gets a chance to be reborn. This is when we get the startling revelation that the supposedly helpful Mr. Moore is actually the reincarnation of Mordred – Marco turns out to secretly be a member of the Order of the Bear and was only being an asshole to stay on Mordred’s good side – and when a toy sword magically turns into Excalibur in Allie’s hands we get the other big twist, turns out that Allie is actually the reincarnation of King Arthur and Will is just her knight in shining armour.

 

What a twist!

These startling revelations would most likely confuse any fans of Meg Cabot’s book, for in the book Mr. Moore was a member of "The Order of the Bear" and represented Merlin – nerdy Miles isn’t even in the book – Will is the prophesized return of King Arthur and Allie is actually the Lady of The Lake, the mythical being that gave Arthur his prized sword, Excalibur. Now, I can understand the Disney Channel wanting to go with the whole “Girl Power” aspect of this version, it’s a great message for young girls and having King Arthur reincarnated as a girl is not a bad idea but with that simple change, it makes all the love triangle shenanigans about Lance and Jennifer’s affair, which causes Will to lose his confidence during the big game, completely pointless. If Allie is King Arthur who cares if Will doesn’t get his scholarship? With this change Will’s character no longer has any bearing on the plot, nor does Lance and Jennifer, thus we are left with a ninety-minute high school romance that plopped a few Arthurian names into the mix.

 

“On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. ‘Tis a silly place.”

Stray Thoughts:

• Allie’s dreams of herself in shining armour and leading the charge against the Black Knight should tip off even the most obtuse viewer as to the fact that she is King Arthur reincarnated.
• Mr. Moore giving Allie and Miles the assignment of the “Order of the Bear” only makes sense if he was Merlin, the villainous Mordred wouldn’t want his enemies to have more information on the prophecy.
• For some reason this version of Mordred has been given magical abilities, he even gets a magic staff, but in the legends, he was just the illegitimate son of Arthur, it was Morgan le Fay who posed a magical threat to Camelot.
• Having the school teacher turn out to be Mordred also ruins the whole “Mordred being Arthur’s half-brother” which was mentioned in the prophecy.

 

Teacher by day Ren Fair enthusiast by night.

Disney Channel’s Avalon High was clearly a victim of screenwriters trying to give their movie a more “Girl Power” message without realizing what those changes meant to the overall framework of the original story. It’s like a movie version of the game Jenga, you pull one piece out and the whole thing topples to the ground. This isn’t the worst thing to make its way onto the Disney Channel, and it's certainly in keeping with Disney’s usual disdain for the source material, but the level of bland acting and low production value on display here makes this entry more forgettable than bad.

A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (1988-1991) – Review

In an ultimate prequel to the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! the network took the eighth incarnation of the long-running Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon back in time to when the Scooby gang were pre-teens. A Pup Named Scooby-Doo was the final television series in the franchise in which Don Messick would portray Scooby-Doo before his death in 1997, and when the show ended after thirty episodes we wouldn’t get another Scooby-Doo for eleven years. Jinkies!

The format of A Pup Named Scooby-Doo followed the trend of the "babyfication" of older cartoon characters, which one of the show's producers would later use on Spielberg’s Tiny Toon Adventures, and though this may have annoyed fans of the classic cartoon it did bring back Fred and Velma to the show, both of whom had not appeared as regular characters since the 1970s.  So, we can take that as a win, right? This particular incarnation also used the same basic formula as the original 1969 show as it had the kids forming the "Scooby-Doo Detective Agency" – that would obviously later morph into Mystery Incorporated – and where the monsters of the week would undoubtedly turn out to be a dude in a mask. That said, this tried and true formula was altered a bit as it had the pre-teen Scooby gang up against some decidedly weirder villains who had even more dubious motives. In the very first episode “A Bicycle Built for Boo!” the Green Monster who steals Shaggy’s bike simply because he needed its chain to fix his counterfeiting press.

 

Was going to a bicycle repair shop just not an option?

Not only was the tone and humour of A Pup Named Scooby-Doo broader and goofier, and the monsters themselves more comedic, such as a sludge monster from the Earth’s core or Chickenstein type creature, a 7-foot-tall humanoid chicken creature in the vein of Universal’s Frankenstein’s monster. It was this kind of “threat” that differentiated this show from the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! a show that was somewhat grounded in reality – talking dog aside – whereas A Pup Named Scooby-Doo relied on more cartoon “logic” for much of its humour. But it wasn’t just the writing that was broader as the animation style itself veered into some extreme cartoon stylized antics that was more akin to the works of Looney Tune legends Tex Avery and Joe Clampett, with characters doing wild double-takes and their eyes jumping out of their faces when encountering various monsters.

 

“A g-g-g-g-g-ghost!”

Unlike previous incarnations, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo was more self-aware and the characters often broke the fourth wall and even played off the standard tropes. The show also relied on several running gags such as whenever Velma would say "Jinkies" someone would point out "Velma said Jinkies, it must be a clue" but more annoyingly was Fred’s constant accusing of the neighbourhood kid Red Herring (Scott Menville) of being the villain of the day despite him never ever being guilty of anything – well, except for that one time - but this was an obvious pun on the literary trope that was designed to distract the reader from identifying the real culprit, but as a joke, it got old real fast.

 

“Let’s round up the usual suspects, and by that, I mean this guy.”

The character traits of this pre-teen Scooby gang weren’t too far off-model with the likes of Shaggy (Casey Kasem) being exactly like his older incarnation while his pal Scooby (Don Messick) was only altered by his random ability to modify his nose to search for clues, such as turning it into a radar dish-like scanner. Daphne (Kellie Martin) is a little vainer as a tween and whose job in this show seems to be that of the resident skeptic, with her catchphrase in the show being "There's no such thing as…” followed by whatever creature they were facing that week. The version of Fred (Carl Steven) in this series isn’t yet the stoic leader he'd later become, nor does he yet have the trap obsessive disorder, but his main purpose on this show was to always jumps to the wrong conclusion and offer a ludicrous hypothesis to the mystery at hand. Velma (Christina Lange) is another character who stayed relatively true to her original incarnation, being an intelligent and soft-spoken young girl with thick eyeglasses that she’d tend to lose at the most inopportune moments.  She also worked as the team’s “Q” and would often have an oversized fan-propelled skateboard at the ready or her briefcase-sized mobile computer to help determine the monster of the weeks true identity.

 

“It says here that I haven’t used my catchphrase for at least five minutes...Jinkies!”

Stray Observations:

• In the episode "Dawn of the Space Shuttle Scare" we see a flashback of toddler Velma meeting Scooby-Doo, but this means Scooby-Doo has been a pup for several years. Does Scooby suffer from some form of reverse dog years?
• This show introduced us to Shaggy’s baby sister Sugie, who was Shaggy's favourite "non-puppy person in the world" and is someone I wish had been given more appearances in later Scooby-Doo cartoons as she was a very sweet character.
• I quite enjoyed the musical interludes where the Scooby gang would dance around to a catchy original song.
• Though this particular run returned to the “Guy in a Mask” formula the episode “Ghost Who Comes to Dinner” is the one episode that did have an actual ghost.
• Shaggy’s love of the superhero duo of Commander Cool and his faithful canine sidekick Mellow Mutt was an obvious homage to the Blue Falcon and Dynomutt.
• A live-action puppet version of this series called Scooby-Doo! Adventures: The Mystery Map was released in 2013.
• The Tex Avery style of the show lent itself to some rather bizarre moments, like Shaggy and Scooby’s skeleton’s popping out and running away.

 

There’s a little case of nightmare fuel for you.

As a prequel series, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo was a breath of fresh air – also giving us a break from Scrappy-Doo – and the Looney Tune style of broad humour and animation gave the writers and artists freer rein when it came to coming up with fun adventures for our pre-teen sleuths to solve. As for the mysteries themselves, well the less said about them the better as pretty much the first person you suspect will most likely be the culprit. We’re not talking Agatha Christie here. The animation not only benefited from looser restrictions but it was also technically better than many of the previous incarnations and though older audiences may not be thrilled to see a Muppet Babies version of our heroes there was enough gags and silliness to give me a chuckle on more than one occasion.

 

Question: Was the film Scoob! be based on A Pup Named Scooby-Doo?