Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – Review

Before Peter Jackson re-invented Middle Earth when it came to cinematic dragons the only ones that readily came to mind would have been such examples as the animated Disney classic Sleeping Beauty and that of the live-action Disney/Paramount fantasy epic Dragonslayer, which had Phil Tippet’s amazing go-motion technique to bring the dragon Vermithrax Pejorative to life, but in 1982 cult film producer/director Larry Cohen gave to the world a startling entry in the form of Q: The Winged Serpent.

When a winged creature begins to prey on the inhabitants of New York City, biting the heads off window washers and snatching up beautiful rooftop sunbathers, we first might assume were about to see your standard monster movie but that couldn’t be further from the truth as Q: The Winged Serpent owes more to films like The French Connection and Dog Day Afternoon than it does such standard monster fare as King Kong or Godzilla because not only is a large aspect of the film a "police procedural" but one of the key players is a two-bit criminal who wouldn’t look out of place in a Dirty Harry movie. This particular character is a wannabe jazz pianist named Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a hyperkinetic loser who takes a job as a wheelman for a diamond heist that goes decidedly wrong which results in him fleeing the scene of the crime and ending up at the top of the Chrysler Building. As to why the spire of a skyscraper appeals to a man on the run, you got me, but it does lead to him coming across the nest of our titular creature.

 

Could this be Mothra?

New Yorkers losing their heads isn’t the only strange and disturbing thing going on in the Big Apple as there is also the slight issue of someone performing a number of Aztec ritualistic sacrifices, flaying the skin off of a body and cutting out the heart, enter NYPD detectives Shepard (David Carradine) and Powell (Richard Roundtree) who attempt to discover whether or not these series of murders have anything to do with sightings of a large winged dragon snatching up people. Funnily enough there is, as it turns out that an Aztec priest has been performing these sacrifices, upon willing subjects, to awaken the winged Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and he is surprisingly effective in doing so.

 

“Forget it, Powell, it’s Chinatown.”

Stray Observations:

• An Aztec priest can somehow flay an entire body in a hotel room without even getting a drop of blood on the bedsheets, now that’s talent.
• Jimmy Quinn takes the job as a wheelman for a diamond heist but then his employer forces him to take a gun and enter the jewelry store, does that man not understand what a “wheelman” is supposed to do?
• Jimmy finds the bloody skeletal remains of one of the dragon’s victims, which is strangely still wearing its wrist bracelet, which means that the monster must have insanely nimble teeth.
• Detective Powell makes the classic blunder of being a black man in a monster movie.

 

Richard Roundtree gets the shaft.

With a meagre million dollar budget at his disposal writer/producer/director Larry Cohen produced a film that looks easily worth ten times that price, even though we don’t get a huge amount of monster action, but with such a fantastic cast, which includes a wonderful performance by Candy Clark as the long-suffering girlfriend of Moriarty’s character, and then there are those great Manhattan locations which all go towards giving this film a solid and realistic setting for its rather outlandish premise. You may have a hard time believing an ancient Aztec god is flying unseen through the skies of New York City but Moriarty’s brilliant portrayal as a three-time loser who tries to be the “Big Man” with a blackmail scheme against the powers that be is the heart of this monster flick and it has a great beat to it. The creature itself is a nice design and is wonderfully animated by special effects wizards Randall William Cook and David Allen, but the star of the picture is clearly Moriarty and he steals every scene he’s in.

 

“One of us is going to survive this movie and it ain’t going to be you.”

Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent is a delightful 80s monster movie that turned out far better than it had any right to be, it had a ridiculous premise and an even more ridiculously low budget but not only did it become a huge financial success it also achieved massive cult status over the years, which is nothing to sneeze at in this game. So if this genre mash-up of a crime drama and a monster movie has somehow escaped your notice do yourself a favour and track down this little gem, you’ll be glad you did.

 

Note: The monster itself may not be as memorable as its human co-stars but to date, this is still the only movie to star a winged Aztec god.

Hercules (1983) – Review

Superhero fans will most likely know professional bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno from his stint playing The Incredible Hulk for the CBS television series co-starring the late great Bill Bixby but when that show concluded in 1982 Ferrigno set his sights on the big screen in the hopes of achieving the superstardom of fellow bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, but exactly how does one go about attaining such a lofty goal? Well, as Arnie's big-screen debut was in the film Hercules in New York what better way to launch your own career than by taking your own shot at depicting one of history’s most legendary superheroes.

There have been many Hercules movies released over the years but the one produced by Cannon Films and Golan-Globus is by far the most entertainingly bad entries in the genre, in fact, I’d say that the 1983 Hercules exists solely for the purpose of making Disney animated Hercules feel a little better about itself for how fast and lose it ran with the mythology. The movie opens with a narrator explaining the creation of the Universe “In the beginning, before creation, there was darkness. From the primordial explosion there emerged the fire of chaos. Chaos merged with darkness and from this union were born the elements; night, day, matter and air.” Despite only one of those being actual "elements" the narrator goes on to explain how from of all this Pandora’s Jar emerged and when it broke the fragments became the planets in the solar system. Basically, even a person with the briefest knowledge of Greek mythology will have a problem with that opening narration.

 

It looks like Pandora’s Box came from Spencer’s Gift not the dawn of time.

We are then told that “The first beings that the mists of creation offered forth were not men, they were of the supremists and became gods, they claimed the moon as their home, there to deliberate and decide the ultimate fate of mankind and all that lived.” On the moon we find Zeus (Claudio Cassinelli), Athena (Delia Boccardo) and Hera (Rossana Podestà) discussing the issue of Pandora’s Jar breaking – as the Jar breaking resulted in the birth of the gods I’m not sure why this issue is just coming up now – and Zeus is concerned that “With Pandora’s Jar broken all the forces of evil are let loose” and he believes that there needs to be a balance, to which Athena suggest “If you don’t want to equalize the powers of all men then why don’t you increase those of one.” And with that irrefutable piece of logic, Zeus creates Hercules and impregnates the Queen of Thebes with his sperm of pure light.

 

Were the Greek gods time-sharing with The Inhumans?

Ten minutes in and this film will most likely have sent every Greek scholar screaming from the room but it only gets “better” from here as we then get the dastardly King Minos (William Berger) and his evil daughter Ariadne (Sybil Danning) orchestrating to overthrow the King and Queen of Thebes by stealing their magic sword and murdering them in their beds. Lucky for Greece, a chambermaid escaped with the infant prince and placed little Hercules in a small boat that drifts down the river, because if we aren’t worried about getting Greek mythology right why not throw in the story of Moses as well. Hercules (Lou Ferrigno) is raised by some kindly farmers and becomes big and strong, despite Hera’s numerous attempts to kill him, which brings up the question “Why is Hera so bent on killing Hercules?” In the myth, Hercules was the product of one of Zeus’ many infidelities so you can understand Hera not caring for the guy but in this movie he was simply a way to balance the scales and Hera is acting all evil for no apparent reason.

 

“Hera, will you please just get over yourself.”

There really isn’t much of a plot to this movie as it mainly consists of episodic adventures with Hercules encountering various antagonists and none of them making much sense. The film does try to hang the whole thing together with a quest to save the kidnapped princess Cassiopeia (Ingrid Anderson) from being sacrificed by King Minos but we don’t get much time with Hercules and Cassiopeia together – they briefly meet while he’s performing only one of the Twelve Labours of Hercules – and their “love story” is thinner than this film’s grasp on Greek mythology. We also get King Minos recruiting Daedalus (Eva Robins) to create monsters to kill Hercules, which may sound cool but when it comes to monsters the people at Cannon Films and Golan-Globus are not known for putting their money where their mouth is. In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a brilliant craftsman, he built the great labyrinth for Minos and made wings for him and his son Icarus, but in this movie, Daedalus is an avatar of chaos and has a thing for building giant robots, which Hercules then dispatches with ease.

 

“Daedalus, maybe we should try winged monkeys next.”

Hercules isn't alone on his quest to rescue Cassiopeia as in his travels he finds himself marooned on the island of the sorceress Circe (Mirella D'Angelo) who first appears to him as an ugly crone but later is revealed to be beautiful, but why she falls in love with him and aids him on his quest for Cassiopeia is never made clear. Then, when our hero needs her powers the most, they fail “You made me fall in love! And when that happens to a sorceress, she loses all her powers. It's the law of Aphrodite. I, the enchantress, have been enchanted!” It has to be quite apparent that declaring one's love to a guy who is on a quest to rescue his “one true love” could make things a bit awkward but lucky for Hercules she gets killed taking a lightning arrow meant for him, launched from one of Daedalus’s mechanical monstrosities.

 

A literal deus ex machina of love.

Stray Observations:

• We see a young Hercules gaining strength by pushing a millstone around which is a blatant lift of “The Wheel of Pain” from Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian.
• Hercules is a dick to bears. The scene with Hercules fighting a bear is probably the most notable aspect of this movie, with him throwing it into space and it becoming the constellation Ursa Major, but even more embarrassing is the fact that it used footage from William Girdler’s Grizzly and with a bear suit that was even more laughable than the one used in The Secrets of Isis.
• In this movie the mythical monster Hydra guards “The Gates of Hell” – I guess Hades gave Cerberus the day off – but this particular Hydra is of the bargain basement variety as it only has three heads. It’s also mechanical and built by Daedalus for some reason.
• We are told that Atlantis is the capital of Thera but Atlantis was actually a continent, not a city. Did the writers of this movie not even have access to Google?
• Minos is a self-proclaimed man of science, yelling such bon mots as “Science! For the sake of science!” but he still sacrifices virgins to a volcano, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, and correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t Cassiopeia the vain mother of Andromeda, the one who tried to sacrifice her daughter to the Kraken?
• Circe and Hercules cross the Rainbow Bridge to reach Hell. WTF?  With all of the Greek mythology to borrow from why did they feel it necessary to take from Norse mythology as well.

 

That they don’t encounter Heimdall is a missed opportunity.

The original script was apparently filled with violence and gratuitous sex, which is pretty much what you'd find reading the stories of Hercules, but Lou Ferrigno told Menahem Golan that the script was a "piece of shit" and threw into the garbage. Eventually, a more family/friendly version was decided on, quite against Golan's wishes, and the result was this mishmash of mythologies and bulging pectoral muscles that failed to please anyone. Sybil Danning later stated that she would've preferred to have seen another more "adult" version of Hercules and going by her body of work that was most likely the reason she signed on to the project in the first place, and what's even a greater crime is how underutilized Danning was with barely ten minutes of screen time, I have to wonder why they bothered to cast her at all. I’ll give it that Lou Ferrigno was in perfect shape to play this demi-god but if they’d gone the “R” rated route of the John Milius Conan the Barbarian we could have gotten a really interesting take on this mythical hero, instead, we were left with a goofy retread of the sword and sandal entries from the 50s and 60s and not even a good as most of those entries. That all said, Lou Ferrigno’s Hercules definitely falls into the category of “So bad it’s good” and can be most enjoyed with friends and a good quantity of alcohol.

 

Note: Hercules pulls a magic sword from a stone because if you’re going to borrow from Norse mythology you may as well take some liberties with Arthurian legends as well.

The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956) – Review

In the subgenre of “Weird West” we have been treated to some truly fun stuff ranging from Billy the Kid Versus Dracula to Cowboys and Aliens but in the late 50s a film dealing with cowboys versus dinosaurs was released and credited as being “From an idea by Willis O’Brien”  the man who created the legendary effects behind the original 1933 King Kong, and though O'Brien was to have done the special effects this did not happen and the end result was less than stellar.

It should be noted that as genre-blending goes The Beast of Hollow Mountain is a rather lopsided affair as about sixty minutes of its eighty-minute running time deals with cowboy drama and rather stingy on actual dinosaur action, and as a young boy having to wait an hour for the monster to show up was pretty gruelling, to say the least. Now, this is not to say that the “cowboy drama” found here is all that bad because as a western the plot of this film is fairly well-crafted, if a bit clichéd at times, as we have our stalwart American cowboy protagonist Jimmy Ryan (Guy Madison) who, along with his partner Felipe Sanchez (Carlos Rivas), owns a small ranch in Mexico that has become a burr in the saddle of a local rancher named Enrique Rios (Eduardo Noriega) and this man not only resents an American intruding into his domain but he is also very concerned that his fiancée Sarita (Patricia Medina) may have feelings for this hunky dude from the North.

 

Who doesn’t love a dreamy white saviour?

Enrique Rios is your typical one-dimensional villain and the bulk of the film deals with his machinations in getting Ryan to either sell his ranch to him or by driving him off it by poaching his cattle and scaring away Ryan’s ranch hands. Enrique is aided in his efforts by the local legend surrounding a supposedly “Hollow Mountain” which locals believe is haunted by a mysterious beast and that when the swamp surrounding the mountain dries up men and cattle will begin to disappear. I’ll admit, that does sound like an interesting premise to a monster movie, and the idea of regions of the world that are cut off from the civilized world that harbouring prehistoric creatures is a good one – dating as far back as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World – but where those stories were filled with fantastic locals and nail-biting action what we have here with is a typical oater that just so happens to have a dinosaur show up for the last act.

 

“Here’s Johnny!”

Sure, we do get the occasional animalistic noises and large shadow thrown across an unsuspecting victim, in this case a poor hapless Mexican widower, all while Jimmy and his partner Felipe search for their lost cattle, which Enrique’s men had apparently driven into the swamp to force the American to leave town, but a few spooky moments does not equal good a dinosaur movie and when the titular beast finally shows up it’s almost as if it had wandered in from a different movie. Another problem is that the love interest between Jimmy and Sarita isn’t all that interesting and the film wraps it up so quickly that it doesn’t even properly resolve things and the last we see of Enrique is him injured and inside a cave but whether he dies or lives is left a mystery.  When the credits roll we just assume that Sarita will fall into the arms of Jimmy and I'd barely call that a happy ending. As to the dinosaur action itself, well, the script may have been based on an idea by Willis O’Brien but for unknown reasons, he was not and thus this film’s special effects fell to uncredited stop-motion animator Edward Nassour, who wasn't quite up to the task of bringing the Allosaurus to life.

 

Note: Some guy wearing dino-booties and stomping around was less than impressive.

When our heroes do clash with the dinosaur, after the filmmakers made us wait an hour, it is a fairly fun encounter with the creature's lashing tongue and snarling grimace but the overall design of the Allosaurus is fairly generic and lacks much in the way of personality, which is something stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen was renowned for infusing into his creations, of course, the unproduced Willis O’Brien script The Valley of the Mists, which was the basis of this movie, would eventually be realized by Harryhausen for his film The Valley of Gwangi, a film that properly capitalized on the idea of cowboys versus dinosaurs. Overall, The Beast of Hollow Mountain makes a nice footnote in the genre and though it may lack a little in the dino-action department the anamorphic Cinemascope process did provide some nice visuals and when the Allosaurus does make an appearance it is adequate and only really pales when compared to the likes Gwangi.

 

“Damn you, Ray Harryhausen, I'll get you and your little dog too!”

The Last Dinosaur (1977) – Review

When one thinks of Rankin/Bass Productions images of rampaging dinosaurs doesn't readily leap to mind as that studio was mostly known for putting out such animated holiday classics as Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer and Santa Clause is Comin’ to Town, yet in 1967 they stepped out of their comfort zone and teamed up with Toho Productions, the studio behind the Godzilla franchises, to produce a live-action adventure film that would pit King Kong against a robot Kong, in a film brilliantly titled King Kong Escapes, but for their second attempt at the world of live-action they would partner themselves with Tsuburaya Productions, a studio well known for the Ultra Series, to make something called The Last Dinosaur.

The plot of The Last Dinosaur deals with a wealthy big-game hunter and millionaire industrialist Maston Thrust (Richard Boone) whose company discovered a valley super-heated by a volcano upon the polar ice cap and while they were drilling for oil in their high-tech manned laser drill called the "Polar Borer" they discovered a world beneath the ice which, of course, contained prehistoric life. Maston holds a press conference to announce a scientific expedition to study the dinosaurs of this lost world and promises his friend Dr. Kawamoto (Tetsu Nakamura) that this will all be about the study of this strange forgotten land and not the hunting of these creatures and that he will not harm the T-Rex despite it having already eaten four members of a previous expedition. Joining him along with Dr. Kawamoto on this excursion is geologist Chuck Wade (Steven Keats), who was the sole survivor of that last expedition, a Maasai tracker named Bunta (Luther Rackley) and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Frankie Banks (Joan Van Ark), whose purpose in this movie is to scream hysterically and be the third part of a love triangle.

 

My money is on the dorky guy with the binoculars.

Almost immediately upon arriving in this prehistoric paradise good ole Maston starts blasting away with his rifle at a Tyrannosaurus Rex, thus putting into question his earlier stated altruistic motivations for this trip, and the conflict this causes between Maston, Wade and Frankie is pretty much the central theme of this movie and the random dinosaur attacks are but meagre distractions to this movie’s Captain Ahab obsession. The T-Rex later destroys their camp, killing poor Dr. Kawamoto in the process and making off with the “Polar-Borer” – we must assume a T-Rex is part magpie because according to Wade he did this because it was shiny – and without a way home our “heroes” are trapped in this world of prehistoric terrors. Complicating things even further is that not only do they have to dodge the odd dinosaur attack but this valley is also inhabitant by cavemen.

 

Note: If this had been a proper Rankin/Bass production this would be the cavemen.

The rest of the movie deals with the several months they spend living “As primitive as can be” with Maston being a sexist dick, Wade being a useless twit, Bunta counting down the minutes before he is killed and Frankie befriending a cavewoman (Masumi Sekiya) who she quickly turns into a ladies’ maid, because why not, she is a girl after all. Maston continues having a hard-on for the T-Rex and forces the group to help him build a medieval catapult – don’t ask me how he knows how to build one – and while pissing and moaning about all this work Wade stumbles across that not as destroyed as the believed it to be “Polar-Borer” and their one shot at getting home. Needless to say, Maston will want to remain and fight the T-Rex, in what will be a hilariously ineffective battle, and Wade and Frankie will make their escape from this world of terror.

 

“To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee.”

Stray Observations:

• A manned drilling machine discovering a land full of dinosaurs clearly borrows elements from the Edgar Rice Burroughs story At the Earth’s Core and it being located up in the Arctic could be considered a lift from another Burroughs’ story The Land that Time Forgot.
• Frankie Banks is supposed to be this strong liberated woman but she still has to sleep with Maston to get the job, which is certainly sending a mixed message about her character.
• All the team members of the Polar-Borer dress in matching jumpsuits except Maston, who continues to wear the cliché khaki hunting outfit as if he were an escaped mental patient who thinks he’s Alan Quatermain.
• They set up camp at the edge of the lake which is something no professional hunter would do as this is where animals tend to come down to drink.
• According to Wade, the cavemen have started sharpening their spears because they’ve seen how effective ours are, sure, that makes sense, for the thousands and thousands of years these cavemen have been living here and yet they never developed a proper spear.
• The T-Rex is attacked by a triceratops that had buried itself inside a cliff face, and this begs the question “Were these creatures part ninja and this was a standard dinosaur attack strategy?”
• I’m not sure what's the point of bringing a Maasai tracker to a prehistoric world as not only would he be unfamiliar with the terrain but even I could track a creature that weighs eight tons.

 

“Hey Bwana, I think I found a dinosaur!”

The most disappointing aspect of The Last Dinosaur is that a company known for its stop-motion animation would resort to using the “man in suit” method – who wouldn’t want to see the people behind Santa Clause is Comin’ to Town's Heat Miser bringing us a proper dinosaur  "I'm Mister T-Rex, I'm Mister 100 Million Years BC" – but to be fair the dinosaur suits in this movie are a step above such offerings as those found in films like The Land Unknown but as good as a suit can look it will almost always pale in comparison to what you get from good ole stop-motion animation provided by the likes of Ray Harryhausen. Sure, having a dude in a dinosaur get-up is a lot cheaper than going the stop-motion route, and its’ certainly better than gluing fins on some poor hapless iguana, but if your film is about dinosaurs that’s the one area you shouldn’t skimp out on.

 

This is not quite the battle of titans we were hoping for.

Overall, this was a somewhat disappointing entry in the genre and it's not because of the use of dudes in dino costumes but more for the fact that none of the human characters are all that likable. Joan Van Ark’s photo-journalist puts the woman’s movement back a decade or two while Richard Boone, and his poor man’s Ahab, was hilariously bad in every way and the only character I sympathized with was Masumi Sekiya’s cavewoman and the film ended with her going off with Richard Boone, a fate worse than death. The only real positive thing I can say about this entry is that the title song "He's the Last Dinosaur" was referring to Richard Boone’s sexist big-game hunter and not the prehistoric beasts, which pretty much hits the nail on the head.

Never Say Never Again (1983) – Review

Twelve years after departing the franchise, for the second time, Sean Connery returned to go head-to-head with the official Eon Production's Bond film, Octopussy, in what was is considered a non-canon remake of Connery’s 1965 Bond outing Thunderball – due to a successful lawsuit by producer Kevin McClory which allowed him to maintain the movie rights to that one particular Ian Fleming novel – and with two ageing Bonds duking it out at the box office there was only one question in audiences at the time “Which Bond would come out on top?”

The 1965 adaptation of Thunderball was one of the more faithful translations of an Ian Fleming novel, that the story was originally written as a screenplay makes this a little less surprising, and as producer Kevin McClory was only allowed to use the novel as a basis for this remake, without any of the other Bond accoutrements, this one is also fairly faithful to source material as well but with some nice updating and a few changes to keep things a little fresh. We still have SPECTRE’s plot to hijack two atomic bombs to extort billions of dollars from NATO governments but no longer is an agent surgically altered to look like an air force pilot, instead, we get a United States Air Force pilot named Jack Petachi (Gavan O'Herlihy) who is a heroin addict and is seduced by SPECTRE agent number 12 Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera) and has one of his eyes made to match that of the retinal pattern of the US President, which he then uses to circumvent the security measures and have dummying warheads replaced with the real thing.  I guess that's cheaper than hiring a dude to undergo plastic surgery but was a heroin addict the ideal choice?

 

"Sorry, with current budget cuts this is the best we could do."

The story still hinges on James Bond (Sean Connery) stumbling across the villainous plot while staying at a health clinic, now because of his age, not simply recuperating from a previous injury, as now it’s due to his failure of a routine training exercise and ‘M’s (Edward Fox) disdain for the entire ‘00’ branch of MI6. When the theft of the nukes happens it’s no longer a case of Bond recognizing a Petachi's sister Domino (Kim Basinger) from a photo that sends him to the Bahamas but a matchbook cover that sported the logo of Maximillian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a billionaire businessman and SPECTRE agent number 1. This plot element is a little sad as I thought they'd stopped using the dropped matchbook cover clue during the Colombo era on television, and the reason Domino is dating Largo is never made clear, other than possibly providing more leverage in controlling her brother, but as she was his mistress in the novel we can’t fault the film too much for that, basically, in all versions of the character she serves the plot as more of a prize than an actual personality.

 

“For my next trick, I’ll attempt to make this character relevant to the plot.”

As a spy adventure Never Say Never Again is hampered by the ridiculousness of the plot but director Irvin Kershner tried to overcome such failings by filling the cast with some truly great actors. Klaus Maria Brandauer is simply fantastic as the charismatically evil Maximillian Largo and he deliciously devours every scene he is in, but not to be outdone we get Barbara Carrera as the over-enthusiastic Fatima Bush, in a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination, and though her ability to kill Bond can be called into question her zest for the part is certainly on par with Luciana Paluzzi performance as SPECTRE agent Fiona Volpe, who played the equivalent part in the original Thunderball. This particular Bond outing also has some nice comic touches and the inclusion of Rowan Atkinson as a bumbling Foreign Office representative provides some moments of comedy gold as he works brilliantly off Connery’s straight man bit.

 

Mister Bean meeting Bond is more than we could have hoped for.

Stray Observations:

• If SPECTRE was to use a health clinic to keep their agent sequestered while his eye is undergoing treatment you’d think they’d keep an eye on the registry to see if a certain MI6 agent was staying there as well. It’s not like Bond ever goes anywhere without announcing who he is first.
• One of the ways SPECTRE controls Jack Petachi is through his heroin addiction but wouldn’t that particular affliction be rather hard for an American Air Force officer to hide?
• The brutal running battle throughout the health clinic between Sean Connery and Pat Roach is one of the best fight sequences in the entire franchise.
• Many actors have played CIA agent Felix Leiter but it’s here, with actor Bernie Casey, that we get our first African American version.
• Fatima Blush tosses a boa constrictor into Jack Petachi’s car to make him crash but then she retrieves the snake and places an explosive inside the wreck to blow it up, the question is “Why use a snake at all, why not just toss the explosive into his car in the first place?”
• To kill James Bond we get this elaborate scheme with Fatima inviting Bond scuba diving and her placing a device on Bond’s scuba tank that attracts modified sharks. I guess shooting him in the face and dumping his body overboard wasn’t a SPECTRE-approved method of killing.
• Fatima bungles her second attempt at killing Bond by placing a bomb under his bed but then doesn’t verify that he’s actually in bed when she detonates it. At what point does SPECTRE demand an assassin to requalify their services?

 

“I could just shoot you in the face but that is not the SPECTRE way.”

Overall, Never Say Never Again was a nice return to form for James Bond and Sean Connery was actually in better shape here at the age of 52 than he was twelve years ago in Diamonds Are Forever. His being physically fit aside we also find a Sean Connery who is obviously having more fun with the role this time out, having grown tired of it during his last few years playing the part, and his charm and likability in the role are at their height here and he even manages to pull off the actions sequences with a good amount of aplomb. On the other hand, I wasn’t too keen on Edward Fox as the replacement for Bernard Lee as ‘M’ as the whole “bureaucratic shtick” seemed kind of lazy and the idea of MI6 shutting down the “00” section is a bit ludicrous, but what was a vast improvement here over Thunderball is where that film had a full quarter of its running time taking place underwater, which was the death the film’s pacing, while in Never Say Never Again even though we do get some underwater moments they are kept to a bare minimum. Why Domino shows up with the United States Navy for the big underwater finale, just so that she can be the one to speargun Largo, is the true mystery here.

 

"Look, I killed the bastard in the original, so cut me some slack."

Released at the same time as Eon Production’s thirteenth Bond film Octopussy, starring Roger Moore who is actually three years older than Connery, Never Say Never was able to gross the tidy sum of $160 million but Octopussy still managed to win out in the box office with $187.5 million take.  That all said, I for one think Never Say Never Again was a nice return to form, a film that relied less on campy humour and outlandish set pieces and though not considered a canon Bond film it is still a worthy addition to the brand.

 

Note: That Bond and Largo duel via a video game is all the evidence you need that this film was made in the 80s.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012) – Review

With the commercial success of the Brendan Fraser led adventure comedy Journey to the Center of the Earth the people over at New Line Cinema obviously wanted a sequel but as Jules Verne’s original novel didn’t have a sequel they decided to mine for ideas from other stories, taking elements from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels and Jules Verne's own Mysterious Island – which was actually a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – but what they didn’t land for the return journey was star Brendan Fraser.

Taking place four years after the previous adventure we find seventeen-year-old Sean Anderson (Josh Hutcherson) living in Dayton, Ohio with his mom (Kristin Davis) and his stepdad Hank (Dwayne Johnson), he’s not a happy camper and spends all his time obsessing over Jules Verne and trying to decode a radio signal that he suspects was sent by his long-missing grandfather, Alexander Anderson (Michael Caine). With help from Hank, they figure out that code by deducing that it uses Jules Verne characters and maps from three different books, Treasure Island, Gulliver's Travels and Verne's own Mysterious Island and by combining these three maps into one single large map it reveals the co-ordinates an uncharted island.

 

It’s at this point they should have called Dora the Explorer for help.

But with the Dora the Explorer unavailable Sean and Hank fly to Palau in the hopes of chartering a boat and proving whether or not this mysterious island actually exists, unfortunately, the area they want to check out is considered by most to be too dangerous to visit and is referred by the locals as a “graveyard of ships” and thus our heroes are forced to resort to hiring a broken down helicopter operated by tourism guide Gabato (Luis Guzmán) and his daughter Kailani (Vanessa Hudgens). No sooner do they arrive at the coordinates than they find themselves trapped in a cyclone, which batters the helicopter and sends them down into the sea. Lucky for them they all wash ashore on the Mysterious Island and they immediately proceed to search for Sean’s grandfather in the hopes that his radio can call for help.

 

“Hello, I’m Oscar-winning actor Michael Caine, and I’ll be slumming it with you today,”

To say that the plot of Journey 2: The Mysterious Island is ridiculous would be giving the writers of this thing too much credit as the ninety-four-minute running consists of nothing more than a collection of nonsensical references to classic literature without any concern of context or logic. When they encounter a herd of tiny elephants Hank asks “Sean, what does Verne say about this?” which Sean replies, “It’s the first law of island biogeography. Small animals become large and large animals become small, Lilliputian. Swift alluded to this in Gulliver’s Travels” which, of course, is utter nonsense as Jonathan Swift had stated no such thing in his book and spouting off bullshit science and blaming it on a literary giant is all kinds of wrong. It’s one thing to base your movie on the works of various authors but to blatantly invent bullshit science like this, which would have pissed off someone like Verne, is simply lazy and wrong.

 

Note: I would like to think them being chased by a giant lizard is an homage to the 1959 adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth which used lizards to play the part of dinosaurs.

After a night’s rest, Alexander takes them to the ruins of Atlantis and states that this is “The same Atlantis Verne wrote about down to the last detail” which the screenwriters of this movie clearly never read because in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea the lost continent of Atlantis was in the bloody Atlantic Ocean, hence its name, and not the South Pacific. Now, he also states that this Mysterious Island suffers from a 140-year cycle of sinking beneath the sea, which is why it was underwater when Verne discovered it, but if that were the case he wouldn’t have also written about it as an island as it would have simply been the seabed at the time. Thus we have another example of the writers trying to cram several ideas from different books into one story without bothering to see if they mesh at all. The rest of the movie deals with their journey to find Captain Nemo’s submarine, as the Nautilus would be the only safe way off the island when they realize they’ve only got days before it sinks beneath the waves. Cue giant spiders, giant ants and “The Flight of the Bumblebee” with our heroes riding giant bees as if the film suddenly turned into Honey I Shrunk the Kids.

 

Question: How exactly does one steer a bee?

Stray Observations:

• The first movie dealt with Sean’s missing father and in this sequel, we have Sean’s missing grandfather, clearly, the common denominator here is Sean.
• A helicopter is not the ideal vehicle to search for an island that may or may not exist as the fuel capacity of said aircraft is rather limited.
• The island is hidden by a permanent hurricane, something that would attract every meteorologist in the world to investigate.
• Our heroes get cornered by a giant lizard right where Sean’s grandfather had set multiple swinging log devices. That’s not luck that is some bullshit levels of screenwriting laziness.
• They come across something called the Dakkar Grotto and Sean states “The resting place of Captain Nemo. Legend has it his crew buried him there.” And what legend is that? In Verne’s book, we are told that the Nautilus sailed the oceans of the world until all its crew except Nemo had died, it was then that Nemo retired to the island, alone, and at the end of the book, the Nautilus was scuttled to serve as Captain Nemo's tomb.
• Gold flakes rain down on our heroes, caused by the nearby erupting volcano, which apparently contains massive gold deposits, and thus Sean states “That must be the treasure that Robert Louis Stevenson was talking about in Treasure Island.” Once again I ask, what the fuck book was he reading? Stevenson was writing about pirate treasure, for Christ’s sake, not gold spewing volcanoes.
• I’m fine with taking liberties with the look of Captain Nemo’s submarine but the Nautilus not only looks nothing like Verne version but the writers outfitted it with bloody torpedoes. Seriously, did anyone involve with this project even open a book? For one, the Nautilus rammed enemy ships it did not blow them up.

 

This looks more like an underwater craft that Jar Jar Binks would pilot.

I’m all four fun rip-roaring adventure films but director Brad Peyton and screenwriters Brian and Mark Gunn clearly had no respect for the source material, with characters at multiple times supposedly quoting information from a book when in actual fact they are just pulling stuff out of their collective assess. Any fan of Jules Verne watching this movie would be endangered of losing their eyesight with the number of times the script will cause you to roll your eyes in disbelief, and even if you set aside the film’s bastardization of the source material you're still dealing with some fairly unlikable people on this particular adventure. Sean in this movie is a petulant jerk and all the “teenage angst” in the world cannot excuse his behaviour here, then we have Dwayne Johnson, who is one of the most charismatic people in the world, yet he and Michael Caine’s character get into a pissing match the second they meet for no possible reason. Then we have the father/daughter team consisting of Luis Guzmán and Vanessa Hudgens who are stuck in this thing simply to provide some bad comic relief and a possible love interest for Sean.

 

“Dad, can we go out on our own adventure and leave these asshats behind?”

Overall, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island is another big special effects extravaganza that cashed in on the 3D craze of the time and was thus more a theme park ride than an actual movie and it should be noted that Dwayne Johnson would later appear in a much better jungle adventure film in, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and as that was a fantasy film based on being trapped inside a video game you can get away with bizarre biology, insane geology and physics that makes little to no sense, unlike this film which is supposed to be taking place in the real world but has people riding giant bees, surprisingly intact lost cities and submarines that are fully functional despite being mothballed for over a hundred years. Now, visually speaking this movie does showcase some amazing talent and if the creation of this world had been in service of a better script, one not made as if the screenwriters were playing Boggle with the works of Jules Verne and others, this could have been a really great movie instead of just a silly adventure tale with no real substance.

 

Note: If this island suffers from something called a “tectonic recurrence” and sinks beneath the sea every 140 years I doubt the ruins of Atlantis would have been this well preserved, they’d most likely be just a collection of loose rubble by now.

Howling: Reborn (2011) – Review

This eighth entry in the Howling franchise was considered a reboot by Anchor Bay Entertainment but as this particular horror series had little to no continuity between entries I’m not sure what they thought they were actually trying to reboot, then again, after the previous producer did his best to run the franchise off a cliff and into a tarpit one can’t blame the new owners for hoping a “fresh” start could reinvigorate the brand.

In this attempted reboot the new producers decide to take a page out of Twilight by focusing the story on teenagers and the problems inherent in interspecies dating, something they still don't teach in High School Sex Education classes. We are introduced to high school student Will Kidman (Landon Liboiron) who through his narration we learn that while carrying him to term his mother was attacked and apparently killed by “something” – no prizes for guessing it was a werewolf – and though her body disappeared little baby Will was found alive and well at the scene of what looked to be apparent impromptu cesarean, flash forward eighteen years and we find angst-ridden Will about to graduate. Now, this film isn’t going to focus a lot on werewolf attacks but more on whether or not Will is going find the courage to ask resident school hottie Eliana Wynter (Lindsey Shaw) out on a date and if so how will he be able to fend off her current boyfriend, who is totally not Flash Thompson but might as well be.

 

If only a radioactive werewolf had bitten him.

I’m not sure if the filmmakers were more interested in making a superhero movie rather than a werewolf film as the teen-drama aspect is right out of Peter Parker territory and when Will starts getting his “werewolf powers” he finds that he no longer needs to wear his glasses and can beat up the resident Flash Thompson with his newfound super-strength, so yeah, Howling: Reborn has more in common with Spider-Man than it does to the Howling franchise. This is not to say that's necessarily a bad thing but the blend of teen-angst superhero shtick with that of werewolf genre does lead to this particular movie looking more like a WB teen-drama than that of a straight-up horror film and the fact that Landon Liboiron would later player a werewolf on the Netflix series Hemlock Grove kind of proves where this take on the subject matter really belonged. What does work really well here is the character of Eliana Wynter and the excellent performance by Lyndsay Shaw in portraying this sweet if conflicted character and she pretty much steals the movie away from the film’s supposed lead.

 

“Will, I’d say you were great but that’d make me a Pretty Little Liar.”

Stray Observations:

• Why exactly does this school have security measures that would be more in keeping with a maximum-security prison for supervillains?
• The school bully, and current boyfriend of Eliana, warns Will that she doesn’t “Date outside her species” which I'll admit is a clever way to tip us off that one of them is actually a different species.
• Eliana flips through Will’s sketchbook to find that all the drawings within its pages are of her, which in a normal world would freak any girl out because having an apparent stalker is rarely a good thing, but as this is a Twilight rip-off it's considered romantic
• It’s so lucky that Will’s best friend is an expert on lycanthropy and not just stuff he picked up from the movies as he also seems to know the rules about this film’s particular arcana for werewolves.
• Will goes right to the “attempt suicide” test to see if he’s a werewolf and I’m pretty sure I’d try a few more things before jumping straight to the one that could end in my death.
• A werewolf is killed by being stabbed by a Second Place Trophy and I must say I’m impressed that this school uses actual silver in their cheap ass-looking trophies.
• Will broadcasts his werewolf transformation live to the world which could be considered a nice nod to how Joe Dante’s original movie ended.
• In a matter of minutes Will is able to cobble together two fully functional flamethrowers from stuff found in a high school science lab.

 

MacGyver has nothing on this kid.

Where the film fails is in the delivery of cool werewolf action, and sure, this film is a step up from some of this franchise’s earlier attempts but that is a really low bar to pass so we really can’t offer the filmmakers points for that. When Will’s mom (Ivana Milicevic) shows up on graduation day, not actually having been killed during that opening prologue but turned into an immortal werewolf instead, and we learn that Will himself is a werewolf because while he was being clawed out of his mom’s womb he was scratched and thus “gifted” with lycanthropy. When we eventually have Will deciding not to join in his mom’s werewolf world domination plans we get a quick collection of werewolf fights that rely heavily on shaky-cam, extreme close-ups and dark settings to hide the fact that the werewolf suits provided aren’t quite up to par.  I didn't expect to see Underworld levels of werewolf action but I did hope to be able to see what was actually going on.

 

"Who let these dogs out? Who, who, who, who, who?"

I’ll give it that the writers had some “interesting” ideas for this particular brand of werewolves but, sadly, they clearly hand neither the time nor the budget to properly pull it off and the script, instead, relied on awkward exposition dumps via lazy narration and having Will’s best friend Sachin (Jesse Rath) spelling out how to fight this particular strain of werewolves with no real basis as to how he knows this shit. Sure, it implies that Sachin is a huge horror film geek but this film tosses in this the idea that “Only a werewolf can kill and alpha werewolf” and I’ve seen a lot of werewolf movies and I’ve never heard of that part of the lore so where did Sachin pick up that vital tidbit? Maybe he confused this with “Only a ninja can kill a ninja” from Ninja III: The Domination. The reveal of Will’s mother to be a werewolf and bent on world domination could have been a clever plot twist but this film is all about teen drama so we have no time to flesh out her backstory, which I’m betting would be more interesting than this one, and thus she is just cartoonishly evil and that’s about it.

 

“Hey, who needs motivations when you’re as hot as I am?”

It’s clear the filmmakers were hoping this would spawn some sequels and snag some of that lucrative Twilight saga money but where those films had an extremely popular fan base from the books to call upon Howling: Reborn had no loyal followers as the previous entries in this franchise had been pretty much been forgotten by most of the movie-going public, the Joe Dante film aside, but the fans of the original film The Howling would not be the type of people interested in seeing a teen werewolf romance movie, of course, this idea was proven to be quite workable as a television series as we got a Teen Wolf series that lasted six seasons. Was Howling: Reborn a case of simply being a little ahead of its time or more likely a swing and miss on rebooting The Howling franchise as a teen drama? Overall, I’d say this film felt more like a pilot for a television series than it did a movie so maybe this did inspire the creators of the Teen Wolf series, sadly, that doesn’t stop this movie from being as forgettable as most of the entries in this franchise have been.

 

Note: There are still rumours of director Andy Muschietti trying to get a remake produced for Netflix but I wouldn’t hold your breath.