The Warlord of Mars: Edgar Rice Burroughs – Book Review

To paraphrase Mario Bros “Thank you John Carter! But our Princess is in another castle!” That line pretty much sums up the plot for this final installment in the opening trilogy of the Barsoom series. Our hero runs from one pole of Mars to the next trying to recover his stolen princess, all while carving a path of death and destruction before him, but with his princess constantly just out of his reach. First published in All-Story Magazine as a four-part serial between December 1913 and March 1914 The Warlord of Mars does wrap everything up rather nicely, it just seemed to take forever to get there.

When we had last left John Carter he had overthrown Black Pirates of Barsoom (aka The First Born), who live beneath the Omean Sea, placed his new friend Xodar to the throne as the new Jeddak of the Black Martians, but after exposing their goddess Issus as the vile pretender she was you’d think it would all be smooth sailing, you’d of course be wrong. Prior to Carter tossing Issus to her people, where she was to be torn asunder by the angry mob, she had ordered Dejah Thoris, Thuvia of Ptarth, and the Thern princess Phaidor to be locked in the Temple of the Sun, a room that rotates so slowly that the entrance is only accessible once a year. Worse is the fact that just as the door rotated away John Carter saw the jealous Phaidor lunge at Dejah Thoris with a dagger. Would John Carter have to wait a whole year to find out if his beloved was alive or dead?

While waiting for the door to become accessible again the throne of Helium is offered to Carter, he refuses it because the throne belongs to Tardos Mors, who along with his son Mors Kajak (father of Dejah Thoris) went missing while looking for Carthoris, who if you remember went missing while looking for his mother Dejah Thoris. I’m not saying the powers that be who rule Helium are irresponsible idiots, but they do spent much of their time getting lost or kidnapped. So John Carter sits his son on the throne as temporary Jeddak until his great grandfather can be found, he then returns to Kamtol, the capital city of the First Born, to await the day that will release his wife from the Temple of the Sun. While kicking back and waiting he spots suspicious activity from a First Born named Thurid, the man leaves the city in the middle of the night, not something any honest sane person would do, and because this a man that Carter had previously disgraced he decides to follow him.  After a long trek through underground passageways he discovers the man is meeting Matai Shang, the Holy Thern whose religion Carter had exposed as well. Carter overhears Thurid explain to Matai Shang that there is a secret entrance into the Temple of the Sun, and that they can rescue Princess Phaidor, who is Matai Shang’s daughter, and also get their hands on Dejah Thoris, their enemy’s one true love.

Thus begins a long series of events that will constantly put Dejah Thoris just out of John Carter’s reach. The minute our hero thinks he will be reunited with his beloved princess defeat will be snatched from the jaws of victory, over and over again. Cater and his ever faithful hound Woola will track them into Matai Shang’s temple, which will quickly be revealed to be a trap, they will escape and Carter will perform several acts of daring do, but alas he will always be delayed enough to let the villains escape with his bride.

Matai Shang, Thurid and Phaidor will then escape with Dejah Thoris and Thuvia as their prisoners, with John Cater again hot on their heels in a stolen flyer, which will then get shot down into the jungles of the equatorial Land of Kaol. The Jeddak of this land is one Kulan Tith who still follows the old religion propagated by the Therns, but when Matai Shang seeks asylum here he keeps the fact that he has in possession two stolen princesses, and that they are being pursued by a man who has killed thousands for far less valid reasons then stealing his wife. When John Carter arrives, after disguising himself as a blonde Thern, he saves a group of visiting dignitaries from an ambush (saving random people that will turn out to monumentally helpful is kind of his thing), but John Carter has a bit of trouble understanding how disguises work. When Carter is presented to Kulan Tith, and his heroic deeds are described, it doesn’t take Thurid or Matai Shang long to figure out that a Thern who can leap hundreds of yards through the air to lop the heads off his enemies is probably not a Thern. Twice in this book he has a disguise pierced by his trademarked skills that are known across the planet.

So Carter is unmasked but before his death sentence for heresy can be carried out Thuvan Dihn of Ptarth, who is Thuvia's father and was leading the group that Carter saved, stands up for Carter because he had learned of this Earth man’s heroic deed in saving his daughter’s life. When Carter informs him that Matai Shang is holding both Dejah Thoris and Thuvia prisoner Thuvan Dihn demands there release. Matai Shang of course denies the charges, but Kulan Tith promises their release if it is true. Because it is late Matai Shang does not want to wake up his daughter so he promises to hand over the girls in the morning. Everyone agrees to this. WTF? Why would Cater agree to wait one single second more to free his wife from the clutches of a mortal enemy? Well if he demanded her immediate release the book would be over, and that pretty much sums up the weakness of this novel. The drama surrounding this action packed adventure is contrived beyond belief.

And come morning it is of course discovered that Matai Shang and Thurid had snuck away with the girls in the middle of the night. Gullible thy name is John Carter. We are then treated to Carter and Thuvan Dihn racing off in pursuit where they will eventually cross the icy lands of the north and into the realms of the Yellow Martians, a race that was once a dominant species on the planet but who were chased into the icy wilds by the Green Martians. The Yellow Martians eventually reached the Carrion Caves located in the walls of an icy mountain range, defeated the Green Martians and left the millions of rotting corpses in the cave entrance to what would be their new home. These yellow skinned and black bearded residents of realm of Okar live in hothouse cities that are protected by invaders by a massive pillar that works as a giant magnet that draws any ship within reach to its doom. After a ship has been smashed against this massive device the survivors are quickly enslaved.

Note: John Carter continues to fail at understanding how disguises work as at one point while made up with yellow make-up and a fake beard he spots Dejah Thoris in a garden below where he is locked up. He makes the sign of love to her and his heart is crushed when she snubs him. It takes him forever to realize she turned her back on him because to her it looked like just another lecherous Yellow Martian hitting on her. John Carter may be the greatest warrior on two worlds but he’s not always the brightest.

Will John Cater and Thuvan Dihn finally be able to rescue Dejah Thoris and the beautiful maiden Thuvia? And what of Tardos Mors and Mors Kajak who have been missing for almost two full books now? Can our heroes survive the slavering jaws of the Martian Apts, the six limbed beasts that prowl the arctic wastes? Where is ever faithful Woola and what of Tars Tarkas and Cathoris? Can they launch a rescue in time, and if they do will the Helium fleet be dashed pieces by the giant magnet? All these question and more are answered in the action packed pages of The Warlord of Mars.

Note: As the book is written in first person one may find John Carter’s constant descriptions of his own amazing fighting skills to be a bit immodest, but there is one passage that kind of explains his attitude, “If sometimes I take too great pride in my fighting ability, it must be remembered that fighting is my vocation. If your vocation be shoeing horses, or painting pictures, and you can do one or the other better than your fellows, than you are a fool if you are not proud of your ability. And so I am very proud that on two planets no greater fighter has ever lived than John Carter, Prince of Helium.”  Who can argue with that?


Though this book does adequately close the trilogy the repetitive nature of the narrative is a bit tiring, and all the awesome action in the world can’t hide the fact that the basic story boils down to, “Women, what a headache, am I right fellas?” Dejah Thoris is depicted as a woman with spirit, and her love for John Carter is beyond question, but mostly it’s her unparalleled beauty that is her most dominant characteristic in these books as it’s the cause of her constant kidnapping, and the only reason she isn’t constantly being sexually assaulted by her captors every minute of the day is because they’re all too busy fighting amongst themselves about who gets her. That all said there is still a lot of fun to be had with this book, John Carter is still the charismatic action here we’ve grown to love, it’s just that the previous book was so damn good almost anything was bound to be a let done, and sadly this book is definitely that.

Bad Moon (1996) – Review

As a monster the werewolf is never going to win over its more glamorous cousin the vampire, in popularity and sheer volume the vampire movie has the werewolf beat fangs down, but I will always have a soft spot for the werewolf, you’ll never see them sparkling or brooding over schoolgirls.  As a result I’m always a bit thrilled when I’m able to catch a werewolf movie I’ve never seen before, but unfortunately most of the ones I’ve not seen are also not very good, case in point Bad Moon by director Eric Red.

Bad Moon is based on the book Thor by Wayne Smith, but the movie really has little to do with the source material.  I can understand not going with the book’s original title, the dog is named Thor, as it could confuse people into thinking the film is about either a Norse god or a Marvel superhero, but aside from it being about a visiting uncle who turns out to be a werewolf there isn’t much else in common with the book. The biggest difference is that the book is told from the point of view of the dog and unless the filmmakers were to go with goofy ass narration from the dog this probably wouldn't have worked, but sadly ditching that premise also removes what made the book unique and so good. In the book Thor considers himself a member of the family pack, with the human mom and dad being the alphas while the two children are below him in the pecking order, and when Thor senses the evil within a visiting uncle he is confused as to how to protect his pack from this strange new threat. Aside from Thor being a German Sheppard, and a werewolf/uncle visiting his family, there isn't much from the book that makes it to the screen. For one thing the family dynamic is gone as now it’s just a single mom and her son in danger, and the film seems confused as to whether we should be sympathetic to the creepy uncle turned werewolf or if were are supposed to want to shoot him in the face for being an evil bastard.

 

The movie does lean towards the “shoot him in the face” angle.

We are first introduced to the werewolf as we see photo-journalists Ted Harrison (Michael Paré) and his girlfriend Marjorie (Johanna Marlowe) making camp in the wilds of Nepal, the two head for their tent for a somewhat passionate lovemaking session, ignoring the Nepalese guides who can awkwardly hear everything, but then again sound must work differently in Nepal because when a werewolf attacks and kills one of the guides the two American idiots in the tent hear nothing. Sure having sex kind of focuses your attention but the blood curdling screams outside your tent should at least register a little, but eventually Ted notices a horrific shadow on the side of the tent and realizes the danger their in. This is a little too late as the werewolf then shreds the tent open and proceeds to then shred Marjorie as well.

 

Worst case of Coitus Interruptus ever.

Ted is savagely clawed by the werewolf (he’s never bitten so this version of lycanthropy diverges wildly from popular mythology even though later he claims that it’s a bite that causes the change), but he's able to reach his shotgun and he blows the werewolf’s head clean off. Like in An American Werewolf in London silver is not required kill a werewolf, but then the film starts getting dodgy with the full moon rules. Later in the film visiting Uncle Ted is sitting on the couch with his nephew Brett (Mason Gamble) as they watch the 1935 classic Werewolf of London, Ted laughs at the idea of a full moon being needed to trigger the transformation stating that, “Maybe there’s different kinds of werewolves but it’s my experience any moon will do the trick.” If we let slide the whole “my experience” bit, a thing that the mom (Mariel Hemingway) doesn’t catch as a red flag that her brother may be a tad nuts, this film constantly shows us that it’s a full moon, in fact this world apparently has full moons that last for days and days, so what the hell is he talking about?

 

“Sure I’m killing you during a full moon, but I'm doing it ironically.”

Note: The film Werewolf of London doesn't even have a werewolf that is triggered by the full moon, which makes Ted's ridiculing of this trope even dumber.

It’s fun when a film can play with the tropes of a genre, and making up your own rules to popular monster mythology is more than welcome, but you at least have to remain consistent with those rules. We see Ted running off into the woods at dusk to chain himself to a tree, but because he was delayed by having a starring contest with the dog he is too late, and he transforms into the werewolf before properly securing himself. Yet at another time we see Ted heading into the woods when the sun has pretty much already set, which means he should already be sprouting hair and trying to eat his sister.

Inconsistent lycanthropy isn’t the only magical thing in this movie, there's also Ted’s incredible teleporting trailer. Brett and his mom drive out to Timberline Lake to visit Ted at his trailer, where Brett finds a book on werewolves that looks as if it was borrowed from Rupert Giles, but stranger than that is the question, “How did this trailer get here?”

 

There is no car or truck in evidence; did he tow it here in werewolf form?

When Brett’s mom invites Ted to visit, telling him he can park his trailer in the backyard, we once again ask, “Just how is he going to get it there?” At no point in this movie do we see Ted with a vehicle.

 

 And there are clearly no access roads to this location, how did it get there?

Then during a live news broadcast from Timberline Lake, which tips off the mom that something dangerous is going on when the reporter mentions five hikers savagely being killed, but even more startling is that Ted’s trailer is clearly parked at the crime scene behind the reporter, despite the fact that’s supposedly still parked in her backyard.

 

Ted’s trailer is actually a Time Lord's Tardis.

The actual werewolf design in this movie is decent, but when we finally get to see the transformation they went with a mixture of the pumping air bladders from The Howling and the early morphing technology from Michael Jackson’s video Black or White video. To say the end result was less than convincing is being generous. What also failed to work in this movie are the performances; Michael Paré goes from tortured sobbing to moustache twirling villainy and it's ludicrously goofy, and then you have Mariel Hemingway’s comatose delivery of almost every line which raises such questions as, “How did she ever have a career, and was Superman IV: The Quest For Peace actually her best work?”

 

“Get the fuck off my son, or I'll call Nuclear Man!”

Hemingway is certainly not helped by the script which in one moment tries to show us how she is a sharp lawyer able to see through a traveling conman’s scam but then later, when she is snooping around Ted’s trailer, she finds gruesome photos of his dead girlfriend and a diary chronically his horrible battle with this strange disease that causes blackouts and that he hopes where medicine fails the love of family will cure, and this barely seems to raise a red flag with her.  And Ted seriously hopes to cure lycanthropy with love? Clearly stupidity runs in this family, but this scene raises a few more questions…

• Where did that photo of the dead girlfriend come from? Did photo-journalists Ted take it, if so he is one sick bastard, but if not is he just carrying around a crime scene photo of his murdered girlfriend? Either answer leads us to believe Ted is very messed up.
• Later the mom straight up asks him, “Where is Marjorie?” and he tells her that she’s in Seattle. So she now knows he is purposely concealing the fact that is girlfriend was brutally murdered, and yet she doesn’t confront him about it or at least ask him to get the fuck out of her house.
• The journal she found mentions that her brother is blacking out and waking up covered in blood that is not his own. I don’t care if the local police told her that the five dead hikers were killed by an animal, they died in the vicinity of a man whose girlfriend was savagely killed, and Ted apparently wakes up covered in other people’s blood.  That’s enough reason to ask anybody to, “Get the fuck out!”

 

Is it considered rude to ask a werewolf to leave?

Of course the mom isn’t the hero of the film, that would be the dog, but because the dog has been super suspicious of Ted all along the asshole uncle provokes the dog into biting him so that the mom is force to call animal control, and then Brett will have to sneak out at night to rescue his best friend while his idiot mom investigates the woods alone and unarmed. The Darwin Awards were invented for people exactly like her.

 

“Ted, what big teeth you have.”

Bad Moon does have some really fun werewolf moments, the gore alone will keep most fans of the genre happy, but the fact that we have less empathy for Brett and his mom than we do for any of the Friday the 13th dead teenagers does not help. Director/screenwriter Eric Red took a fun an original werewolf book, turned it into a standard monster film and then populated it with fairly uninteresting characters. This is a movie I can only recommend to die hard werewolf fans. If you want to watch a werewolf movie that is so bad its good check out Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, it’s vastly more entertaining.

The Stepford Wives: From Book to Screen

The term “Stepford Wife” entered the world’s lexicon shortly after author Ira Levin’s book was published back in 1972, and I’d say more people are familiar with the term and it’s meaning (i.e. a woman who seems to conform blindly to an old-fashioned subservient role in relation to her husband) than they are with the source material it came from. There have been two theatrical adaptations of Levin’s book, and several made-for-television spin-offs, but the original novel remains as chilling and relevant as ever.

The original story is a hard thing to quantify; it’s mostly billed as a satirical thriller but there are definite science fiction elements, as for me I’d consider it a horror/mystery. This is one of those rare books that knowing the “terrible secret” from the outset only adds to the terror; knowing what horrible danger the protagonist is up against only increases the tension as you fly through the pages of this woman’s doomed journey. For those few of you unfamiliar with the story The Stepford Wives is about a family moving to the small town of Stepford, Connecticut and we follow the wife Joanna Eberhart, a talented photographer, as she slowly discovers this idyllic town may not be what it seems. That her husband joins a “Men Only” club immediately puts her on edge, which even in the 70s was considered an outdated concept by most.

 

Women check in, but they don’t check out.

She befriends neighbor Bobbie Markowe, a spirited ex-city girl like Joanna who arrived a couple of months earlier, and the two marvel at the zombified hausfraus of Stepford. The pair befriend another woman, Charmaine Wimperis, who is like minded as they are when it comes to “wifely duties” and is even more outspoken about her not even caring for sex, “Look, I just don’t enjoy having a big cock shoved into me, that’s all.” Our duo is then shocked to learn that a month later she has torn up her tennis court so her husband could have a putting green. She had become just as docile and “pleasing” as the other women of Stepford.

 

“I just love squeezing the Charmin.”

It’s at this point that Bobbie becomes convinced there is something in the town’s water supply that is turning women into men pleasing puppets, but of course, it’s more insidious than that. Joanna and Bobby investigate further and discover that there use to be a strong woman’s rights group in town, and now the founder of the group, once a strong feminist activist, is now just a simple housewife only concerned with keeping her home clean and her husband happy. Bobby starts to panic and tells Joanna she is getting her husband to move them out of Stepford before it’s too late, Joanna herself makes overtures about leaving to her husband, and he seems cool with the idea, only stating that it would be best to wait for the kids to be out of school before moving. Then when Bobbie comes home from a romantic getaway at a local spa with her husband Joanna is horrified to see that she has become one of the Stepford Wives.

 

And with an apparent boob job.

Joanna demands to move immediately but her husband insists she sees a psychiatrist as her paranoia and fear is unreasonable. She sees the shrink, who tries to reassure her that chemical brainwashing of a population of women is not possible, and is given a prescription for tranquilizers. Soon after this Joanna starts to put the pieces together; all the members of the “Men’s Association” come from a variety of technological fields, with the president of the group an ex-Disneyland employee who designed the animatronic robots for the park’s attractions, she finally comes to the conclusion that women aren’t being brainwashed but that they are being replaced by robots. She tries to escape the town, having discovered they have taken her children but is eventually cornered by the men. The men deny the accusations that Joanna is making about them, and they ask her if she would believe them if she saw one of the other women bleed. She agrees and they take her to Bobbie’s house, and the scene ends as Bobbie brandishes a knife at her former friend.

 

“Come on,” Bobbie said. “The men are waiting.”

We then get an epilogue revealing that Joanna has now become a Stepford Wife as she glides blissfully down the aisles of the supermarket. That is a pretty dark ending, and the book’s slow build up to this moment is simply terrifying. This isn’t some evil alien race or supernatural power doing this, it’s being done by ones who were supposed to be loving husbands. The book is told solely from Joanna’s point of view; we never get a look into the Men’s Association or hear them talk about their motivations, and this is a smart decision on the author’s part, what possible amount of dialog could explain a group of men deciding to murder their spouses and replace them with robots? The book is a clear satirical jab at the men of the time who were resisting the feminist movement and women’s decisions to explore life outside of the home; thus the men in this book are just shadowy figures with cold and cruel desires.

Note: Ira Levin also wrote Rosemary’s Baby, so basically I think he’s trying to say that men are assholes and not to be trusted.

In 1975 director Bryan Forbes, with screenwriter William Goldman, brought Ira Levin’s book to the big screen in what is a very faithful adaptation. Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) and husband Walter (Peter Masterson) move with their two children from the big city to the charming town of Stepford, she befriends fellow newcomer to town, the sloppy, irrepressible and fun Bobbie Markowe (Paula Prentiss), and briefly hang-out with Charmaine Wimperis (Tina Louise) until she is Stepfordized into having her tennis court plowed under to make way for her husband’s swimming pool (not a putting green as in the book). The movie pretty much covers all the events found in the book and even adds in a few; when one of the Stepford wives is “injured” in a fender bender Joanna notices that the ambulance is heading in the opposite direction to where the Stepford hospital is located, and later at a party that same wife is then seen repeatedly stating, “I’ll just die if I don’t get this recipe.” This “glitch” is our first clue that robots may be involved. In the book we only suspect robots because of president of the Men’s Association Dale “Diz” Coba (Patrick O’Neal) being expert on robotics from his prior work at Disneyland, but in the movie the “glitches” and the attitude of them women quickly has the viewer suspecting what’s actually going on.

 

Also, Dale Coba is a huge douche.

In the book and movie Joanna doesn’t believe his nickname “Diz” came from his working at Disneyland, stating, “You don’t look like someone who enjoys making people happy” and the film doubles down on the douchery by having Coba state, “I like to watch women doing little domestic chores.” As villains go he is one of the best, you just love to hate him, as he just oozes entitlement and menace.

One of the key differences between the book and this movie is that we occasionally get scenes with Walter and the group from the Men’s Association while as I mentioned earlier the book is only from Joanna’s viewpoint. In the book Walter is more of a cipher, we don’t get to know much about him, and when he returns from his first night at the men’s club Joanna is awakened by him masturbating next to her. This implies that Walter was very turned on by the idea of his wife being replaced by a submissive robot, while in the movie we have a moment where Walter tells his wife that he really does love her, as if he isn’t quite on board with having her replaced, and Coba at one point questions if Walter is really sure about Stepford. The movie Walter is made a little more sympathetic, for a man planning murder that is, while the book Walter is clearly a man just biding his time until his sex toy arrives.

 

“So she’ll do laundry and anal?”

The biggest difference between the book and the 1975 movie is the ending; where the book has Joanna meeting her end under the knife of robot Bobbie the film turns it around and has Joanna stab Bobbie, who then proceeds to not bleed and wanders around the kitchen glitching spasmodically. This kicks aside any doubts as to what is going on and motivates Joanna to find her children and flee for her life. When she goes home she finds her children missing and is forced to beat the information of where they are out of her husband, and he tells her that they are up at the Men’s Association, and like an idiot, she believes him. This results in her being trapped inside the Men’s Association with Coba and her robot double.

 

Going by the black eyes she’s either a robot or a demon.

The movie then ends as the book did, with the robot duplicate of Joanna placidly purchasing groceries at the local supermarket, where we also see one of the newer residents and next victim of Stepford arguing with her husband and thus the horrific cycle continues. As adaptations go this is one of the better ones, though not completely faithful to the book (as they are two different mediums that’s really an unrealistic goal) it still captured the spirit of the Ira Levin’s novel perfectly. The only moment I didn’t care for was when “Diz” Coba confronts Joanna at the end telling her, “It’s nothing like you imagine, just another stage. Think about it like that, and there’s nothing to it.” This sounds more like something you’d hear from the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers not from someone who is murdering women and replacing them with robots. Did he honestly think Joanna would suddenly realize being killed would improve her life? More likely he just loves to hear himself talk. Minor changes aside this is an excellent thriller with its only real fault being the pacing, at two hours it feels rather sluggish at times, but overall this a movie well worth checking out.

 

You can find the book or DVD in aisle three.

Worth checking out is not something that can be said of the 2004 remake by Frank Oz. This version of The Stepford Wives is mostly known for the many problems during film making, where absolutely no one was having a good time with some cast members even threatening to walk. It’s not easy to make a good movie, it doesn’t matter how many talented people were involved a lot can still go wrong, but in the case of this movie, everything went wrong.

Where 1975 version was, at times, a scene for scene adaptation of the book this remake is almost an “In Name Only Adaptation” with Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman) no longer a mild-mannered amateur photographer with hopes of making it big, now she’s a successful reality television executive producer with such idiotic shows as “You Could Do Better” where women leave there husbands so they can screw porn stars. The original book and movie was a satirically look at the battle of the sexes; taking a hard and nasty look at men who preferred their women barefoot and pregnant, while in this version women are, and I quote, “high-powered, neurotic, castrating, Manhattan career bitches” and according to the villain of this piece the world would be a better place without them.

 

“I’m totally not overcompensating.”

When one of her reality shows – where spouses choose between each other and prostitutes – results in one of the jilted men going on a shooting spree, Joanna is fired and has a nervous breakdown. Apparently, a woman who has reached the top of her profession is still a brittle little girl inside. sheesh Her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) quits his job as vice president of the Network and decides that the best thing for their family, after Joanna receives shock treatment, is a change of scenery, so they leave for the small gated community of Stepford, Connecticut. All the homes in Stepford are palatial mansions, with all the latest technological toys installed, which made me wonder just how two unemployed television execs are affording this, but let’s not let logic and sense spoil the fun. Walter seems to be enjoying the new surroundings, all the women are gorgeous and comment favourably about his “package,” but Joanna doesn’t seem to fit in. She still insists on dressing all in black and wearing pants while the Stepford wives wear flower print dresses and heels, even when doing aerobics. And yes, this looks as dumb as it sounds.

 

Dear Frank Oz, there is a difference between satire and outright stupidity.

Joanna has two allies in the war against conformity; Bobbie Markowitz (Bette Midler), a writer of such books as “I Love You But Please Die,” and Roger Bannister (Roger Bart), a flamboyant gay man who has moved to town with his long-time partner and staunch Republican. Roger replaces the Charmaine character from the original, and it could have worked, if it wasn’t such an over-the-top clichéd performance and when he is changed, sporting a Brooks Brothers suit, he informs Joanna and Bobbie that, “I now know that being gay doesn’t mean a guy has to be effeminate or flamboyant, or sensitive. I’m no sissy.”

 

An openly gay Republican running for the Senate? Yep, this is a fantasy.

The mystery element that is a highlight of the book is completely missing here, instead, we are treated to our bumbling heroes stumbling around the Men’s Association like they were in an episode of Scooby-Doo.  When Joanna discovers that Bobby has been changed like the others there is no foreboding terror, just bad comedy. I’m not saying there isn’t a way to turn a dark satiric thriller into a comedy but Frank Oz clearly didn’t have a clue as to how to pull this off, The failed comedy isn’t even the film’s greatest crime as that would be Oz’s abject cowardice. In both the book and the 1975 movie, women were being killed and replaced by robots, and it’s clear that was going to be the case here as well, but then once again Frank Oz fell victim to test screenings as he did when he made the musical remake of Little Shop of Horrors. That film originally ended with the plants killing the heroes and taking over the world but when it tested poorly he dumped that ending and tacked on a stupid happily ever after.

 

Seriously, who doesn’t prefer this ending?

Well, the exact thing happened with his remake of The Stepford Wives, the women of Stepford were supposed to have been murdered and replaced with robots but test audiences did not respond well to this so they did some re-shoots and changed the ending. Now we are told that the women have had microchips planted in their brains and their bodies augmented to the ideal form (Or their chipped brains are placed inside clones, the movie refuses to be clear on this) and this allows all the women to be “saved” at the end of the movie by having the nano-chips deactivated. Extra footage was shot to work this “miracle change” but they didn’t bother to remove earlier footage that clearly shows the exact opposite of this. When Walter is at the Men’s Association the leader, Mike Wellington (Christopher Walken), tells one of the husbands to give Walter the $20 dollars he owes him and the man does this by calling his wife into the room where she then spits the money out of her mouth like an ATM machine.

 

This is stupid on multiple levels so let’s unpack it a little.

• The husband hands her his ATM card saying “I need $20 you know the pin.” This implies that she is an actual ATM machine which means the local bank has to make daily drops of money to her.
• Reading an ATM card, internally entering a pin number and then spitting out cash, proves that this woman is a machine and not a brain chip controlled person or even a clone.
• They do this all in front of Walter without the insurance that he isn’t going to freak out and inform the authorities of this atrocity.
• Walter’s reaction is, “She gives singles?” and a part of my soul died.

Neither the book nor the 1975 movie gets into how the Men’s Association picks its members, but it is implied that the men are completely aware of the “women being replaced by robots” plan before actually arriving in Stepford, so one can assume that the Stepford men feel out like-minded individuals whose skills could add to their overall plans. Dropping this bomb on a recently unemployed television executive, right in the heart of their lair, is very careless. I guess we can assume if he reacted poorly they would have murdered him on the spot, but that just adds to the whole incredibly stupidity of their plan. That Walter’s true love for his wife is the town’s eventually undoing proves their vetting process sucks. Yet the idiocy isn’t over yet, after a tearful Joanna is lowered into the bowels of Men’s Association with her husband, to be turned into a fembot (or whatever the fuck these things are supposed to be) in their secret lab, we cut to her and all the Stepford wives serenely purchases groceries in their pastel gowns.

 

This is a nod and a fuck you to the original.

As it turns out true love won they day after all and Walter had just faked turning his wife into a bimbot, and while she distracted Mike, with a waltz during formal ball, he was able to sneak down into the lab and deactivate the nano-chips/ We all know that television execs are all well versed in neurobiology and the computer sciences involved in this sort of thing. In fact, he defeated the machine by simply repeatedly pounding on the key pad, and because this is a comedy we are supposed to accept this works. Yet this idiotic plot isn’t done with it’s moronic reveals, Joanna then knocks Mike’s head off and he’s revealed to be a robot as well and that the real orchestrator of Stepford is Mike’s wife Clair (Glen Close) who, like all the Stepford wives, was at one time powerful career-minded woman who was so caught up in her work that she ignored her husband which resulted in him cheating on her. Clair then murdered her husband and his lover, then decided that the world would be a better place if she turned back the clock to a time before women were turning themselves into figurative robots. She chose Connecticut as a good place to start when she asked herself “Where would people never notice a town full of robots?” After her moronic monologue, she kisses her robot husband’s severed head and is electrocuted.

 

After this “shocking ending” you may need a stiff drink.

We are then treated to an epilogue where we find Joanna, Bobbie and Roger on Larry King as they inform the world that all the husbands are now serving a house arrest sentence in Stepford and are forced to do the menial chores they’d once programmed their wives to do. I know this is supposed to be one of those poetic justice endings but it comes across as decidedly lame. These men committed what accounts to both physical and mental rape of their spouses, they should not be squeezing the Charmin they should be breaking rocks in Leavenworth. And what of the wives who we learned were once all CEOs, judges and powerful movers and shakers in the world? Their recently chipped controlled brains are now in these genetically grown bodies, how can they possibly return to their old lives? Would a Fortune 500 company risk taking them back? Are they even considered human under the law? Sure this is a stupid comedy and I’m probably way overthinking this way too much, but it’s clear the makers of this film put no thought into it at all. That they took a satirical story about threatened masculinity, one that still resonates today, but then made the actual villain a woman. What the fuck?

 

 This is what you get for making Dalmatian fur coats.

Women’s rights and the feminist movement have come a long way since the 70s as women are no longer expected to fulfill preconceived gender roles, but the fight isn’t quite over yet. Women are often still being paid less and laws are continually being written to control the very rights to their own bodies, so a 21st century remake of The Stepford Wives would have still been relevant without having to make drastic changes to the story, hell, at the time of this article most of the Republican leadership believes that America should go back to the carefree days of Leave it Beaver and Make Room for Daddy, so making a movie about the modern woman being “castrating career bitches” brought down by their emasculated husbands is just insulting.  That they were being manipulated by a woman, who simply wanted to go back to wearing chiffon and “happier days” makes it even worse.  It kind of sends the message that “Men aren’t chauvinistic pricks, it’s modern women who are the problem.”  How this movie was originally supposed to end, before test screenings forced the director to hand over his balls, we may never know how much responsibilities lies with screenwriter Paul Rudnick is another unknown factor. What we do know is that Frank Oz was at the helm of this disaster and he hasn’t done much since.

 

Maybe Frank Oz has issues he’s trying to work out on his own.

The Gods of Mars: Edgar Rice Burroughs – Book Review

The Gods of Mars is considered by most to be the best of the Barsoom series; it fleshes out the hero, introduces new races and gives us more history of the planet, all that and it's also one of the best attacks on organized religion I’ve ever come across. Published in 1913 in the pages of All-Story magazine this book is basically the second of what is really an introductory trilogy to the Barsoom series; A Princess of Mars and The Gods of Mars both end with cliffhangers and not properly concluded until The Warlord of Mars was released. Lucky for readers at the time Burroughs was a pretty fast writer with no five year wait between installments, I'm looking at you George R.R. Martin.  The first serialized chapter for A Princess of Mars came out in July 1912 and the last chapter of The Warlord of Mars hit stands in March of 1914, all that while also working on Tarzan of the Apes. 

When we last left John Carter he had raced to the atmosphere processing plant in the hopes of turning it back on before the entire population of the planet asphyxiated, but just as he succeeded in opening the massive door to the plant he was whisked back to Earth. He then spent years trying to figure how to get back to his Mars and his beloved Dejah Thoris, until one day while standing atop a bluff overlooking the Hudson River, and with outstretched hands he once again finds the strange power that draws him to the wonderful world of Barsoom. Only one small problem, when he arrives he’s not at a location that he is familiar with. The surroundings are so lush with vegetation he at first wonders if he’s been transported to a different planet all together. The good news is that he is in fact on Mars/Barsoom, the bad news is that he is in the Valley of Dor which is considered to be the Martian afterlife, and to return from Dor is considered sacrilegious and is punishable by torture and death.

While taking in these strange surroundings he spots a boat coming down the River Iss, onboard are a group of Green Martians on their assumed pilgrimage to paradise. You see upon reaching 1,000 years of age almost all Martians undertake a pilgrimage along the River Iss expecting to find a valley of paradise; but instead they find in a veritable deathtrap, populated by bloodsucking plant creatures and the giant white apes of mars waiting for them. This is all overseen by a race called the Therns, a cruel cannibalistic society of priests who perpetuate the Martian religion through a network of spies across the planet. Those that aren’t immediately killed by the ferocious monsters are either enslaved by the “Holy” Therns or eaten by them. Being this is a Burroughs story it should surprise no one that this particular pilgrim party contains someone John Carter knows, the mighty Green Martian warlord Tars Tarkas. With Carter at his side the two are able to fight their way through the horde of plant men and apes until they stumble upon a secret passageway into the Thern city. While there our two heroes rescue Thuvia of Ptarth, a Red Martian who has been a slave to the Holy Therns for years because of her unique ability to control the great cats Martian cats called banths.

The Therns are white skinned, bald, but wear blonde wigs to appear as they once did generations ago, and this allows Carter to easily impersonate one of them by killing him and stealing his wig. With an army of Thuvia controlled banths at their side Carter and Tars Tarkas make for their escape, but things get complicated when the city is attacked by the Black Pirates of Barsoom. Calling themselves the "First Born" this race of Martians considers themselves a unique creation among Martian races, and worship the living goddess Issus. They raid the White Martian Therns carrying off girls as slaves just as the Therns took Red and Green Martians to be their slaves. Strangely enough the Therns consider the Temple of Issus to be their Heaven but it is in fact a scam perpetrated by the Black Martians. So the Therns perpetrate a fake religion to lure Red and Green Martians into their clutches, but they don’t know that their own religion is also a hoax which was created by the Black Martians. Basically it’s a pyramid scheme of religions.

I’ve read that Edgar Rice Burroughs was not considered to be anti-religious; he was more concerned by the abuse and exploitation of religious beliefs by leaders of the various sects, but after reading this book, and some of the nice subtle jabs at religion in the Tarzan stories, I’m betting that if he wasn’t a closet atheist he was at least a solid agnostic.

Here is a nice quote from John Carter as he explain the importance of exposing this hoax to the world, even if it costs them their lives, “Only thus may we carry the truth to those without, and though the likelihood of our narrative given credence is, I grant you, remote, so wedded are mortals to their stupid infatuation for impossible superstitions, we should be crave cowards indeed were we to shirk the plain duty that confronts us.” Yeah, that sounds like a guy with a serious beef against religion. This not so subtle commentary is even more impressive when you consider he was writing for an audience that were primarily religious.

Aside from religion the factors of race is also a key element in this book; in A Princess of Mars we were introduced to Red Martians and the Green Martians who are both shown containing good and bad people. Now in The Gods of Mars we meet the White Martians and the Black Martians and though both are first introduced as villainous races Carter does befriend one of the Princes of “The First Men” by the name of Xodar, and when Carter exposes that the Black Martian religion to be just as fake as the ones the Red, Green and White Martians all believed in he quickly joins forces with him. Some people have accused Burroughs of fostering racist stereotypes but that idea would be dashed if such people had read this book; here is how Carter describes the Black Martians, “Only in the colour of their skins did they differ materially from us; this is of the appearance of polished ebony, and as odd as it may seem for a Southerner to say, it adds rather than detracts from their marvelous beauty.” Carter later describes the Black Martian Xodar as, “He was a handsome fellow, clean limbed and powerful, with an intelligent face and features of such exquisite chiselling that Adonis himself might have envied him.” So to recap the Red Martians and Green Martians are Carter’s dearest allies, and even the cruel Black Martians are not wholly a race of evil, but the White Martians are shown as having no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Carter even rescues Phaidor, daughter of Matai Shang, Holy Hekkador of the Holy Therns, Father of Therns, Master of Life and Death upon Barsoon, Brother of Issus, Princess of Life Eternal, and then when he spurns her love because his heart belongs to Dejah Thoris she becomes enraged and eventually tries to kill Carter’s wife. Even the women of the White Martian race are despicable.  I think we can put to bed any idea that Burroughs was racist.

Of course The Gods of Mars isn’t a treatise on religion and race relations, well not just that, but it’s also a rousing science fiction adventure with John Carter bringing death and destruction to all who stand between him and his beloved. We get a glimpse into his morality as he kills a crew of Black Martians as they sleep, it's the only way he can take their ship as is badly outnumbered, but later he spares the lives of several of the Black Martian soldiers because killing them at the particular point is unnecessary. And Carter is constantly leaping into combat against overwhelming odds if he sees a woman in danger. At one point in the book, during Carter’s time as a prisoner of the Black Martians, he is about to witness a group of Red Martian maidens about to be slaughtered and eaten by some of Barsoomian white apes in the arena, and without a second thought he charges in and ends up sparking a Spartacus like rebellion among the cities slaves.

You don’t get better swashbuckling space adventure than this. The Gods of Mars will have you rifling through the pages as you can to discover if John Carter and his friends will escape the Black Martian city, wondering what other dangers could lie within the subterranean Sea of Omean. Will John Carter and company make it back to Helium only to be killed as heretics? Who is that young Red Martian captive with the lighter red skin who bears such a startling resemblance to John Carter? Does Dejah Thoris still live and if so how many times will John Carter have to rescue her? Seriously, she’s a worse damsel in distress than Tarzan’s Jane. The Gods of Mars is my favorite of the Barsoom series, and one I heartily recommend.

Westworld: Pilot (2016) – Review

When Walt Disney placed The Hall of Presidents and the Pirates of Caribbean in his parks he changed the way people saw amusement park attractions. Sure rollercoaster and Ferris wheels will always entertain crowds but as the years go by people want more from their entertainment, they want to be amazed and thrilled by new things, and as science and technology marches on the possibility of getting an actual park, like the one created by Michael Crichton in his movie Westworld, becomes a closer possibilities. And a dangerous one.

In my review of the 1973 Westworld I went into detail on the viability and functionality of such a park, even discounting murderous robots it seemed rather dangerous, so I went into this HBO update with a piqued interest to see how show creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy Nolan would tackle the problems of creating a park that would give guests a completely immersive experience. The artificial people for this updated version more resemble the replicants of Blade Runner than they do the robots of Crichton’s original, and seem to be constructed by a 3D printer mixed with a milk bath, but the real kicker here is that these "robots" don’t know they are artificial. We are first introduced to Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), a Western girl being interrogated by Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) in what resembles a Voight-Kampff test from the aforementioned Blade Runner. It seems pretty critical to the functionality of the park that the “Hosts” (robots) are not aware that their world is not real.

 

“Let me tell you about my mother.”

Of course it turns out that something isn’t quite right, and that added code in the latest update is causing some of the Hosts to glitch. This new code was slipped into the update by the park’s creative director Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) in his ongoing attempt to make the Hosts more realistic and indistinguishable from a human. Certainly can’t see why that should cause a problem. Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen), Westworld’s operations leader, wants all updated Hosts brought into have a full diagnostic check-up, but Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), Westworld's narrative director argues against this because it will disrupt dozens of scripted storylines and effect they guest’s overpriced adventures.

 

Then things start to get worse.

Robots breaking down and refusing to fall down after being shot isn’t even the weirdest thing going on in the park, that would be The Gunslinger played by Ed Harris. In the original film The Gunslinger was the primary villain, the robot that mercilessly hunted down Richard Benjamin, but in an interesting twist Ed Harris’s Gunslinger is actually a guest, one who has some very sadistic fantasies involving murder and rape. He also seems to be on a journey of his own, which some times involves scalping Hosts, to figure out Westworld and its secrets. How this will all tie into the park’s programming failure is clearly one of the more interesting aspects of the show.

 

The Man in Black.

Being this is just the pilot we still have much to learn when it comes to how the park functions, but the things we do find out are as follows:
• Like the original guns do not work on guests.
• One side of the river is for more family friendly activities.
• The park is over 30 years old and is overdue for an incident.
• Management may have ulterior motives when it comes to the park.
• They have a SWAT time on standby in case of robot uprising.
• James Marsden gets shot a lot.
• Thandie Newton is a badass madame.
• Ed Harris gets scarier with age.
• If a corpse is warm enough no one will judge you for it.

 

"We spared no expense."

Exploring the dangers of artificial intelligence, which I’m assuming will eventually lead to the Hosts becoming self-aware and no longer cool with being shot and raped, is great fodder for a television show, and being this is an HBO series it will all be nicely combined with a heaping helping of sex and violence. So this new Westworld shows a lot of promise, with a bunch of great people behind and in front of the camera it should be at least very interesting, and at $8 million dollars a pop each episode is probably going to look fantastic.  I for one am excited to see where this show goes.