TERRA NOVA

Contributed by Marshall

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!  So to begin with I don’t watch TV very often.  That is to say rarely.  That is to say almost never.  It’s mostly a product of my upbringing, but increasingly it’s because television is so mindless and insulting to the viewer.  And if that’s not enough, there is the added baggage that I know that the mindless crap I’m watching is loved and adored by millions of viewers.  I saw an ad tonight that said Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon was the “greatest action movie ever”.  Apparently whatever moron off the street they found to get that quote is not aware of Indiana Jones and the Raider of the Lost Ark, Terminator 2, or Die Hard…  Did I mention that commercials piss me off?  Anyway, Terra Nova!

Ever since Michael Crichton’s came along, sci-fi has been becoming more and more mainstream.  And it was Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park that not only rocked the special effects world but also spurred public, and uneducated, interest in dinosaurs and cloning.  Why I remember an Australian biotech company actually attempting to clone recently extinct animals from taxidermied samples, they never did it, but that the power of this idea got them initial funding should emphasize how much influence Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and the less awesome movie version were.  It even spurred 3 sequels that got more ridiculous as time went on but they still put butts in seats so it was only a matter of time before we got another lost in dinoland story, this time airing on Fox, you know, because they love sci-fi so much. (read about Fox’s abuse of sci-fi series here)

Terra Nova is a series that starts in 2149 and mankind has finally destroyed the world…again!  But as luck would have it we have just discovered the secret of time travel.  But the portal was an uncontrolled accident or something so it only goes to one place.  But that place is in the middle of the jungle 85 million years ago.  Given this premise it sounds pretty cool.  I thought so too until I started watching and realized that there is nothing new in this show. 

We open on a scene of Jim, the loving father, coming home to his family bearing, GASP…an orange!  I get the idea, the world is overpopulated and everyone’s lives are shit, but that doesn’t give you the right to blatantly steal from Soylent Green.

Population control then busts in looking for their youngest child, because she’s a dirty third! (see Ender’s Game…)  The issue of population control through “one child policy” schemes has been approached before in sci-fi like The Fortress.  This series went out of its way to talk about how much importance society places on a phrase like “a family is four” but then points out later in the episode that if Jim hadn’t struck one of the officers who found his daughter he would have gotten off with a fine instead of 6 years in prison.  Oh, and nothing happened to the daughter.  So the oppressive government they live under is actually not that oppressive and our protagonist is rash, quick to anger, and lived outside the law for 3 years before his daughter was discovered.  

Now there is a lot about the first 10 minutes of this series that I could pick apart with a dull butter knife.  Forget the fine toothed comb, the plot holes are miles wide, but I’m willing to let all this slide.  It’s all to engineer a situation for the family to escape an “oppressive” society.  I’ll even ignore the massive gaps in time travel logic, causality continuity, and failure at basic TV technobabble.  What I will neither ignore nor condone are stupid characters we are supposed to identify with or ridiculous and implausible secret keeping that drives the plot.

For a long time there has been a genre, especially on TV, about a group of people cut off from all they know in a hostile environment.  Lost in Space, Star Trek, Land of the Lost, Sliders, Andromeda, Star Trek: Voyager, Farscape, Stargate Atlantis, LOST, Stargate Universe… so there is plenty of precedence for the success of a series like this.  However within the last 10 years the sitcom narrative structure has given way to a more continuous narrative with every episode as a to be continued, encouraged by series like 24 and LOST which were both wildly popular.  Terra Nova is no different and that’s ok, there is nothing wrong with a narrative structure like this, but the shift away from the old style also came with a shift in character types as well which conform more to those of horror movie conventions.

I noticed this years ago but it didn’t hit me until I watched Sunshine.  For those of you who don’t know, the plot of Sunshine is that the sun is dying so earth builds a giant spaceship to take a handful of earth’s best minds to the sun and do some pseudoscience to save the day, figuratively and literally.  Well the screw up and are never heard from again, so we silly earthlings do it again and use up all of earths remaining resources to build a second ship with the second best handful of people on the planet to save the day.  And wouldn’t you know it, this crew is at each other’s throats the whole way and there is not an ounce of common sense or survival instinct among them.  You might think that psychological instability would raise a red flag in the approval process for a mission of such importance but no, making sure your characters are dumb as rocks so they can screw up and die makes for an entertaining movie.  I can deal with all this.  It hurts but I can deal with it.  What I can’t stand is when I have to put up with this insanity for years in the form of a television series.

Let me list some of the horrible choices the characters make in episode 1:

The son doesn’t “read the pamphlet” or go to the orientation meeting on living in a dinosaur infested jungle.

The son leaves the compound with his new free spirit friends stealing a car and traveling into the forbidden zone.

Security does nothing when a patient in the hospital flips out taking the doctor hostage and stealing a gun.

The base commander has neglected to mention to the people in the future who keep sending people through the portal that he is dealing with a civil war which has effectively crippled the development of Terra Nova.

There are things that look like alien hieroglyphs on some rocks in the jungle but don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret…even though half the main characters know about them…

And then there’s the everyday TV stupidity of people running into dino infested jungles expecting to come out ok, typical horror movie fare.  My major problem with series like this is the leap in logic that if this project is so important, why are the scientists, the soldiers, the administrators, everyone, so completely incompetent and not informed about anything?  I got really mad when they had the audacity to quote Aliens with the lines “They mostly come out at night.”  To which the other character responds, almost breaking the fourth wall, “mostly…”  Sigh…

In a rare occurrence Fox gave funding for 13 episodes instead of just a pilot.  It is also backed by producers Steven Spielberg and Brannon Braga of Star Trek fame, so there is definite possibility that funding will not be cut in the foreseeable future a la Firefly.  Terra Nova has an average episode budget of $4 million.  Sadly it looks like most of the cost of season 1 was construction of sets and paying supposedly high filming fees.  There was speculation before this came out that the dinosaurs would rival the ones in Jurassic Park which is not the case.  The dinosaurs also come across as extra creepy because they have human like eyes instead of lizard or general purpose animal eyes.

On the lighter side, I am tickled that they got Stephen Lang to play the base commander in Terra Nova, because he was my favorite character in Avatar.  And did I mention that the people he’s fighting against are blocking his mining operation…  Oh well, nothing new under the sun… 

I suspect that this show is going to do very well.  Action sells and it sells more when you have enough extra named characters to kill one off every once and a while.  As much as this one episode got to me I’m going to keep watching, at least for now.  While I take issue with the execution I find the basic concept of this series intriguing.  And to be fair they had a lot to do in one episode and there were a lot of competing themes.  Our characters are now free of the old world, and lots of things raised in the first episode will never matter again. So let’s hope there’s a little more continuity of thought from here on in.  And for those of you who don’t mind any of the complaints I’ve brought up, watch this series, it will blow your mind!

Movies and TV Referenced:

2011-Terra Nova

2011-Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon

2009-Avatar

2009-Stargate Universe

2007-Sunshine

2004-Stargate Atlantis

2004-LOST

2002-Firefly

2001-24

2000-Andromeda

1999-Farscape

1995-Sliders

1995-Star Trek: Voyager

1993-Jurrassic Park

1992-The Fortress

1991-Terminator 2: Judgment Day

1988-Die Hard

1986-Aliens

1981-Indiana Jones and the Raider of the Lost Ark

1974-Land of the Lost

1973-Soylent Green

1965-Lost in Space

SPECIAL

Contributed by Marshall

I finally saw a film I’ve been wanting to see for a long time, the independent 2006 film Special.  Special is one in a long history of superhero movies, of which I seem to have covered a lot of recently.  Special is the story of a man who joins a drug trial and begins having delusions that he is a superhero as a result.  

As originality goes, this plot has been done a thousand times.  Our hero has wants and dreams that suddenly become reality and the question is always there, is this reality or are they just crazy.  The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Harvey, Bunny Lake is Missing, Almost an Angel, Total Recall, Contact, the list of films that have approached this concept is a long one.  However what is interesting about all of these is the ever nagging question at the back of everyone’s mind, is this happening or is it all a delusion?  I would say that Total Recall did this best by not revealing the answer.  A more recent example would be Inception.  Other films choose to leave the audience guessing until the end and then there is a reveal and cue the credits!  It’s a sloppier ending but it usually gives a happier ending than a more unsettling cliffhanger.  Special however hurts itself right out of the starting gate by making it clear that our “hero” Les is delusional.

We start with Les being accepted into a drug trial for Special, a drug that makes you…better?  What the drug is actually for is not made clear.  What is made clear is that Les has a crappy life and is a 30 some year old comic book nerd in a crappy job with low self-esteem.  Whether he has any preexisting psychological conditions or not we don’t know so let’s assume he’s just an average guy, which is a pretty sorry state of affairs for the human race now that I think about it.  When his powers first manifest he is watching TV and begins to levitate.  He doesn’t notice at first as it comes as naturally as breathing to him.  Wow, that’s pretty cool, I wonder what else he can do!  He goes to the drug trial doctor to show off his progress from the drug only to treat the viewer to an alternate view of Les lying on the floor in the doctor’s office thinking that he is showing the doctor he can fly.  This movie goes out of its way to prove to the viewer that Les is just crazy which gets rid of any suspense or tension that would have been built up otherwise.

As his doctor begins explaining to him his adverse reaction to the drug he discovers he has telepathy and has an alternate thought conversation with the doctor further convincing him he has superpowers.  From here on the superhero story is merely a tool with which to tell the story of a deeply disturbed individual who has been completely detached from reality and had constructed a world around him full of self-fulfilling prophecies and conspiracies that all point to him being a superhero.  From that point on it loses the charm of something like Kickass where the characters spend their time fighting crime and living a double life.  Les takes on his superhero persona completely, getting noticed by the police immediately and terrifying the people around him.

The most interesting part of this movie was the way it was filmed, that is showing the world as it is perceived by Les.  For most of the movie, we get to see him run through walls, levitate, make cars disappear, and read minds.  As I said earlier, we are shown at the very beginning that all this is just his perception of reality and is not real.  This shifts the focus of the movie away from him being a superhero to the plot of the pharmaceutical company and how their experimental drug ruined his life without him noticing.  But except for a few scenes that show us he is delusional, the rest of the film is shown from his perspective complete with blocks of his memory erases, hearing voices, and showing his believed superpowers.  

At the heart of this film is a split in what kind of a story they wanted to tell.  Is it a superhero movie with the reveal being he has no powers, or is it a drama about a man whose life is ruined by an experimental drug?  This independent film was made around the time when superhero movies were hitting the big time.  What makes this film interesting in that it seems to have been right at the beginning of the big push for in modern superhero movies to go for a more realistic approach.  I interpret this as the original inspiration for films like Kickass where normal people become costumed vigilantes blending the lines between heroism and sociopathic behavior.  Special was the guinea pig for this genre and it had plenty of flaws.  But I give it credit for transforming the superhero genre into the more thought out plots and characters we get today.  

The movies that generally get remembered are the ones that get it right the first time like 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then everyone copies them hoping to achieve the same wild success.  Others like Special, don’t quite get it right but are important because of the new ideas they present that are experimented with by others and manipulated to the point that great movies come out of it.  This film isn’t for everyone, but if you have any interest in the modern superhero genre you should check this out.

Movies Referenced:

2010-Inception

2010-Kickass

2006-Special

1997-Contact

1990-Almost an Angel

1990-Total Recall

1968-2001: A Space Odyssey

1965-Bunny Lake is Missing

1950-Harvey

1947-The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

PATHOLOGY

Contributed by Jeremy

What invokes the genre when you think of a movie called “Pathology”? Is it a murder mystery? Thriller? Flat out horror? No to all of these. It is in fact a very lazily written exploitation movie with a unique premise (although a very, very stupid one). 

What makes this movie exploitative? Oh I’ll get to that later. Let’s just describe the opening scene for a minute. The movie starts off in grainy handy-cam (because that’s always the mark of excellent cinema) with a bunch of goof offs in a morgue playing with the cadavers. Hey, when I plan my next unsupervised romp in a morgue I sure want to have video evidence of it! These intelligent individuals are opening the mouths and propping the bodies up in sexual positions, all while moaning to make it appear the corpses are having sex. One of them then remarks “We are so going to hell for this.” Yes you are filmmakers, for making such a ridiculous scene that is neither disturbing or shocking as its intentions are so clearly meant to be, but just rather incredibly dumb. But who are these odd degenerates; surely just some bored teenage juvenile’s who somehow got into a morgue? The answer to that is even more mind boggling. 

Fast forward to the credits, and now we get to the real movie. At least the handy-cam is gone but now replaced with a made for TV vibe in film quality.   Not really a shock as the main stars of the movie biggest credentials pertain to TV shows.  The main star is Milo Ventimiglia of Heroes fame, who played the character Peter Petrelli. I’ve never seen Heroes but from what I understand he plays the exact same character he does there as he does here. From what I gathered in his role in Heroes, he plays a Ma-Ti variant that has the power of overwhelming empathy.  Here he’s a promising medical student who just got done with some humanitarian work in some non specified area of Africa to study pathology in the big mean city (which is also unspecified).  Man, is this guy one dimensional.  Simply named Ted Grey, all we know from him is he’s a nice upstanding moralistic do-gooder who has an attractive fiancé to boot. Attractive fiancé played by Alyssa Milano of Charmed fame who is just as one dimensional.  

The filmmakers simply made Ted a boy scout merely so he can be converted to the dark side. The transition here is even more unbelievable to that of Anakin in the Star Wars movies.  You see, the people who like to spend their free time playing with corpses are actually other medical students that Ted must work with, in the pathology department at this hospital. The head doctor is somehow oblivious to their silly antics while working such as throwing livers on the one nerdy guy that isn’t part of the group. Because all medical students are as wacky and zany as something you would find in Animal House right? It’s like they didn’t do any research for this movie at all! On wait, the DVD extra feature proves otherwise, but they simply researched the instruments used in pathology to open up the bodies and not the behavior of actual pathology workers or medical students. Makes sense considering the overall exploitative nature of the film. 

When Ted meets spiky haired “that’s how you know I’m evil” Jake Gallo and his crew of miscreants Ted quickly becomes allured by their strange antics. I don’t know why, they are complete jerks to Ted and all-around unlikable people. Somehow Jake convinces Ted to go barhopping with the gang one night as Ted quickly impresses the gang with a totally unprovoked speech of how we are all just animals and have the desire and will to kill within us all. Silly Ted doesn’t know how much his speech actually gets these guys off, because they actually have a little secret club where they kill people in oblique sometimes creative ways and try to challenge each other to find out how they did it. This is seriously why they became medical students?

If you haven’t realized where this movie is headed by this point shame on you, but I’ll explain further in case you haven’t.  They invite Ted to the club, Ted is initially disgusted, eventually he realizes how morally decayed  society is and joins, etc, just add in orgies and drug use to symbolize his fall from boy scout to evildoer and Ted is immediately a convert to this weird club. Of course he does have moments where he realizes he’s in too deep and now his fiancé is in trouble because the psycho med students are targeting her now…have you realized how stupid this movie is yet?

One thing I will give credit to this movie, it just made me feel dirty for watching it in pure exploitation fashion. I wondered who the hell this movie was targeted toward and somewhere out there, there’s an audience who are entertained by watching people smoking crack, having sex, and cutting up bodies.  That’s pretty much the main content of this movie and the plot is so flimsy, the characters so one dimensional, that’s there’s really no justification for it at all. 

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

Contributed by Dave

And now for something completely different!

Ok, this one likely needs a bit of back story. Once upon a time, I was sitting in my bedroom at around one in the morning, drinking beer, eating Pringles and watching Star Trek. You know the way it goes. The Trek de jour was Deep Space Nine, the third installment in the series and a kind of spin-off of Next Generation. This one features Avery Brooks as Captain Benjamin Sisko, think black William Shatner with significantly less of an ego.

The different Star Trek Series have always had fascinating production histories, many of which I know fairly well, but about midway through an episode called Rapture, Captain Sisko is shocked in the holodeck and logically begins receiving visions of the future due the experience, that I realized that I had very little knowledge about Deep Space Nine’s history. More specifically, it was midway through the episode, when Sisko was convulsing on the floor yelling about locusts, that I realized I had no information on Avery Brook’s own acting history. Who was this man? Where did he come from? Had he always had that smooth, sexy, baritone voice that makes even the most ridiculous stories seem important?

Thus began my quest for knowledge on Avery Brooks. Like most Star Trek actors his pre-trek flimography was nothing extensive, but he had been in at least one movie. Thus we have the subject of today’s review, the 1987 made for TV adaptation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The movie is incredibly rare, not available on DVD, and I spent way more time than I’d like to admit trying to track it down more for the challenge of the hunt rather than anything else. Now I have it… and all that’s left to do is watch it…Oh boy…

Let’s see, director for this was Stan Lathan, you’ve probably never heard of him and there’s a reason for that, and the movie itself premiered on Showtime, yet another reason you likely never watched it. As for the cast, Avery Brooks stars as Uncle Tom and that’s pretty much it…the chick who played Margo in “Big Trouble in Little China” makes a brief appearance…and…wait…SAMUEL L. JACKSON IS IN THIS?! Holy shit, this is unexpected. But yeah, he plays an escaped slave by the name of George Shelby; not a terribly important character in the narrative but the movie makes sure to give him at least one scene where Jackson is allowed to deliver a badass speech to some slave hunters. Also, I love how he gets bigger billing in the end credits than Avery Brooks.

For those of you as unfamiliar with the story as I was, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the story of a slave, Tom, who lived and worked at relatively kind plantation along with his wife and son. However, when the plantation begins losing money Tom’s Master decides to sell Tom down the river to a slave trader from New Orleans. There’s a particularly affecting scene near the beginning where Tom is chained up and forcibly separated from his family, while the son of the plantation owner, the one who gave Tom the name “Uncle Tom,” swears to raise enough money to eventually buy him back home. The remainder of the narrative focuses on Tom’s trips through the south, being sold from plantation to plantation and the lives of the various other slaves and white slave masters around him.

So, now for the one million dollar question: Is it any good? Well… it’s a mixed bag. On the plus side, this does have a reputation as being one of the best and most faithful adaptations of the book available. I haven’t read the book, but judging from this the story is a very good one. It doesn’t take the obvious, lazy road of pounding a message about equality into your head. Rather, the film tries to show slavery from all points, good and bad, in order to show that even when slave owners have the best of intentions, the institution of slavery is just a fundamentally flawed system. Also, most of the acting, especially that of the main lead, is quite solid, with the exception of every God-awful child actor that makes an appearance.

On the downside, this movie looks and sounds REALLY cheap. Granted this is a made for TV movie from the 80s so you’d likely expect problems like that, but here it can get just plain sad at times. For example, when one of Tom’s owners gets stabbed to death in a drunken bar fight not only can the production not afford to show any blood, they actually have to resort to having the assailant stick a clearly plastic knife in between the man’s arm and chest, like how little kids stage death scenes in elementary school plays. Yikes.

Actually, in the time since I watched the movie, I’ve discovered that someone has put the entire thing up on YouTube in 9 parts. It appears to be the same recording I saw, complete with the same clearly scripted interview section in the beginning where a black college student reads off of a card explaining that the story itself is not racist. The audio in the YouTube versions appears worse than in the recording I have, but you can still make out what’s going on well enough.

So do I recommend it? Well, if the subject matter seems interesting to you than sure why not give it a watch. Just be sure you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into, a made for TV movie from the 80s. If nothing else, it’s a good chance to culture yourself with a great American classic for free. Certainly worse ways to kill time if you’re bored. It also finally answers the question for me as to what else Avery Brooks did besides Star Trek. He also recently appeared in a documentary by William Shatner about the various Star Trek Captains. I think I know what my next review is going to be about…

OBLIVION

Contributed by Marshall

I said at the beginning of the summer that I had access to a wondrous treasure trove of film oddities at my local rental establishment but have for the most part reviewed recent films.  This was mostly due to the fact that I have had more to say about the recent ones…and I’ve been busy.  But I feel that I have to get some of these in because they are low budget gems that show a lot of creativity and hard work on the part of everyone involved.  As promised I’m here to talk about the 1994 sci-fi western Oblivion.

Now most of you might think of a fantasy adventure game when you hear “oblivion”, but watch the movie, that will be your first thought for the rest of your life whenever you hear that word.  In a nutshell it’s a traditional rise to sheriff and bringing order to an outlaw plagued town kind of story.  There’s really nothing wrong with the plot, but it’s nothing special.  This movie did do three things very well.  The sets and costumes were very well done, the comedy was unpredictable and always on the mark, and the sci-fi elements were integrated well and were not simply gimmicks but were important to the plot and character development.

So far nothing I’ve said has made this movie sound that amazing.  However if you are a fan of George Takei this can’t be missed.  The production company Full Moon Entertainment has a history of finding actors and staff who have connections to one or more Star Trek series which makes for a lot of fun for Star Trek fans.  Another major project they released was Groom Lake which was starred in, written, directed and produced by William Shatner.  I’m not sure what the connection between this company and Star Trek is.  I suspect there is a common agent somewhere, but that’s not important.  What is important is that the script has no Star Trek jokes aside from one character, Doc Valentine, played by George Takei.  His antics as the drunken doctor and cyborg engineer were heavily marketed in the trailer with such memorable lines as “Great Scotty!” and “Jim Beam me up.”  

Full Moon Entertainment was originally founded as a low budget horror and dabbled a bit in low budget science fiction after a few successful horror franchises.  They quickly found their niche market in both horror and sci-fi creating two more branches of the company, Torchlight Entertainment which specialized in adult sci-fi titles and Moonbeam Entertainment, which focused on the family market, all the time with the continuous theme of low cost output.  When looking at the cast lists for Full Moon movies it is common to see actors and much of the crew filmographies overlap with other titles from the company.  While this is true for Oblivion, the special effects department was quite impressive.

While the comedy is great, the special effects are amazing.  By amazing I’m not referring to the eye popping CGI that we get nowadays, oh no!  I’m talking about the old time Ray Harryhausen Claymation effects!  The movie takes place on a desert planet and as far as the audience can tell, the only native animals are giant monster scorpions.  Stop motion animator Joel Fletcher headed these segments.  He also did work on such movies as The Nightmare Before Christmas, King Kong, and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.  And while the visual effects department for this film consisted of only six people, only one did not have an impressive filmography of summer blockbusters and A-list movies.  

However this film is far more cerebral than you might think given that it is a western with a generic plot set in the future on a cowboy planet.  The special effects while entertaining are few and far between.  The cast is made up of mostly extras or actors making the rounds as guest “stars” on television.  The real entertainment comes in when you realize that there is actual conflict and character development in this movie, something Hollywood has rejected as an outdated mode of film making in recent years.  There is genuine conflict in the town brought under the control of the outlaw gang and the only person who can stop them, the son of the slain sheriff, is unwilling to help for unexplained reasons facing ridicule and hate from the townsfolk.  It’s one of those movies where they don’t push a moral message as character motivation making the character universal but bland, but instead there is are actual unique circumstances for all the characters that dictate their motivations and actions.  I have to say that it was very refreshing.  And even though on paper the plot is deathly grim and George Takei actually gives an amazing performance, legitimately pulling at our heartstrings, it never loses sight of the fact that it’s a silly movie, and the next brush with comedy is never far away.  

The comedy is a success on several levels.  There is the dark comedy of the shadowy undertaker who is never rattled but everyone is terrified of.  There is the ridiculousness of the scenario of cowboys on an alien planet.  There are numerous references to Star Trek.  There are many instances where westerns as a genre are lampooned.  The great thing about it though is that most of it is spoken.  There are a few instances of slapstick but for the most part the humor is in the dialog, and a movie that is both visually rich and captures your auditory attention is always a winner.

One of the reasons I was so upset with Cowboys & Aliens was that it took itself too seriously.  But let me ask you what really good action movie doesn’t have comedy.  Ok, so maybe The Terminator wasn’t funny, but Terminator 2 had great comedy and so did Die Hard, a trait that it kept all the way through 3 sequels.  Seeing a movie like Oblivion really eased my mind after watching Cowboys & Aliens.  This is an old idea and one that budding creators have typically dabbled in for fun.  The idea of mixing westerns and science fiction go back to Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Princess of Mars.  Lost in Space did it, Star Trek did it, Battlestar Galactica did it, numerous comics have played with the idea including like Iron West.  Hollywood made a crucial mistake in forking over the money for Cowboys & Aliens and that was underestimating the power of creativity.  Oblivion and all of the other projects I have mentioned here went in new directions and took risks making fresh new stories and images that spur the imagination, and that’s what people expect from this mix of themes.  Oblivion stands as a testament to what a small group of talented and creative storytellers can do with limited resources.  You may not think much of the final product, but you can sure tell everyone had a good time making it.  

Movies Referenced:

2011-Cowboys & Aliens

2005-King Kong

2002-Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

2002-Groom Lake

1994-Oblivion

1993-The Nightmare Before Christmas

1991-Terminator 2

1988-Die Hard

1984-The Terminator

DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK II

Contributed by Dave

Ok, challenge time!

To all aspiring film makers out there; complete my test and I shall forever grant you a place in DAVE’S HALL OF LEGENDARY FILM MAKING GODS where you will receive all the glory and accolades that honor entails… from me. The Challenge before you: Make me an effective horror movie about the Tooth Fairy! Think you’re up to it? If the answer is no, well quite frankly I don’t blame you.

To the best of my knowledge, the only other time a horror movie has had the balls to tackle this concept was back in 2003 with “Darkness Falls,” and even then I wouldn’t so much say that movie had balls, so much as I would say it just didn’t have the good sense to know when it had failed, or how badly. It was an amateurishly done ghost story about a kindly(?) old woman who happens to collect teeth from local children. After being unjustly murdered by a random lynch mob (Standard Plot Device for B-Horror Movies) returns from the grave as a... well, a vengeful tooth fairy. It’s been many a year since I last saw Darkness Falls and I don’t plan to do so again for the sake of this review, but when I try to recall that particular movie watching experience, fear is not one of the emotions I remember feeling. I do remember it was horror(?) director Jonathan Liebesman’s most unintentionally funny movie, but dubius honor may shift hands next year when Liebesman unleashes “wrath of the Titans,” a sequel to the 2010 remake of “Clash of the Titans.” Excited? 

On a happier note, I am very pleased to tell you that the same panning I just gave “Darkness Falls” cannot be said about the film de jour, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.” “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” is a genuinely frightening and well crafted horror movie from newcomer director Troy Nixey, whose filmography is limited to this and a fairly cool 17 minute YouTube video called, “Latchkey’s Lament,” and veteran movie writers / directors Matthew Robbins and Guillermo del Toro.

 Robbins  is a writer I’ve had my eye on for a while now as he’s currently attached to the movie adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness;” and to add to his street cred, he also helped write “Close Encounters of the 3^rd Kind,” an all time classic of Sci-fi movies. Also on a somewhat random note, he wrote the inexplicable “Corvette Summer;” just Google the poster and you’ll see what I mean, special surprise for all Star Wars fans included!

Guillermo del Toro is a writer whose talents have already been more than adequately demonstrated in his own, very impressive filmography, which has already earned him his place in DAVE’S HALL OF LEGENDARY FILM MAKING GODS and his influence clearly shows on this film.  Like most of del Toro’s works, the atmosphere of this film feels like a vibrant yet dark, adult fairy tale, but more on that in a bit.

“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” is actually a remake of the 1973 made for TV movie bearing the same name. Sadly I can’t say I’ve seen the original, but I’ve heard that it too is a fairly creepy film, if a tad sexist. The plot of the original film centers around a newlywed couple moving into an inherited house which (Surprise!) turns out to be haunted by demons summoned by the wife’s father. The bulwark of that film revolves around the wife’s vain attempts to convince her husband of the dangers of the house while he scoffs at her female hysteria (See what I mean about the sexism thing?). That little tidbit is unfortunately all I can say on the original right now, since I haven’t actually seen it for myself. My mother told me it was good and the way I see it, if she remembers a made for TV movie from the70s it’s likely got SOMETHING memorable to it.

The remake adds a step daughter into the mix, whom the demons focus their primary attention on. As I said before, the demons are tooth fairies, but in the old European tradition of the term, I.E. little monsters that hid in the swamp and fed on the bones and teeth of children who were unfortunate enough to wander into the muck. They also left coins under children’s pillows in exchange for children’s baby teeth. Bet you never thought the tooth fairy was actually eating those things, did you? Childhood memories tainted yet?

These particular monsters inhabit a pit underneath the house in question and attempt to lure / trick / kidnap humans into the basement to satiate their hunger. Also, since the creature can’t stand to be in the light, hence the title, many of the scenes involve watching the critters find inventive ways to surround their potential victims in darkness where they quickly transform into an easy, calcium rich meal. There’s a particularly creepy scene near the beginning where the fairies con the house’s previous owner into killing his maid by getting him to drive a steel pick through her clenched teeth. Don’t we all love appetizers before the main course?

The big selling point of this movie is del Toro’s style, which as I said before oozes all over this film’s look, but in a good way. From the Old World European looks of the opening credits, to the family’s first visit to the formerly sealed-off basement, to the shots of the little girl’s Victorian bedroom at night when the creatures prowl through shadows in the lamp light, this film is a real visual treat. I’d actually compare it to an early Tim Burton film, you know, the type he used to make before he started with the CG cinematic poison of recent years.

While I did really like this movie, that isn’t to say it’s perfect. I’m not sure how effective it is for a horror movie to show the monster(s) so early on in the beginning, nor do think it’s a good idea give them as much cheesy dialogue as they seem to get. Also, while all the performances are all very good, especially that of twelve year old Bailee Madison who really steals the show, the family’s dynamics are more than a bit clichéd. Aww, step-daughter doesn’t like her dad’s new wife and feels all alone. Never seen THAT before in anything.

That said, these problems are very minor and really don’t ruin the movie watching experience and because of that, I’d strongly recommend this to you if you’re into horror films. If nothing else, if you’re looking forward to “At the Mountains of Madness,” whenever it FINALLY comes out, this may be a promising look into what you could possible expect. Till then, be sure to keep those pearly whites nice and clean for any hungry dinner guests.

DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

Contributed by Jeremy

The new horror movie Don’t be Afraid of The Dark knows how to draw the audience from the very beginning.  An extremely powerful opening scene (which I believe is the sole reason for its “R” rating) builds up for some great expectations.  As one theater-goer in the row behind me put it before the opening credits scrawled, “that’s one ****ed up way to start a movie!”  Does it live up to its incredible potential brought up in the opener?  Not really, but it’s still worth watching.

Written by horror enthusiast Guillermo Del Toro, and directed by Troy Nixey (which appears to be his first feature film to direct) one can immediately tell these guys know a thing or two about horror.  The shots bleed tension when required, and the plot is given ample enough time to cook into a climatic finale.  The movie is surprisingly character driven, perhaps too much so, but it’s required for the payoff.  The kooky original premise brings a lot to the table as well (think the tooth fairy gone wrong).

Sally has her fair share of problems. Over medicated by her mom, and seeing a therapist, she now has to adjust to moving in with her dad while he is seeing somebody new.  Played by Bailee Madison she is depicted with the appropriate level of disconnection and curiosity for a young girl in her position.  Her dad is somewhat of an architect/home renovator and Sally must stay in one of the mansions he is renovating.  However, the previous owners are still there lurking around, and Sally’s curiosity gets the better of her.  Of course her dad (Guy Pearce) and his girlfriend (Katie Holmes) don’t believe her when she says she hears voices that eventually lead her to a secret chamber that was previously walled up.  Unfortunately that’s where these creatures reside and Sally is eventually responsible for freeing them.  Even after the friendly groundskeeper gets killed by these strange creatures the parents still dismiss Sally’s claims as an overactive imagination of a troubled child.  But they can’t stop there, they need Sally for her teeth because it’s what apparently keeps them alive…for some reason.  They’ve been doing this for a while, they’re evil just go with it.

Which brings me to my main conflict with the movie.  The creatures we are supposed to find scary; are they scary enough?  They are certainly some ugly bastards, a mix between a monkey and a rodent, but are they scary?  They are for a great deal of the film due to the smart decision to show them sparsely from the shadows or bold quick in your face close ups, but by the end of the film where they are given more screen time, things start to fall apart.  I questioned if it was due to the fact that they were CG creations, and not something like stop motion which is always inherently creepy due to the unnatural otherworldly motions caused by the process.  When we see Sally take these things on in the third act, which she does with just a camera (they have a weakness to bright light) and a blunt object you start to wonder if they are really that threatening or the adults in this movie are just really incompetent.

Not to mention some things don’t really jive together story wise.  If you stop for a minute and think about some elements to the plot, it just may ruin the experience for you.  All in all Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark offers an original premise with moments of hair raising tension.  Too bad it ultimately couldn’t live up its potential.

COWBOYS & ALIENS

So far this summer has been a massive disappointment with regard to Hollywood output.  This summer broke last summer’s record for most sequel and franchise movies.  On top of that, the few movies that did not fall into these categories were not original ideas and were based on previously existing media.  After the mediocrity of the summer I was really looking forward to the quirky western sci-fi mix-up that is Cowboys & Aliens.  I did not leave the theater in a good mood…

This was a film that had everything going for it.  Good actors, a well known director, story already written in the form of a comic book, good visuals, interesting premise, and yet it was embarrassing to sit there knowing I had paid to see this movie.

As far as casting they did a great job.  Both James Bond and Han Solo in the same movie!  Wow!  How can you not want to see that team up!  Well in theory that’s a good idea, but in practice everyone involved seemed to be anticipating this film being a blow to their careers and exhibited as little emotion and excitement in their performances as possible.  Harrison Ford in particular seemed incredibly bored through the entire movie even when he is supposed to be near homicidal rage.  I have heard varying opinions on Daniel Craig’s performance.  He has almost as few lines as Arnold Schwarzenegger in his early movies due to his heavy accent and inability to speak English.  Daniel Craig seemed to suffer the same problem as his American accent sounds ridiculous.  I have heard his lack of lines was intentional to promote his “badass image”, but when most of his dialogue consists of “I don’t know.” (he has amnesia) he doesn’t come across as very threatening, just incredibly lucky that all his crazy cowboy antics don’t get him killed at any point in the movie.  There are a host of other characters in the film and all of them are sadly two dimensional.  The spoiled rich kid, the Nurturing preacher, the kindly sheriff, the bullied bartender, the crying child…do you see a pattern?  Take a noun representing the character’s physical features then give them an adjective to define how they act, and voilà! you have a screenplay! I don’t know if this was a product of copying characters from the original comic (because not one of the original character names has survived as far as I can tell) but if it was, whoever was in charge of this project should have been sacked for thinking this would make a good movie.

By far my biggest complaint about the characters was how little they grew and developed, and my broader complain about Hollywood in general, how we are forced to sympathize with them.  Let’s take a look at the characters.  Daniel Craig’s character, Jake Lonergan, is revealed to be murdering, looting, pillaging, arsonist, gang leader with a huge bounty on his head.  One might think that we are supposed to sympathize with him because he’s a completely different person now that he’s lost his memory.  We’ll he’s not.  He still goes around picking fights with every person he meets needlessly killing and causing massive bodily injury along the way almost killing his friends several times.  Our hero everyone!  But how about Harrison Ford?  Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde spoils his son rotten and protects him from the law so his son can go riding around and shoot up the town whenever he wants.  When we first see Dolarhyde, he is torturing one of his hired hands over some cattle the aliens killed.  Through the movie his past in the army is alluded to where he was a racist Indian butcher and feared by his men.  Some of these stories are implied to be fiction he made up so that makes him a habitual liar too.  This is indicative of a broader issue in Hollywood.  In attempts to prevent the writing of Mary Sue like characters who have absolutely no flaws, it seems like Hollywood writers have started leaning towards the anti-hero turned hero strategy where the character is initially a horrible monster and in an attempt for redemption or some other change of heart they earn their hero status by the end of the story.  This can be done incredibly well like in Angel, but character motivation must be clear and make sense.  

The moral shifts in this movie make no sense at all.  Throughout the film there is this theme of fatherhood surrounding Harrison Ford’s character.  When he was in the army, after a battle the only survivor was an Indian child who he took into his home and gave a job.  Nat Colorado, now grown and Dolarhyde’s son’s bodyguard is devoted to his boss and ends up dying protecting Dolarhyde in the search for his kidnapped son.  This tragic story ends with Colorado saying he always wanted a father like Dolarhyde, who replies “I always wanted a son like you.”  Wow!  That’s kind of a blow since all this was to get his asshole son back.  You might think that when he gets his son back Dolarhyde would realize that his poor parenting had ruined his son and would whip him into shape.  But no, instead this seems to have the opposite effect and he spoils his son even more by making him a partner in the family business, effectively giving his son half the town.  The son doesn’t seem to be a jerk anymore, but what kind of character development did he go through?  He spends most of the movie in a coma.  None of the character actions in this movie made any sense and if you paid attention it was very difficult to sympathize with any of them.  We are just supposed to take it for granted that the humans are all good guys by the end even though it makes no sense for any of them to have changed at all.

This film has had an enormous marketing campaign that has been said to be even larger than Green Lantern’s and has been going full blast for a year now.  One of the things that was pushed as hard as anything was that Cowboys & Aliens was from the same director as Iron Man, Jon Favreau.  Now Iron Man is a masterpiece and it is still my favorite Marvel Studios movie.  After this though I think it will be clear to everyone how incompetent Jon Favreau is at directing and that Iron Man was a fluke due to the input he let everyone else on the project put into their work.  On his own, he is a failure, as we should have figured out from his filmography thus far.  As far as cinematography it was amateurish.  The movie starts with a very sloppy panning shot which astounded me.  I have done very little camera work in my time but from what I have done I can recognize good and bad work and that was bad.  The shaky-cam also got to me.  This was one of the things I liked most of all about 300.  When there was something impressive going on it would go into slow motion and give you enough space to see the action.  This film had a lot of good action but the camera was often shaking so much it was near impossible to tell what was going on.  Several times in the movie someone would get killed and then appear in the next scene.  I only thought they had died because the camera was shaking so much it was impossible to even identify major characters in the action sequences.

The story was an embarrassment even to the recent summer movies.  It was made up of nothing but clichés which could have been done with an air of comedy but was instead done completely straight which came across as childish for a movie of this scale.  For a movie called Cowboys & Aliens you might think that the film makers would bring a little humor to the table with such a ridiculous concept, but you would be wrong.  Not even witty one liners, which is in part due to Daniel Craig saying nothing at all.  Every once and a while it seemed like someone was trying for a one liner as if the concept was described and then translated through 4 different languages before it reached the script writers.  The “humor” was very poor and the audience seemed to be laughing only to fool themselves into thinking the movie was good enough for their money.  The biggest laugh in the theater was a weak response from the audience when our heroes are riding out to chase the aliens and the token woman character asks if she can join them.  The preacher says, “Sure, we have a kid and a dog why not a woman”…get it?  I didn’t think so.  And that was the funniest part of the movie based on the audience reaction.  

Not to spoil anything but the motivation of the aliens is gold.  That’s it.  They are mining for gold.  This raises a few worrisome parallels.  What was the last film we saw with aliens and miners?  That’s right, Avatar, and what was the most criticized aspect of that movie?  The story.  There is also a heavy native land theme with the Indian wars and then the aliens coming to wipe out the new white settlers.  If Avatar was criticized for its overly done Dances with Wolves theme then I see no reason for Cowboys & Aliens not to bare the same shame.  What I and my viewing companion found more disturbing was the eerie similarity to Battlefield Earth.  There, aliens invaded Earth in the pursuit of gold and a vastly underdeveloped culture thrashed them and kicked them off the planet.  Not good that your plot is readily compared to Battlefield Earth guys.  There are also themes akin to The Treasure of the Sierra Madres in that old adage money is the root of all evil, or in this case, gold is the root of all evil.  It seems that every character that pursues gold be it Lonergan, aliens, whoever, nothing good comes from it.  I reject this reference on grounds that I don’t believe the film makers were competent enough to do this as an intentional reference.

There were a lot of moments in this film that didn’t work or seemed weirdly inappropriate.  Maybe they were going for edgy and failing.  Maybe my mind is just really twisted and makes connections that aren’t there.  I would like to bring up that the aliens are defeated as the end of the movie by having their rocket blown up as they are lifting off, trying to get back to space.  This movie came out within a week of the end of the Space Shuttle Program which had two midair liftoff explosions just like the one in the movie.  Maybe it’s just the conspiracy theorist in me, but I think it might have been intentional.

I was intensely disappointed by this film which could have been really fun and instead is a stain on the good name of the sci-fi western genre.  Thankfully there are enough good movies out there this won’t ruin the genre.  I hope audiences realize how bad this is before they give too much money to the theaters, though based on the action I believe this movie will make up for its losses just on the low brow action market.  This left a sour taste in my mouth.  To make up for it, tune in next week for a good sci-fi western!

PS: This review is coming out a couple weeks after I wrote it, and I’m pleased to say that at the time of this publication, the box office take has been a complete bomb, I hope everyone involved learned their lesson and actually puts substance in their next movies.

Movies Referenced:

2011-Cowboys & Aliens

2009-Avatar

2008-Iron Man

2006-300

2000-Battlefield Earth

1999-Angel

1990-Dances with Wolves

1948-The Treasure of the Sierra Madres