After stumbling upon The Quest recently I've been in the mood to try and seek out some other obscure (or at least slightly forgotten) films from the 80s that I've missed out on over the years.  Since I'm not into picking up bootlegs these days though, I've felt pretty limited as far as where to look.  There are a number of films on Youtube, but the quality is typically pretty rough, rough enough to make sitting through a couple hours of choppy, static-y video migraine-inducing.  After weighing the options I decided to pop for a Netflix streaming package, if only for a month so that I'd have enough time to take in the complete Spiderman and His Amazing Friends series.

I've heard that their streaming selection is pretty bad, especially for newer stuff, but since my interests tend towards stuff that's at least 25 years old I thought there'd probably be enough to keep me occupied for awhile.  Boy, was I ever right on that mark.  Over the course of a week I've managed to dig up about 50 movies from their archives that look like the exact sort of flicks I want to dive into right now.  Not really knowing where to start, I decided to watch the first thing I stumbled across which was a weird sci-fi fantasy film from 1985 called The Dungeonmaster.  Much like The Quest, it's know by different titles depending on where you hail from, the most common alternate title being Ragewar…

Though I'd never seen this film before, there was something nagging at the back of my mind, a familiarity with the title and concept that I just couldn't shake.  It wasn't until afterwards while searching for some decent poster artwork that I stumbled upon the cover for the VHS home video release that it clicked.  I must have thumbed over this cover a million times while scoping out my local video stores as a kid.  The painting of W.A.S.P. frontman Blackie Lawless (who I always mistook for Ozzy Osbourne as a kid) with the wicked spiked headband and blood dripping down his chin and chest sent chills down my spine.  He looked like the seriously evil and really screwed up older brother of David Bowie's Jareth from Labyrinth…

Just to illustrate how awesome the cover artwork on VHS tapes were back in the day, this one was enticing but even so was still overshadowed by at least a thousand other choices.  These days, if I saw a film with poster artwork like this I'd call in sick from work to catch it in the theater.  Anyway, back to the flick.  The Dungeonmaster was following pretty closely on the heels of films like Tron and Mazes and Monsters, playing around with the concept of taking folks from the real world and thrusting them into the fantasy realm of video and role playing games.  The story centers on a computer geek named Paul who was part of a pilot program linking humans more directly to computers.  He has a very close relationship with his feminine PC at home which he's nicknamed Cal (short for X-Calibr8), who acts as his personal assistant that he can interface with via a special pair of glasses.

Actually, although Paul is the hero if the story, his creepy relationship/link with Cal sort of puts his heroics in a slightly dubious category.  When we're introduced to the character we discover that he works as an IT consultant who is letting Cal do all of the heavy lifting so to speak.  While at work Paul's glasses act as both a webcam for Cal and as mini display screens showing her commands.  It's a neat idea that the writers and directors make great pains to utilize repeatedly during the first 10 minutes of the film.  Paul uses his glasses to "hack" into practically every single computer system he comes by including one that controls the city's traffic lights (so he always gets his way.)  This culminates in a sequence where he realizes he's broke while trying to buy some flowers for his girlfriend.  Instead of passing them up, he hacks into the nearest ATM and steals twenty bucks from some stranger's account…

  

Not the most noble start for our hero, but I never held it against a young John Connor in Terminator 2, so I suppose I shouldn't split hairs here.  Back to the plot, Paul's been having weird dreams about his girlfriend where she's one part seductress and one part damsel in distress.  Though it's not clear in the film, I think Cal has been hacking away at Paul's brain while he sleeps in an effort to separate him from Gwen.  The flick opens with one of these dream sequences (which by the way, is the only portion of the film to feature R-rated material, in particular a full frontal nudity scene with Gwen), and in a second sequence it appears that Paul and Gwen are transported to a mythical wasteland…

  

This realm is ruled by the vile Mestema (played with fervor by Night Court's Richard Moll), an immortal wizard who is looking for people to torture and to face his evil challenges…

Mestema outfits Paul with some more appropriate clothes, as well as providing him access to his "magic" computer via a wristband controller device.  In the same breath he's chained Gwen up to a rock and issues Paul a challenge to face his seven tasks in exchange for liberation from this world.  If he fails, Mestema will keep Gwen and will kill Paul.

   

So much like Tron we have a nerdy character stuck inside a fantasy world where he must risk life and limb to escape, except in The Dungeonmaster that world is heavily influenced by table top role playing games.  Each of these seven challenges takes place in a different environment (and is written and directed by a slew of different people), from ancient temples with stop motion monkey god statues to ice caves populated by the souls of villains throughout time (including werewolves, Jack the Ripper, Genghis Kahn, and Albert Einstein?)…

  

There are also a couple of odd choices for environments, including a real-world scenario where Paul has to stop a serial killer in New York and a very stripped down Road Warrior-esque car chase sequence…

  

Though most of the film is pretty cheesy with horrible dialogue, acting and special effects, there are a few standout moments that make this flick worth watching.  If nothing else, the wide variety of effects work on display is kind of cool.  The film mixes stop motion and traditional back-lit 2D animation, as well as compositing and puppetry to bring the various villains and creatures to life.  There's a pretty goofy battle sequence between Paul and Mestema in the wasteland involving both magical and computer generated (conceptually, not animation-wise) dragons.  In fact it's so cheesy that it makes movies like John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China look like Citizen Kane in comparison...

There's also a really creepy sequence where Paul is zapped to the land of the dead in which he has to battle two undead zombie warriors as well as a demon puppet…

  

By far though, my favorite sequence has Paul whisked away to a heavy metal concert featuring the band W.A.S.P.  Paul has to save Gwen from a homicidal Blackie Lawless in what has to be the epitome of an over the top 80s metal music video…

  

I'd be lying through my teeth if I said that this film has aged well, but I also can't deny how much fun it was to watch.  If this is the sort of flicks that are populating the Netflix streaming archive than I might just have to keep the subscription going for awhile…

**UPDATE** The winner of the DVD has been picked, Jody Y., and has been notified via the Facebook messaging system.  Thanks to everyone who entered and keep an eye out for some more cartoon DVD give-aways on Branded soon!

I've been lamenting a lot about the downturn the cartoon-on-DVD industry seems to have taken in the past couple of years, but lately all that gloom and doom has been forgotten as a metric ton of new-to-DVD and catalog titles have been announced.  Leading the pack is Shout! Factory, who have managed to snag some of the more popular franchises in the last few years including G.I. Joe and the Transformers.  Having just announced the impending release of the complete version 1 of M.A.S.K. and the Japanese Transformers – Headmasters series, as well as the long-awaited re-release of Jem, Shout! is making fans of 80s era cartoons very happy.

As happy as I am to see these titles released, I've also been keeping a close eye on the folks over at Millcreek Entertainment who have also been very busy with a slew of re-releases of out-of-print Filmation classics as well as a bunch of other slightly more obscure cartoon releases.  In addition to picking up a bevy of the oop BCI Eclipse titles like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Defenders of the Earth, and Dungeons and Dragons, Millcreek has also partnered with Cookie Jar to start releasing some great new-to-DVD titles (including the stop-motion Paddington Bear shorts and the Get-Along Gang) as well as some other re-releases such as C.O.P.S. and The Littles.

I've been on the fence about how I feel about Millcreek's sets.  On the one hand they're one of the last few DVD production houses bothering to license and release older cartoons, but on the other they're concentration on slimmed-down budget releases leaves a lot to be desired at times.  Today I'm going to take a look at one of their newer re-releases, the Complete Bravestarr 7 disc set…

First thing's first, the term "complete" is pretty relative.  For fans of the Filmation Bravestarr cartoon, complete doesn't just refer to the 65 syndicated episodes of the series, but also the theatrical film, Bravestarr: The Legend.  Back when the series was first released by BCI Eclipse, the film was included as an extra on the Best Of Bravestarr release.  While at the time it seemed like BCI was doing a little double dipping on the Best Of set (knowing that real fans of the show would re-purchase those episodes when the complete series was released later that year), the inclusion of the movie made it fully worth the purchase price.  As for the Millcreek re-releases, I'm not sure if we're going to see the movie included or not.  In addition to the Complete Series set, they're also releasing two slimmer volumes, each including 20 episodes of the series.  I'm wondering if they're planning on following this up with a third volume with the remaining 25 episodes and the movie, but time will only tell...

Though I'm a bit bummed that the movie wasn't included in this set, I do have to admit that at around $30 you're certainly getting your money's worth.  Millcreek has kept to their budget, stacked-sleeved DVD keepcase design, but with this set they've brought up the quality a bit both in terms of aesthetics and value.  The cover artwork is a variation of the same great art used on the BCI version of the sets, and for the first time that I've noticed they've included a handy episode guide that fits right in with the stack of DVDs.  With a lot of their past complete series sets Millcreek didn't include guides which made flipping through a stack of 5 to 20 DVDs a nightmare for trying to find specific episodes (in particular, their 21 Jumpstreet set really suffered from this.)  Like the cover art, the guide contains episode synopses and trivia culled from the BCI sets (and written by James Eatock of the wonderful Cereal Geek magazine.)

This set also includes a handful of the documentary interviews Andy Mangels produced for the original BCI sets that include conversations with Lou Scheimer, Pat Fraley, Tom Sito, and Tom Tataranowicz, as well as a commentary track on the episode "Eye of the Beholder".

As far as the visual/audio quality of the set goes, it's pretty good.  It's not as crisp and clean as the BCI release (especially the audio), but when you consider the price of the set it's more than adequate and should please casual fans of the series.

Now lets get down to the contest!  If you missed out on the BCI release of Bravestarr, and would like to win this very full review copy of MillCreek's Complete 65 episode series set, then head on over to the Branded in the 80s Facebook page (like it if you haven't) and leave a comment/response on the discussion board under the Bravestarr DVD Contest thread with the name of your favorite Bravestarr character.  I'll be picking a winner at random on Thursday, June 9th at 2:00pm est.  Remember, these are region 1 DVDs, so if you’re an international reader take note.  Good luck!

After reviewing the documentary, Candyman: The Dave Klein story, the film (and Hillary Buckholtz over at I'm Remembering) reminded me that I had yet to talk about another flick that I'd been meaning to write about for a while, The Rock-afire Explosion.  The two documentaries are very similar in that they focus on genius inventors who have been all but forgotten by their chosen industries and have gone under appreciated in the pop culture they helped to shape.  I popped the flick back into the DVD player this weekend though and decided it's time to share my thoughts…

All the world's a stage and history is apparently nothing more than a collection of script revisions.  Whether it's the question of who invented the Jelly Belly jelly bean, or who designed and built the first Whac-a-Mole, the truth isn't always what's recorded.  In the case of the Whac-a-Mole, a quick Google search leads to the company that "originated" it, Bob's Space Racers.  The website describes how it all began "…in 1976 when the crew at Bob's Space Racers, Inc. developed the first working game for a customer who wanted to try the new concept at a carnival midway…"

What the site neglects to mention is that what they "developed" was reverse-engineered from a prototype they purchased that was designed and built by a guy named Aaron Fechter (who was developing it for a carnival that ended up selling it to Bob's Space Racers.)  Fechter even came up with the name for the game, Whac-a-Mole.  Very similar to how Dave Klein was written out of the history of Jelly Belly, Aaron Fechter was dropped from the story of the Whac-a-Mole.  But that's not all there is to Fechter’s legacy, and the anecdote about the famous midway game is only a segway into a much more interesting story, the rise and fall of America's most famous animatronic band, the Rock-afire Explosion!

For most kids growing up in the early 80s there was only one place they wanted to go for birthday parties and celebrations, Showbiz Pizza Place.  It's where a kid can be a kid, at least it was if you bought the pizza chain's tag line, and from the ages of three to ten I was drunk on that company’s Kool-Aid.  From Skee Ball, what seemed like hundreds of arcade games, ball pits, and the afore-mentioned Whac-a-Mole, to tiny completely-carpeted rooms lit by strobe lights under the main stage, game tickets, prizes, pizza, soda by the pitcher, and a little animatronic band called the Rock-afire Explosion, these were the ingredients for legendary birthday parties when I was a kid.  I've podcasted and written about my love of Showbiz Pizza and Chuck-E-Cheese at length before, and how it's almost impossible, even with some remaining C-E-C franchises still open, to get back that feeling of what it was like to dine and play in these establishments as a kid.  Though I was lucky enough to grow up less than 30 miles from Walt Disney World, I can only imagine that for kids that lived in other states, Showbiz was like a mini Disney theme park.  Sure, there weren't any roller coasters or dark rides, but who cared about those when you had a band full of animatronic, anthropomorphic animals belting out great music from the 60s, 70s and 80s at your birthday party?

When I first started Branded in the 80s back in 2006, one of the first bits of obscure childhood bliss that I wanted to talk about was the Rock-afire Explosion.  So when I discovered that there was a documentary detailing the rise and fall of the Showbiz Pizza phenomena, the band's creator Aaron Fechter, and how a handful of fans have been striving to bring back the magic I was ecstatic…

Produced and directed by Brett Whitcomb, the film starts with a tone setting awkward pause as Aaron Fechter is gathering his thoughts about the legacy of his creation.  Honestly, these first few seconds were a bit unnerving for me as I was afraid of the direction the film would take.  If there's one certainty about 80s era fandom, it's that people either love it or mock it, and usually people just love to mock it.  Though I personally find the sarcastic mean humor that's rife with 80s homages boring and overdone, it's the route that most people take, and when all is said and done this documentary walks a pretty precarious tightrope act, only dipping it’s toes into smarminess a couple of times.

The flick is comprised of a series of talking head interviews with Rock-afire Explosion creator Aaron Fechter (and his significant other Kerry), super-fans Chris Thrash, Mike Scherpenberg, Damon Breland, as well as showbizpizza.com head honcho Travis Schafer, intermixed with old vhs video footage of Showbiz commercials, local news clips, company tapes, and some vintage behind the scenes footage of Creative Engineering.  Basically, we follow the story of Fechter, a genius inventor who graduated college at the age of 19, and Chris Thrash, a fan so dedicated to the Rock-afire Explosion that he sought out Fechter so that he could purchase his very own animatronic band.  In a way, Thrash can be attributed with a lot of the recent fan-fair of the Rock-afire nostalgia as his desire to own a copy of the band, and through a series of youtube videos where he programmed them to play some current music has breathed new life into the property.

   

   

"I believe that you should be a child at heart and don't be ashamed of it. Y ou know if there's something you dreamed or you wanted to do when you was a kid, then do it.  You dreamed it for a reason.  And I dreamed to have this, and I had it.  Some people like it, some people don't, but I don't care, it's mine." -Chris Thrash

As a kid, one of the coolest aspects of the band and stage show at Showbiz Pizza was that it was like seeing Sesame Street, the Muppets, or Pinwheel live, right in front of your eyes.  In the film fan Mike Scherpenberg really puts in context what it was like for a kid when he says, "If you didn't grow up with it, then you can't understand what it meant. It was like meeting a real celebrity…"  And it was. Even growing up in Orlando and having the opportunity to mingle with all of the "characters" at Disney World, seeing the Rock-afire Explosion was so much cooler because they talked and blinked, and ironically just felt more real.  It was truly like seeing a cartoon character coming to life.  Subsequently I probably would have flipped my lid had I realized that I lived so close to the home the Rock-afire, Creative Engineering in Orlando...

   

Looking back, one of the things I really respect was the amount of thought and back-story went into each of these characters.  Whether it's good-natured country bumpkin Billy Bob (the face of Showbiz), Fatz Geronimo (piano player and leader of the band), fan-favorite Dook Larue (the astro-dog who played some mean drums), Beach Bear (the resident cut-up, surfer, guitar playing polar bear), Mitzi (the slightly ditzy cheerleader mouse and only female on the stage), or even Rolfe & Earl (the Don Rickels of animatronics), each of these characters was unique and well thought out.

   

   

With that in mind, the filmmakers managed to address some odd aspects of this kind of fandom by cutting in both vintage footage of the Creative Engineering workshop with exposed endoskeletons of the various characters in production, as well as current bits with Thrash, Schafer, and Breland grooming their animatronics.  It's a not-so-subtle way of reminding the viewer that this fandom, as well as most fandom of fictional characters, is a little hollow and can be very strange the closer you get to it.  There's a bit where Thrash recalls pulling back the curtain once at a show and climbing on stage coming face to face with the frozen robots.  It reminds me of Will Wheaton taking about his experience "meeting" the Muppets back in the 90s at the peak of his Star Trek popularity.   As he watched the puppeteers open a series of drawers and pull the lifeless bodies of these characters out it sort of ruined the magic of the shows and movies.  Personally, this is the sort of touching awkwardness that I can totally relate to, and I think it addresses an honest harshness of fandom, in particular this sort of extreme fandom.  In fact, there's a bit in the film that shows Mitzi Mozzarella being decommissioned as Showbiz was being integrated into Chuck-E Cheese, and there's a quick shot of her right after some workers lifted off her cheerleader's uniform.  I actually gasped a bit at seeing the animatronic's bare breasts exposed.  What's left of the kid in me found that weirdly obscene…

   

Where the documentary falls apart a little for me though, is when it strays away from this honest representation of fandom and wanders into more voyeuristic territory.   Everyone has a little weird in them, and it's no secret that geeks, nerds, dweebs and dorks typically have more than their fair share.  The flick gets a little uncomfortable for me when it unfortunately starts to focus more on the quirks of the fans and of Aaron Fechter. It starts to feel like its taking advantage of them for entertainment's sake, working in aspects of their lives that aren't that important to the narrative.  There's a bit around the 25 minute mark where Thrash starts talking about his habitual Mountain Dew drinking, and you can feel the film shift away from a celebration of Showbiz Pizza and the Rock-Afire Explosion to his lifestyle as a person outside of the fandom.  Similarly there are moments with Fechter and his relationship with super-fan Kerry that gives the impression that he's kind of a creepy old man.  I question whether this benefits the story the filmmakers are trying to convey, or if it sort of undermines any celebration of this nostalgia.

   

Lucklily these uncomfortable bits don't go on for too long, and in the end the film gets back on track, digging into why Showbiz Pizza and the band are so interesting.  I was glad to also get an opportunity to see some of the performers behind the characters as there's some footage shot during one of the recording sessions that's pretty interesting and features glimpses of Aaron Fechter (who voiced Billy Bob), Shalisa James (Mitzi), Rick Bailey (Beach Bear), Duke Chauppetta (Dook), and Burt Wilson (Fatz) performing.  The music in the film is also great with some songs by the Super Furry Animals, and overall a great score.  It's also fascinating to see the extent that some of these fans go to, to reclaim a bit of their childhood.  Purchasing whole shows (as the set up off all the animatronic characters are referred to in the documentary) for god only knows how much money and setting them up in specially constructed garages and rooms just blows me away.

   

   

All in all, there's a lot to love about this documentary, and I wish there were more flicks out there like it shining the spotlight on some obscure but awesome bits of what it was like to grow up in the 80s. 

As a last bit I thought I'd share two of my favorite pictures from celebrating my birthday at Showbiz as a kid.  Though I look less than thrilled in the group photo (that's me in the back on the right), I really did love that place…

Well, even though the market for classic cartoons on DVD seems to be unfortunately drying up, there are still a handful of companies taking the chance to release some great shows.   One in particular is Millcreek Entertainment.  Though they typically seem to concentrate on public domain material, in the last couple of years they've been actively acquiring licenses and partnering with other studios to act as the DVD production and distribution house.  In fact they've begun re-releasing a lot of the cartoons that BCI Eclipse was putting over the last ten years (stuff like Dungeons and Dragons, Defenders of the Universe, and even Bravestarr.)  They've also recently teamed up with Cookie Jar, the company that rose out of the ashes of Cinar Films and DiC, to start releasing a bunch of their cartoons on DVD.  One of the these titles I was really happy to see is the complete Paddington Bear, which is coming out on DVD today, February 15th…

I have a ton of fond memories watching the Paddington Bear shorts (including the awesome theme music) during Pinwheel on Nickelodeon back in the 80s.  In fact I still feel very lucky that my parents popped for cable because I was introduced to a lot of imported shows and shorts from all over the world, almost all of which came to me through Nickelodeon.  Simon in the Land of Chalk, Danger Mouse, Count Duckula, Belle & Sebastian, the Little Prince, Bunny in the Suitcase, the Hattytown Tales, and of course that adorable marmalade-eating, stow-away bear from the darkest reaches of Peru, Paddington.  The UK series originally aired between 1975 and 1978, and had three follow-up specials that aired in 1980, 84, and 86.  I vividly remember watching it during Pinwheel sometime between 1982 and 1987…

Paddington is based on a series of books written by an ex-camera operator for the BBC named Michael Bond.  He began the adventures of Paddington in 1959 and is still writing them to this day.  As far as the series goes, it was produced by a company called FilmFair, and was directed by the wonderful stop motion animator Ivor Wood.  The series was shot in a very interesting variation of stop motion that blended puppetry with hand-drawn paper cut-outs which gave the show a very convincing storybook look. It didn’t hurt that the series was also narrated by a single actor (the sweet dulcet voice-work of Michael Hordern), so it added a book-on-tape sort of feel to the production.

The gist of the story centers on a chance encounter in a train station where the Brown family happen on a little bear in a clunky over-sized hat and a duffle coat who secretly immigrated to the UK from Peru.  The family decides to adopt the bear and name him Paddington after the Paddington station where they found him.  He might as well be a propber British bear as he loves his marmalade sandwiches and always has time to take tea with family and friends.  Of course in the process of exploring his new hometown he gets himself into all sorts of unfortunate situations, but such is the life for a little brown bear.

  

One of the aspects that I love about this series is the interesting take on the animation.  In the series there is an odd style which mixes puppetry and miniatures with paper cutouts.   Basically, Paddington and the immediate area surrounding him is typically shot in miniatures while all of the characters and environments not directly in contact with him is done as drawings on paper, though they aren't combined in post production, but instead all short together on film.  It makes for a very distinct look and tone, not to mention some crazy jump-cuts where a paper figure will hand a paper prop to Paddington that becomes a miniature after the jump.

  

The Millcreek/Cookie Jar set is (I believe) the first time that the complete series has been released on DVD with all 56 episodes.  It also features the three later specials that I remember also watching on HBO on Sunday mornings during their kid's block of programming.  These specials have a slightly different look where Paddington sheds his black hat and dark blue duffle coat in favor of a light blue coat, a yellow hat and little yellow rain boots. These specials also updated the look of the paper-cutout animation, increasing the number of "frames" and getting rid of any extra white paper halos around the figures.  They look a lot cleaner and much less clunkily animated than the original series, but all of it is gold in my book…

  

This set also features a bunch of bonus episodes from two other FilmFair UK stop motion series, five episodes of the Wombles (1973) and ten episodes of Huxley Pig (1989)…

  

I’d never seen these series growing up, but they've very similar in look and tone to Paddington.  I'm secretly hopping that Millcreek and Cookie Jar will see fit to also put some episodes of Hattytown Tales on DVD in the near future (please, please, oh please!)

As far as this set goes, it's super affordable at $16 for the whole shebang, which honestly is what Millcreek does best.  The packaging is in the new style (discs housed in individual sleeves that snap into the clamshell case) that I'm not a fan of (see my review of the Complete 21 Jump Street for pictures), but at only 3 discs it's nowhere near as frustrating as some of their other sets.  The picture quality is a little jumpy and grainy, but at this price it's really a non-issue.  All in all, if you grew up with the British and Canadian programming available on Nickelodeon then this is a must have set that will bring back all sorts of fond memories…

I never questioned whether or not history was written in stone until I had my eyes opened by a cheerleading coach in my senior year of high school.   No, I wasn’t in the cheerleading program, Coach Gordon also taught World History at my school.  During the one semester I spent in that class there were a couple of things he really opened my eyes to, one being the definition of the word usurp, and the other was the concept of revisionism.  Mr. Gordon was the only teacher I knew that ever questioned the content of the textbooks we all had to use, and at one point he taught us that the content of these books, especially ones centered on history, are written with a point of view and an agenda to impart specific teachable facts.  He wasn’t a complete conspiracy nut, he was just trying to open our eyes to the idea that there's more out there to learn and that just because something is passed off as a fact doesn't mean it's the full truth, it's just the version that was put to paper.

With that in mind I'd like to ask a question.  Who invented Jelly Bellys?  Well, I don’t know about you, but the first place I'd look for the answer would be on the Jelly Belly website, and more specifically on the company history page.  Go on, check it out and I'll meet you back here in a few minutes.  Alright, according to the official company history it seems that the man responsible for bringing the world Jelly Belly jelly beans would be Herman Goelitz Rowland Sr.   Well actually the history lists Rowland and an unnamed marketing guru, but really Herman seems to have been the man with the plan.  Well that's that, right?  Well, maybe not…

Most of us have heard the fairytale about Jack, his cow, and a bag of enchanted beans, but it wasn't until this past week that I first got a chance to experience a real life variation of the story about a man named David who, instead of selling a cow, sold his bag of magical beans.  Candyman: the David Klein Story is a documentary about the eccentric genius who invented America's first gourmet jelly bean called Jelly Belly.  Directed and edited by Costa Botes (co-director of Forgotten Silver), the film features David Klein and his son Bert (an animator for Disney and the Simpsons) as they take a look back at the Klein's life, the creation of the iconic confection that was championed by none other than former President Ronald Regan, and how Klein was more or less erased from the legacy of Jelly Belly.  The documentary follows David on a short tour around a lot of the southern California locations where he worked and developed his passion for making and marketing candy.  The journey is peppered by interviews with friends, family and industry professionals (including some super funny witticisms from Weird Al) reflecting on Klein, Jelly Belly, and his love/obsession with making people happy at any cost.

What really struck me was Klein's son Bert (who also produced the film with his wife) and how he was sort of using this documentary portrait of his father to set the record straight, not so much to stick it to Jelly Belly, but to validate Klein's legacy and passion.  David Klein had the idea to take the ordinary maligned jelly bean (brilliantly described as Easter basket packing material by Weird Al Yankovic in the doc), and transform it into a natural, high-quality, great-tasting candy.  He got the ball rolling, contacting the Goelitz Candy Company and getting them to manufacture his ideal bean, and then took to the road telling everyone that would listen about his creation.  There were local publicity stunts, visits to national TV talk shows where Klein was truly decked out in the part of the proverbial candy-man, and zany photo-shoots, all in the hopes of getting the world to notice these amazing Jelly Belly beans.  It was as if he stepped out of the pages of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  For four years Klein was the face of Jelly Belly and is a huge part of the candy's success.

  

Costa Botes does a wonderful job of shinning the spotlight on Jelly Belly, Klein and his family, touching on the sadness of the tale without getting too mired in the ennui of corporate shenanigans and unresolved family issues.  The documentary is as much about celebrating Klein's eccentricities and ideas as it is about being written out of the history of a pop culture phenomenon.  From his use of paper plates as notepads (hard to lose and easy to throw), to his later insane confection creations (my favorite being yellow liquid candy sold in urine sample jars), Klein has led a wacky and truly interesting life and it makes for a very entertaining film.  All in all I think this portrait is the perfect way to remind us that there is always more to the story.

  

I wanted to mention that though I did receive a copy of this documentary on DVD for review purposes, I've also purchased one with my own funds that I'm going to give away here at Branded.  I'm certainly not biased because of an access to review materials, but I also want to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak, and I enjoyed this film enough to do just that.  So if you'd like to win a copy of Candyman: the David Klein Story, send me an email with the subject line "Candyman DVD" and a description of your favorite flavor of Jelly Belly jelly beans by February 17th at 12:00am est.  I'll pick one e-mail at random to win a copy of the DVD.

The film is currently available via the Indiepix website on DVD, On Demand, or to Download.  You can also see a trailer for the film at the above link.  If you're curious about what David Klein is doing these days, check out his candy company Sandy Candy!

After the disappointing release of the Warner Brothers Saturday Moring Cartoons: 1980s earlier this year, I've been in kind of a cartoon on DVD funk.  Included on that set was a single episode of the series Thundarr the Barbarian, which though I had fond memories of watching it as a kid, I didn't realize just how damn cool that show was until rewatching that one episode.  Because Warners was moving away from full series and season on DVD in favor of cheaper anthology releases, I figured I'd never get a chance to see the rest of the episodes in a format that I really love.

Well, I'm really happy to say that my funk has been broken because the Warner Archive Collection, the company's print-on-demand arm, has announced that the complete Thundarr the Barbarian will be shipping starting today, September 28th, 2010!

I was excited a year or so ago when the WAC first launched as I was hoping to secure copies of some out-of-print flicks on DVD, but I didn't hold out any hope that they'd start releasing TV boxsets, let alone of classic cartoons.  But last month saw the WAC release of long overdue series on DVD from the 90s, Pirates of Dark Water…

…and from what I've gathered from the WAC twitter feed, it looks like a slew of other cartoons are also headed to the POD format…

"We have only just begun to delve into the animation library!  We've got a few more series in 2010, +/- 2/month planned in 2011"

Also slated for release are Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space and the 1973 Addams Family cartoon.   The idea that they're also planning on around two additional releases per month next year is fantastic!  Do I hear releases of the Herculoids, Grape Ape, Speed Buggy, Frankenstein Jr. and the Impossibles, and Mr. T on the horizon?  I sure hope so!

I recently had the opportunity to take a look at the Mill Creek re-issue of 21 Jump Street on DVD and I have to say that I was both a little excited about the set and a little bit bummed out.  First off, I have to make it clear that Mill Creek provided a review copy of the DVD, so I didn't purchase this set.  I am, however, a fan of the show, and I already own a few of the seasons that were previously released by Anchor Bay on DVD.  So for whatever it's worth, I'd like to believe that my opinions on the set and series are unbiased.

Part of the reason that I wanted to take a look at this set is that I feel like we're entering an unfortunate stage in the life of DVD as a medium, and Mill Creek is leading the pack into the future.  After living through the first home video boom during the 80s and 90s with VHS, I knew the life cycle of DVD would be relatively short in the grand scheme of things, lasting around 20 years.  Introduced to the public in 1997, I think it's safe to say that we're now entering into the last stage of life for the format, its twilight years.  The signs are all around us with discount $3-$5 DVDs available in stores like Big Lots and Wal-Mart, and with a slight improvement of the medium already on the market (Blu-Ray.)  Pretty soon we’re going to see a shift in the releases of films and TV shows as some will only be available on blu-ray or for download, and only the most popular and profitable releases will garner DVD distribution.

So why is Mill Creek important in this scenario?  Well, in the last few years super discounted DVDs have usually consisted of old, discontinued or overstock titles that companies are trying to liquidate to recoup production costs.  Mill Creek on the other hand is leading the charge on first run releases in the budget format, so instead of getting an affordable price on a nicely manufactured set, we're getting lower quality sets at great prices.  After years of releasing budget public domain fare, Mill Creek is now licensing TV series that other companies have discontinued releases for, as well as picking up the rights to some shows that have never been released on DVD.  One of their first big coups was in acquiring the library of Stephen J. Cannell productions including such shows as Hunter, the Commish, the Greatest American Hero, and 21 Jump Street.  All of these series have been released before, but not at budget pricing.  In addition to these well-known series, Mill Creek is also releasing a lot of Cannell's lesser known series such as Ten Speed and Brown Shoe, Booker, and Cobra which have never been on DVD in North America (except Cobra which was released in Canada.)  I think this is going to become a trend for the medium in the face of rising music rights costs, especially for TV on DVD, and I’m kind of sad to see it.  I think if it's successful then it's going to prove to DVD distributers that subpar sets are perfectly acceptable.

So what about this new 21 Jump Street Complete series DVD set?  Well, being a budget release, the set is attractively priced between $60-$70, which isn't bad for five seasons of television.  The original five sets released by Anchor Bay in 2004 would have easily set you back $150, so right off the bat we're talking a 50 to 60 percent drop in price.  But this price reduction also comes with a drop in quality, both in the packaging, features, and in the video quality as well.  First off, the quality of the transfer is pretty close to the original DVDs, at least displayed on a regular player on a non-HD television, but there is a higher compression as there are more episodes per disc on this new set.   The original source material was rough to begin with though, and there's only so much you can do to pretty it up.

My biggest complaint though is with the packaging which is just medium to subpar.  Though the sets are packaged in clamshell-style cases, the DVDs themselves aren't housed on individual pegs or spindles.  Instead they're individually wrapped in plain black paper sleeves which stack together and sort of snap into a frame on one side of the case.  That means that when you want to pull out DVD #17, you have to pull them all out and sift through the sleeves, which can be a pain.  With a smaller set it's not that big of a deal, but with these complete series sets it really gets to be a pain.

There are also no liner notes and no DVD booklet.  You want to know which episode guest stars Brad Pitt?  Go to IMDB and find it that way because you'll be searching forever on the DVDs.  Again, with a smaller or season set this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but with a complete series set it's really a pain in the butt.  This is also a bare bones, no-special-features release (unless you count the single episode of Booker included in the set.)

Unfortunately, as with the original release of the series on DVD, most if not all of the original music was also stripped from the episodes because of high song licensing issues.  This is the biggest setback for TV on DVD, and in particular with a show like this because the music helped to define the tone, and it provided a boost to the overall quality of the show.  Without the music the series feels so much more cheesy than it was when it originally aired and honestly it's just a shame.

Talking about the series itself, 21 Jump Street is an example of Stephen J. Cannell at his most playful.  Starring Peter and Michael Deluise, Holly Robinson (Peete), Dustin Nguyen, Steven Williams (the X-Files), Richard Grieco, and of course a young Johnny Depp in his break-out role as Officer Tom Hanson, the show was sort of like the older brother to Saturday Morning cartoons in the 80s.  Usually centered on some hot-button topic of the day, the series was a fun spin on detective shows that gave the actors a lot of range to play all sorts of characters in their undercover roles.

The series is a snapshot of what the Fox Network was like during its inception as well, and helped to define a slightly hipper alternative to the normal programming on the main three networks.  It works best as a time capsule of late 80s television and features a plethora of up and coming and established actors in guest spots like Brad Pitt, Pauley Shore, Mario Van Peebles, Kurtwood Smith, Jason Priestley, Mindy Cohn, Bridget Fonda, Sherilynn Fenn, Josh Brolin, Christina Applegate, Vince Vaughn, John Waters, Shannon Doherty, and Thomas Haden Church.

 

All in all, for the price, the set is probably worth picking up if you're a fan and don't already own the series, though I would wait for a sale.  Right now Best Buy actually has it for the astounding price of $38.

To me the series will always highlight the bittersweet experience of moving on from middle school to high school, and leaving the 80s behind.  It was the beginning of the end for the type of television that I grew up on, and it made the transition into the 90s a little less rocky.  You can pick up this set on July 27th, 2010.

About six months ago I was having a fun time on Twitter going back and forth with Paxton Holley (of the supremely cool Cavalcade of Awesome), trying to come up with a bunch of unofficial film trilogies.  We got to talking and we decided that it would be epic if we worked on an article together and we decided to flesh out the whole idea of these sort-of-film-trilogies.  So please head on over to the Cavalcade and get your awesome on!

If growing up in the 80s taught me anything it was that any film that was even moderately successful deserved a sequel, and the only thing better than a sequel was a full blown trilogy.  There's something magical (in the unicorn and rainbow kind of way) about the movie trilogy format that I can't quite put my finger on, but it's there all the same.  Something satisfying.  Personally I can point to the experience of growing up with the three original Star Wars films as a point of reference.  In some form, every trilogy I watch is compared to these three films; in particular to their structure of a first film that works as a stand alone piece (incase of box office failure and no sequel money), a second film that enriches the characters and paints a much bigger picture for the world, and a third film which brings a sense of closure to the overarching plot while also giving the characters one more wild adventure.

There seemed to be an endless stream of trilogies that I cherished in and around the 80s.  The Back to the Future films, the Karate Kid flicks, the hillbilly/mutant Jason flicks (Friday the 13th parts 2-4), the Zombie Jason flicks (Friday the 13th parts 6-8), the Bad News Bears flicks, the Look Who's Talking flicks, the Mad Max flicks, the Naked Gun flicks, the Poltergeist films, and the Meatballs films.  That's not including other film series that broke into more sequels like the Superman or the Rocky films.  Heck, in doing some research for this crossover I discovered that there was even a trilogy that I was unaware of, Cannonball I, II, and Speed Zone!  I loved the first two and now I have to track down and see the third.

Recently though, I've been thinking a lot about conceptual trilogies, film series that aren't directly connected by characters or story, but have other threads that tie them together.  There are a lot of series written by the same author or that were all filmed by the same director that get a lot of attention; for instance Sergio Leone's Dollars/Man with No Name trilogy (Fist Full of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly), his epic America trilogy (Once Upon a Time in the West, Fist Full of Dynamite, and Once Upon a Time in America), or John Carpenter's Apocalypse trilogy (The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness.)  But there are also a lot of films that just feel like they belong together because of interesting themes and overall concept.  Here are a few of my favorites…

The Ralph Macchio Fight Trilogy.  There are only a handful of films starring Mr. Macchio thoughout the 80s as he was quickly typecast as Daniel LaRusso (not a terrible fate), but of the films that he did make there seems to be a clear throughline of scrapping against all forms of bullies.

Starting in 1983 with Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of The Outsiders, Ralph Macchio stars as Johnny Cade, a 16 year-old greaser runt who's had enough and is ready to pop.  In the film, Macchio's Johnny comes to the aid of his friend Ponyboy (played by C. Thomas Howell) who is being attacked by a group of Socs (the rich, douchey, pre-suburbanites of the 50s) because he was hanging out with "their girls".  Johnny stabs and kills one of the Socs in the scuffle and then he and Ponyboy go on the lam hiding from the law.  Things don't end well for Johnny, but he does save a bunch of kids from a burning building, so I guess there's that…

The second film in the Fight trilogy is by far Macchios most famous and probably my favorite film of the 80s, 1984's The Karate Kid.  Starring as Daniel LaRusso, a kid who moves from Newark, NJ, to Reseda in California and then proceeds to get his butt kicked by bullies right and left.  One chance meeting with the apartment's reclusive superintendant later and we're on the awesome rollercoaster ride of banzai-tree-trimming, catching flies with chopsticks, waxing cars, painting decks, and beating the living shit out of a bunch of asshole bullies in skeleton costumes.  Not only did the film give us the ultimate douche in Billy Zabka's Jonny Lawrence, but it also provided the best fight song in the history of all time, Joe Esposito's You're the Best.  It's to fighting what Barry White is to love making.

The final film in the Fight trilogy is the under-seen 1986 Walter Hill flick Crossroads, starring Macchio as Eugene Martone, a young guitar prodigy searching for the legendary Robert Johnson's (he of the musical deal with the devil fame) one lost song.  Though there are a couple of dustups in the flick, the fighting all takes place with guitars, in particular in the culmination of the film where Martone accepts a challenge from the devil to out guitar his pet project, rock star Jack Butler (playing with a crazed yet entertaining relish by Steve Vai.)  It seems that in battling the Devil, there is no greater weapon that soulful rock and roll (Just ask Charlie Daniels, the Kids in the Hall, or Tenacious D.)

Crossroads brings me to another themed series, The Walter Hill Musical Battle Trilogy.  Walter Hill is one of those directors that never broke as big as his resume deserves, though he has been a part of some pretty big projects including the first Alien film and the HBO Tales From the Crypt television series.  His eye for style and interesting characters is amazing and I can only hope more people pick up his films as time goes on.  For this trilogy I'll go in reverse seeing as I've already mentioned the culminating flick, Crossroads. 

The middle film in the Musical Battle trilogy is the insane 1984 flick Streets of Fire.  Starring Michael Pare as Tom Cody, an ex-soldier turned hero for hire who is called back to his home town when his ex-girlfriend, rock star Ellen Aim (played by Diane Lane), is kidnapped by Raven Shaddock, leader of a local gang called the Bombers (played with wicked insanity by Willem Dafoe.)  Cody, along with another ex-soldier McCoy and Ellen's manager/boyfriend Billy Fish (Rick Moranis in a typecast-breaking performance as a fast talking ass), take on the Bombers and rescue Ellen in a film noir inspired rock opera that culminates in one heck of a kick ass sledge hammer fight that needs to be seen to be believed.  This film drips style much in the same way that Tim Burton or Wes Anderson flicks do.  Hill is a master of creating unique alternate universes that exisit just on the edge of reality, and in Streets of Fire it can be the 50s and the 80s as the same time.

The first flick in this Musical Battle trilogy is probably Hill's most famous film, 1979's The Warriors, which is one of those movies that people love, hate, or love to hate.  Personally I love it.  The film is loosely based on the Anabasis an account of a battalion of Greek soldiers, lead by Xenophon, from Sardes to the Black Sea through hundreds of miles of enemy territory.  In the film, Cyrus, the leader of the most powerful gang in New York calls for a peaceful meeting between all the gangs in the city (60,000 strong), in an effort to rally together against the police and the system.  Luther (played by a psychotic David Patrick Kelly), uses this opportunity to assassinate Cyrus, and in the ensuing chaos blames the act on the Warriors, who then have to travel through all sorts of enemy territory in trying to get back to their home turf at Coney Island.  The film is punctuated by updates given by a faceless mouth on the radio informing the various gangs of the whereabouts of the Warriors as they try to evade battle.  Though it's not an out and out rock opera, it has many of operatic qualities and a very similar visual panache.

Probably my favorite themed film series from the 80s has to be The Alternative/Extreme Sports Trilogy made up of Rad, Thrashin', and North Shore.  Each film centers on one of the big sports crazes of the 80s including BMX, skateboarding, and surfing respectively.  All of them have similar plots, when a hometown boy (who is pretty damn good at what they do), is confronted with the idea of competing in a tournament that will pit them against the biggest assholes each past-time has to offer. Growing up in Florida in the 1980s I was smack dab in the middle of all three of these crazes, and even though I never tried my hand at surfing I was enamored with all three.

In 1986's Rad (which I discussed at length before), Cru Jones has to battle against the insufferable Bart Taylor (played by real like Olympian Bart Conner) at Hell Track, along the way winning the hart of pro racer Christian (Full House's Lori Loughlin.)  1986 also brought us the skateboarding classic Thrashin'.  Starring Josh Brolin as Cory Webster, the plot centers around a friend of a group of local skaters from the Valley who has come to Los Angles to complete in a crazy high speed downhill race.  Webster unfortunately bumps into a insane local gang of punkish skaters called the Daggers, who are led by Hook (played by Robert Russler.)  Of course Cory falls in love with Hook's more normal sister Chrissy, and the two play Romeo and Juliet while mixing it up with the Daggers (which means plenty of skateboard jousting.)  Lastly we have 1987's North Shore, which features Matt Adler as Rick Kane, a surfer from Arizona who has never really had a chance to hone his chops in a real ocean.  He wins a local competition and finds himself in Hawaii where noting is quite like it seems or he expected.  Battling against the Hui (locals) on the waves, he ends up simultaneously falling in love with Kiani (Nia Peeples) and being mentored by Chandler, a transplanted soul-surfing guru.  Rick decides that the only way he can prove himself is by winning a surfing competition called the Banzai Pipeline.

Last but certainly not least is the is The William Zabka Bully Trilogy.  I've already talked about the Karate Kid (where Zabka plays the leg-sweeping bully we all love to hate, Johnny Lawrence), but he also goes on to play douches in two other 80s flicks, 1985's Just One of the Guys, and 1986's Back to School.

Just One of the Guys is my favorite hidden gem movie of the 80s that I must have seen on cable two trillion times.  Starring Joyce Hyser as Terry Griffith, an aspiring teenaged journalist who can't seem to get any respect because she's a shapely woman.  Terry hatches a scheme to enroll in another high school (seeing as her journalism teacher has already dismissed her talent), only this time she decides to start cross dressing as a boy so that she can get the respect she deserves for her work.  In the flick Terry is basically playing the Daniel LaRusso role from the Karate Kid, but instead of getting beaten up by Billy Zabka's Greg Tolan, she instead mentors a geeky guy who can't seem to get a date, Rick (played by Clayton Rohner.)  Rick has a crush on Tolan's girlfriend Deborah, and therein lies the Zabka douchery.  Though it's a slight step down from Johnny Lawrence, Greg Tolan is still a pretty entertaining asshole and it's fun to see him get his ass kicked by a girl, her little brother and eventually Rick as well.  Whereas in the Karate Kid Zabka was more likely to bust up your ghetto blaster and chase you down with a dirtbike, in Just one of the Guys his coup de grace comes in various forms of exercizing with nerds and geeks.  Between showing off his wedgie-weight-lifting, and his personal favorite lunch table lifting, Zabka had a lot of fun as teh ultimate P.E. bully.

Zabka's weakest bully performance is in Back to School, the Rodney Dangerfield comedy where he plays Thorton Melon, the owner of a successful string of Big and Tall shops who decides that the only way he can get close to his son is by enrolling in college to be near him.  Zabka plays Chas Osborne, who is the alpha male on the college swim team, and the rival of Thorton's son Jason (played by Christine's Keith Gordon.)  Honestly, Zabka is barely in the film and even though he really is supposed to be a douche, he's kind of justified in his asshole-ery.  He's a great diver, and he doesn't even really bully Jason all that much, so when his dive is sabotaged by a young Robert Downey Jr. (playing Jasons best friend), it's kind of sad.  Though he's still a douche, I feel sorry for his character and I think it goes a long way to redeeming his much worse bully past.

Anyway, this is only one half of the unofficial trilogies cross-blog special.  For the ultimate in awesomeology and more trilogy fun, head on over to Paxton Holley's Cavalcade of Awesome, and tell him Branded in the 80s sent ya!

The wife and I have recently been culling through our collections of various things, trying to free up some room and make our place look a little bit neater.   In the quest to let go I came across what's left of my meager collection of VHS tapes, movies that haven't been released on DVD (or at least hadn't when I choose to keep them) and I just can't seem to part with.  Throughout the 90s and in to the 2000s I had amassed a ton of VHS tapes while working at a local grocery store.  I was a night manager in the drug/gm department which was over our in-store video rental kiosk, and because I was a burgeoning movie freak I always got first dibs on previously-viewed sales stock.

When DVD came along I started the laborious and expensive process of replacing my collection, and to help bolster that project I sold off most of my tapes on eBay when you could still get a decent amount for them.  Even so, there were a few tapes that I decided to hang onto because I figured they'd never get released on DVD.   It's been fun over time as some of these titles have become available and I've been able to throw away a tape here and there (like my two Tick cartoon videos, MTV's the Maxx series, Buckaroo Banzai, Goonies, and my Thundercats and Transformers the Movie convention bootlegs.)  Well, the collection had shrunk to about ten tapes, a few of which were gifts (I have a hard time parting with gifts), and a couple more which I just hadn't thrown away yet (I finally bought a copy of the Die Hard DVD last year.)  I thought it would be fun to share some of the straglers…

First up we have the 1988 anti-classic Hot to Trot starring Bobcat Goldthwait, Dabney Coleman, Virginia Madsen and the voice of John Candy as Don the talking horse.   I loved, loved, loved this flick as a kid (it probably didn't hurt that Nick at Night was coming into it's own at the time and I was getting introduced to a massive amount of Mr. Ed re-runs.)  First off you have Goldthwait who was becoming my favorite stand-up comedian with his coke-induced sweaty, garble-mouthed HBO specials and his role as the unpredictable and loving Stork brother Egg in One Crazy Summer, not to mention his really fun turn as Zed in the Police Academy movies and his suicidal turn as Eliot Loudermilk in Scrooged.   I think this is sort of the high point of his career as the goofy funny guy with one of his only starring roles.  In a few more years we get the sort of straightened out and much more seriously crazy Goldthwait with Shakes the Clown and his firebug antics.

At the same time I sort of felt that Coleman was reprising his 9 to 5 horrible boss character, which was a role that I loved him in.  He could also sort of do-no-wrong for me after playing dual roles in Clock and Dagger alongside Henry Thomas.  If there's one thing this film is really notable for, it probably as the beginning of the end of John Candy’s career.  There were a few promising moments here and there (Uncle Buck, and I actually enjoyed the Delirious flick), but for all intents and purposes it was all downhill after Hot to Trot.   It's kind of sad…

Debuting the next year ('89) was the insane comedy Big Man on Campus…

…which featured an early performance from the Office's Melora Hardin, as well as Corey Parker (best friend and one-time step son of Patrick Dempsey), Cindy "Shirley" Williams, and Tom Skerritt.  The star of the flick was an unlikely Allan Katz playing the hunchback Bob Maloogaloogaloogaloogalooga ("One Malooga, four looga's…")   Katz was the writer/producer on shows like M*A*S*H, Rhoda, Roseanne and Blossom, and his one big film was Big Man on Campus which to this day I content is utter comedy genius.  The film is silly re-telling of the Hunchback of Notre Dame set in present day California on the UCLA campus with Bob living in a click tower and fawning over Hardin's Cathy from afar.  When he sees Cathy in trouble while she's defending her boyfriend (played with amazing comic-timing precision by Parker), Bob swoops down to protect her, outing himself in the process.  At first considered violent, the university decides to study Bob, appointing Parker as his keeper/roommate, and it's from here that the film really takes a weird turn.

Though it could have stayed pretty much to the obvious stock story, Katz imbues the flick with some much comedic life in all of the zany little details.  There's all sort of left-field one-liners in the film that I still find myself uttering to this day.   At one point in a mall Bob is asked what he wants from a fried chicken stand (legs, breasts, thighs, you know where the joke is going), but instead of making it overtly sexual and hum drum, he asks for "…two faces."  On top of the well written script, Katz brings an amazing physicality to the character that's half John Belushi, and half Harold Lloyd.  I'd plotz if the flick ever came out on DVD…

Next up we have an obscure Billy Dee Williams flick from 1995 called Secret Agent 00 Soul…

The flick is excruciatingly bad and it must have been a favor to a family member that got Billy Dee to star in this.  I haven't even managed to make it all the way through the film, and honestly I don't think I ever will.   My favorite character from the Star Wars flicks has always been Lando, and that's more or less why I’ve been hanging on to this tape (it was a gag gift from a friend.)  My favorite aspect is the post-production design work on the promo materials.   Look at that cover!  Have you seen a worse photo-enhancement job in your life (that is Billy Dee's head, but it ain't his body.)  Oh wait, there is a worse job than the cover.  Take a gander at that back cover…

Yup, Billy Dee's head pasted onto a white man's body (doing a bad impression of Roger Moore from the flick For Your Eyes Only, though it might even be Moore's body.)  Classic.  If you ever find a copy of the flick, look for an early guest star appearance by Tiny Lister Jr.

Last up is a film that has actually come out on DVD, but it's a tape that's been so loved over the years it's impossible for me to get rid of it, the one and only Monster Squad!

This tape has been watched and rewound at least two hundred times (personally) not to mention all of the viewings it had at the video store where I picked it up.   I just can't get rid of it.  I even have a swanky bootleg cover that matches this original cover for my official DVD release (since I hate the new cover artwork so much.)  I think I'd get buried with this VHS (if I were planning to be buried that is.)  By the by, does anyone know who the poster artist is for the Monster Squad?  The art on the cover is signed Craig, which looks like a familiar signature, but I'm not sure who it is…

Though there's a distinct drought of upcoming 80s cartoons being released on DVD, there are plenty of interesting live action 80s television titles that are about to start popping up on shelves.   If I had to make a guess as to three 80s shows that I figured would never see the light of day on DVD it would have been Small Wonder, Street Hawk, and Max Headroom.  Amazingly enough these three titles are actually becoming a reality thanks to the folks at Shout! Factory (which is quickly becoming my favorite outlet for DVD production and distribution.)

Small Wonder was one of those shows that filled the gap between afterschool cartoon watching and primetime when my parents took control over the TV.   I'm pretty sure I remember watching it on the USA network in first run syndication, and for some reason I seem to remember catching it alongside episodes of Out of this World as sort of a double whammy of crazy girl power insanity (OotW was a show that revolved around a girl named Evie that has some nifty alien powers, in particular the power to stop time around her by putting her fingers together, because her father was an alien.)  For those not familiar, Small Wonder was a sitcom that ran from 1985 to 1989 and revolved around a nuclear family that consisted of genius engineer father Ted Lawson, his wife Joan, their biological daughter Jamie and their adopted robot daughter Vicki (a project Ted brought home from his robotics firm dayjob.)  The series has the same basic premise as ALF, with the Lawson family getting used to their exceptional new family member while also trying to keep her robotic secret from neighbors, friends and family.  Honestly, I figured this was one of those shows that would fester in the mire of obscurity, in particular because were no big stars attached that have gone on to create any buzz for an archival release of the show.  But it's becoming clear that this is where Shout! Factory really excels when it comes to picking DVD projects.  Small Wonder season 1 is already available on DVD…

If that series wasn't obscure enough, coming on July 13th (just in time for my birthday) we're also going to see the release of Street Hawk the complete series…

Before the internet, Street Hawk was one of those shows that I only managed to catch a couple episodes of before it fell off of network TV and since then also seemed to fall off the face of the earth.  I could never convince my friends that the show even existed.  Street Hawk featured an awesome futuristic urban combat motorcycle and helped round out the collection of vehicle-based action shows of the 80s alongside stuff like Airwolf, Knightrider, the Dukes of Hazzard, and to an extent, the A-Team.  Starring Rex Smith as Jesse Mach, an ex-motorcycle cop recruited by a secret government agency to fight urban crime at speeds up to 300 miles per hour, Street Hawk featured my second favorite vehicle (right behind the chopper in Airwolf).  In fact, it's probably because of these two shows that I fell so in love with Brad Turner and his motorcycle/helicopter Condor from the cartoon M.A.S.K. as it joined two of my favorite designs into one badass mode of transportation.  The Street Hawk series was more of a hit in the UK, receiving a series of picture books and novelizations, though there was at least one lunch box released in the US.  There was also an unofficial G.I. Joe figure released abroad that came with a similar black motorcycle.

Rounding out the obscure TV DVD releases in August is the complete Max Headroom.  Starring Matt Frewer and Jeffrey Tambor, Max Headroom was one heck of a crazy sci-fi show whose virtual titular character spilled over into the mainstream in the 80s becoming a cult product spokesman, most notably for New Coke and MTV.   The series used speculative fiction to respond to the insane climate of crass commercialism and greed in the mid 80s, in particular on television, and honestly seemed like a very unlikely candidate for release on DVD.

Between these upcoming titles and Shout! Factory's recent re-release of classic 80s cartoons the Transformers and G.I. Joe, not to mention releases of shows like Freaks and Geeks, My Two Dads, Mr. Belvedere, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and Punky Brewster, the company is really winning me over as a loyal fan.  Shout! Has even snagged the rights to continue releasing the Facts of Life on DVD.  I'm hoping they get similar distribution rights to stalled DVD releases like Silver Spoons and Perfect Strangers…

So aside from some odds and ends here and there, new releases of out of print 80s cartoons on DVD have really been slowing down lately (though we did finally get Scooby Doo's All Star Laff-a-Lympics on DVD.)  I think a big part of this is a mixture of the switch from DVD to Blu-Ray and the general decline in DVD sales.  Just like with VHS when DVDs became cheap there was a too-quick boom where people bought tons of them and then a year or two later were scratching their heads trying to remember why they accumulated a collection of 300 plus movies and television shows.  DVD collecting is one of my main hobbies, in particular building specific libraries (e.g. 60s, 70s, & 80s cartoons and all of the flicks from the 80s that I loved as a kid), so even though I have what seems like six million DVDs I'm not phased in the least. Back to the 80s cartoons though, it's kind of a shame since there are still a handful of shows that I think really deserve to be available on DVD (like Kidd Video, the Dinosaucers, the Visionaries, Teen Wolf, TigerSharks, and Jem just to name a few.) 

There are a couple of promising movements in the realm of DVD releasing though, namely print-on-demand technology and anthology sets.  Amazon has been playing around with a p.o.d. model by partnering with MTV/Nickelodeon on a series of 90s releases like Doug, the Rugrats, the Maxx, the Head, and Rocko's Modern Life.  I'm not sure how well these titles are selling, but I can say that I've been more than happy with the quality of both the Maxx and Rocko DVDs, and I'd love to see some future releases of Ahh! Real Monsters, Pete & Pete season 3, Hey Dude, Salute Your Shorts, and maybe some 80s titles as well like You Can't Do That on Television or a best-of Pinwheel.  Similarly, Warner Bros has also been playing around with p.o.d. with their Warner Archives releases, but so far I've found the selection to be wanting and the prices are way too high (but you can finally get Lilly Tomlin's Incredible Shrinking Woman and the Rankin/Bass Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which is awesome.)  The one company that's really got me excited though is Shout! Factory which has decided to start their own p.o.d. service that's specializing in continuing releases of shows that have received initial sets that didn’t sell well and have since stalled like C.O.P.S. and Mr. Belvedere.  I'm crossing my fingers that there is a volume 2 release of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors in the cards…

I'm not quite as interested in the anthology releases that have been coming out, mainly from Warner Brothers, but there is one that has peaked my interest called Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1980s, Vol. 1...

Warner has previously released two volumes each of 1960s and 1970s sets that are interesting, but unfortunately they were a little off-the-mark in my opinion because they contained episodes of shows already available on DVD.  If there’s one practice I hate with DVDs it's double dipping, and these are the worst because in order to get episodes of shows like the Herculoids or Shazzan you have to also buy episodes of the Flintstones and Hong Kong Phooey.  Nothing against those two latter shows, but they're already available on DVD and if you happen to own them than these episodes are just taking up valuable real estate on the anthology releases. I think Warner has finally gotten the message though, and with the 1st 1980s release they concentrating on putting out a collection of shows that have never been on DVD before.  The set consists of single episodes of the following eleven shows:

Mr. T

Thundarr the Barbarian

Dragon’s Lair

The Flintstone Kids

Galtar and the Golden Lance

The Biskitts

The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley

The Monchichis

Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos

Tex Avery’s the Kwicky Koloa Show

Goldie Gold & Action Jack

Though I'd love full season sets of Thundarr and Mr. T, I'm glad at least that these shows are going to see the light of day on DVD.  When I first started collecting cartoons on DVD my mission was to get 1 episode of every show I watched as a kid on DVD, and this set will fill in a good chunk of those gaps.  I can only hope that they continue this trend with at least a second volume.  I'm not sure what shows Warner holds the rights to (even though I realize they own a good chunk of Ruby Spears and Hanna Barbera), but I'd love to see some episodes of Turbo Teen, Pac-Man, Teen Force, Astro and the Space Mutts, Fangface, Captain Caveman, the Frankenstones, The Shirttales, Rubik the Amazing Cube, the Snorks and Kidd Video.

Oh and while I'm on the subject of 80s cartoon releasing, I have to say that there is another "innovation" that's begun to take a foothold lately that I'm not a big fan of, iTunes only digital downloads.  Whereas I'm all for the idea of more streaming and downloadable content, I hate it when releases are subject to only one medium.  It was recently announced that both the Dinosaucers and the Karate Kid cartoons are going to be available on iTunes.   I'd love to have the Dinosaucers on DVD, but maybe I’ll have to settle for watching them on the computer (or eventually on an iPad maybe?)

I've been thinking a lot about 70s/80s teen sex comedies lately in the wake of Severin Films' announcement they'll be releasing the seminal (in every sense of the word) comedy flick Screwballs on DVD.  By the way, the disc comes out today and you can order your copy by clicking on the cover below…



Anyway, back to pondering teen sex comedies.   It's really surprising to me how often films don't deliver on what they promise in terms of content, in particular genre flicks.  I can't count how many times I've rented a horror flick that wasn't scary, gory, or disturbing, or a comedy that just didn't try that hard for laughs.  This past year a friend and I sat down and watched a ton of 80s comedies both in the hopes of reliving some nostalgia and to finally expose my friend to the original R-rated bits and pieces that he never got a chance to see growing up as a kid.   My experience to most of the films we watched came through either renting them on video or catching them in the wee hours of the morning on HBO or Cinemax.  My friend on the other hand grew up a bit more sheltered and wasn't allowed to watch most of them, and the stuff that he did catch was on basic cable over the years so he has felt like he's really missed out on the raunchy adult humor.

Turns out he didn't miss all that much.  Even flicks like Porky's really don't have all that much in the way of nudity or language so bad that it'd make his grandma blush.  Granted Porky's was the brainchild of Bob Clark, the same guy who brought us the beloved classic A Christmas Story, but he was also the guy that brought us Black Christmas, so we weren't sure what to expect.  Overall, after watching flicks like Fast Times at Ridgemount High, Meatballs, Sixteen Candles, Revenge of the Nerds, and Risky Business my friend was starting to feel like he hadn't missed that much at all.  Personally, I seem to have memories of more raunch in my 80s comedies, though there are a lot of flicks that I watched back in the 80s that we didn't revisit and were more on the periphery in terms of tasteful content like Hot Dog, Kentucky Fried Movie, Class (which seemed really dirty at the time), and the various academy (Police or Screwball) and school movies (Rock 'n Roll High, or Ski), all the stuff that I'd catch for years on USA Up All Night with Rhonda Shear or Gilbert Godfried.

Sure, most of these films have some rude language and a jiggling pair of boobs here and there, but none of them feel like they're delivering on their potential, not at least in the way that a lot of exploitation flicks did in 60s and 70s.  When you sit down and watch a Herschel Gordon Lewis film like Blood Feast or Two Thousand Maniacs, you get what you pay for.  When you watch a Jack Hill flick like the Big Bird Cage, Foxy Brown or Switchblade Sisters, you get plenty of violence, language and T&A.  So with the 80s teen sex comedies, it sad that for the most part you really don't get more raunch.  That isn't to say that I don't like John Hughes (the Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink) and Savage Steve Holland (Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer) flicks, just that there was a relatively untapped market for making flicks that were a bit more visceral.

Well, getting back to the reason for this post, I have to say that I never saw Screwballs back in the 80s and it was one heck of an oversight.   Screwballs is to teen sex comedies what Last House on the Left is to horror.  There are more naked girls, goofy horny guys, and inappropriate jokes than in most other 80s films combined.   In fact the raunch reaches a level of slapstick that is more on par with the feel of a crazy 30s era gag-a-second Fleischer cartoon than an 80s comedy.  The flick was also produced under Roger Corman, which might have something to do with its level of debauchery (but in the best sense of the word.)

If you haven't seen it, the basic gist of the film revolves around a pact made by five senior guys who all have a beef with one girl, the ultimately virginal Purity Busch.  She's either gotten them in trouble or lead them on and the guys decide that by the end of the school year they'll either get to see her "goods" and score, or die trying.  Though the film should be qualified as terrible, where plot is really secondary to the mass amount of gags in the film, the set dressing keeps bouncing between the 50, 60s, 70s, and the 80s, and with acting that for the most part is insanely bad, it's still pretty great.  It's almost like watching a live action adaptation of a much dirtier version of MAD magazine that still manages to be funny.  Between sessions of strip bowling, insane make-out sessions a the drive-in, freshman breast exams, trips to the strip club (with a guest appearance by Russ Meyer star Raven DeLaCroix), ornate brainwashing attempts involving an giant fake hot dog, insanely inappropriate cheerleading practice in bikinis, and a milf mom who is playing the cougar to the point of being overdubbed with animal growls, you'll never be bored.

I can honestly say that I was blown away by this long-overdue-on-DVD gem, for however contrived and cliché a statement like that can be.  I have to give a hand to Severin Films for taking the time and effort to restore this film (as well as stuff like the original Inglorious Bastards.)  The DVD looks pretty good for a lowbudget early 80s film like this, and has a nice set of special features including a commentary track as well as surprisingly insightful interviews with the director Rafal Zielinski and cast (there are clips with the director and some of the actors online.)  I don't know what more I can say except that, again, the DVD is available to purchase as of today. If you're a fan of goofy 80s comedies and boobs, than this is highly recommended...

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Mill Creek Entertainment has picked up the license to the 1983 Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, one of my favorite mainstays from Saturday Mornings as a kid.  The series was originally released by BCI Eclipse back in January of 2007, but has since gone out of print due to Navarre shuttering the BCI Ink & Paint imprint.   I was a huge fan of that original set as it was one of the first bright examples of an 80s cartoon property handled with love and care, and one that wouldn't make a permanent dent in your pocketbook.   As much as I hate seeing all the BCI titles starting to drop off into OOP obscurity, I was really glad to hear that Mill Creek was picking up some of the pieces.



That being said, I was a little skeptical of what this would mean for the series being kept alive on DVD.  Mill Creek is most known for distributing public domain material in via large box sets like those 50 movie packs (featuring horror and westerns to name a couple) as well as the 150 packs of old public domain cartoons.  The quality of these public domain titles ranges from medium to poor for the most part and the sets are geared more towards introducing one to obscure nostalgic fare than being a source for nice copies of these movies and cartoons.   From time to time Mill Creek will also take on a licensed property like their releases of the Teddy Ruxpin series.  I picked up one of the TR sets in a dump bin for about $5 and that's pretty much all it was worth.  The video and audio quality of the show left a lot to be desired, but the price was right and honestly that's what Mill Creek is all about.  So how would the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon fare?

Well, I just received an advance copy of the Complete series set, which will hit store shelves on August 25th, and should be retailing for between $13 to $24 depending on where you find it.   They're also releasing an entry level disc which features only the first nine episodes of the cartoon in tandem which should retail for around $10.  After cracking open the set I was both pleasantly surprised and a little bit let down with some quality issues that should have been expected…



First off, the bad. The main issue I have with this set is the packaging.  It's cheap, really cheap and it's sort of a shame.  I guess I was spoiled by the nice embossed sturdy box that the BCI release came in, the beautiful fold out digi-pak that housed the discs, and the included episode guide.  Compared to that the Mill Creek release is about as bare bones as you can get…



This set features all 27 episodes spread over 3 single sided discs which are housed in black paper sleeves that sort of snap into the plastic case.  Granted it keeps the DVDs sturdy enough, but I can imagine over time these paper sleeves are going to get worn and torn up.  Besides this, it's just an annoying to have to pull out the sleeves like this and fish out the disc.  DVD packaging companies are doing wondrous things with minimal packaging these days, and a case like the ones used for the Family Ties releases (that has spindles on either side of the inner case and a flap with a DVD spindle in the middle) would have been a vast improvement at very little increase in cost…



As for the DVDs themselves, they're not bad.   First off, all of the special features from the BCI edition have been stripped.  There is nothing extra on this set, it's just the episodes.  Like I mentioned above, there are a total of 27 episodes, 9 to a disc, and the DVDs default into the episode selection screen for each disc…



The most surprising aspect of this set is how well the quality of the actual video and audio held up.  The BCI discs had up to 7 episodes per disc, so there wasn't a ton of added compression to fit a couple more on, especially considering that all the fancy frills were discarded.  To my eyes, the quality is almost a direct transfer.  As far as the audio goes, it's a little bit quieter on the Mill Creek DVDs, with the background music suffering the most, but it's certainly not to a level that it's ever distracting.  With the video, the Mill Creek version isn't quite as rich, but the difference is really subtle.  Here are some screen to screen comparisons.  The Mill Creek version is on the left, and the BCI on the right…

Mill Creek                                              BCI
  
Mill Creek                                              BCI
  

All in all, if you're more interested in just getting a decente copy of all the episodes, I'd highly suggest picking up a copy of the new Mill Creek set.   It's a little shoddy on the packaging side, but for $13 on Amazon right now it's one hell of a deal.  If you're more concerned with a nicer presentation and a great set of special features, than I suggest picking up one of the remaining BCI sets before they fall into seriously over-priced out of print obscurity.  Amazon still has copies available for around $40.

As far as the cartoon itself, I still love it as much as ever and I'm glad to see it staying in print for a new generation.   If you're interested, you can find my original review of the BCI set, as well as my expanded look at the first 13 episodes from my Cartoon Commentary! column by following these links:

Dungeons and Dragons Overview
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Episode 11
Episode 12
Episode 13

I just received my copy of the new Transformers season one DVD set and I was pretty darn impressed…



For the last few years it's been a wonderful time for fans of 80s cartoons.  Between the lovely Filmation sets released by the now sadly defunct BCI Eclipse, Warner Bros. stepping up to the plate and offering action cartoons like Thundercats and the Silverhawks, WEP/Anime Works/Media Blasters releasing the complete series of Voltron, Time Life releasing the complete Real Ghostbusters, and Shout! Factory picking up dropped licenses for a ton of DiC and now Sunbow cartoons, releasing 30-odd episode sets instead of the paltry 4 episode discs for shows like C.O.P.S. and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, it's just been great.

With the recently released Transformers season one 25th anniversary edition, Shout! Factory has stepped up its game and taken on a tent-pole series, looking to correct the mistakes in the show's past DVD releases (both in terms of price point, attractive packaging and actual animation and sound snafus from the 2002 Rhino releases.)  Taking a nod from Time Life and their release of the Real Ghostbusters, Shout! is putting together multiple DVD sets that'll hopefully appease both casual and hardcore fans.  This set is the first of 4 individual releases that will comprise the complete Transformers cartoon.

This first set includes all 16 episodes from season one, a 20 minute documentary featurette featuring a lot of the creative team responsible for the original toy line, the Marvel comics series, and the cartoon, a G.I. Joe-style "Knowing is half the battle…" PSA featuring Bumblebee, three archival Hasbro toy commercials, a printable script for the episode "Transport to Oblivion", and a large b&w Autobot magnet.   For the most part, these episodes are from the same masters that Rhino used in the 2002 releases, but Brian Ward and his team painstakingly researched the discrepancies between the original masters and the broadcast versions, and replaced most of the incorrect footage (and sound) with the correct sections from the 1" broadcast tapes.  For casual fans these changes will be transparent, but for longtime viewers, these new DVDs are the closest we've gotten to how the show was originally shown on TV.  Unfortunately, the 1" tapes segments tend to stick out a bit, and can be a bit jarring as the animation flows between the crisp sequences of the original masters and the softer, slightly duller 1" broadcast tape.  On the whole though, knowing that the original broadcast versions are preserved far outweighs the visual bumpiness.

Here's an example of the corrected animation from the episode "Fire in the Sky".  Look to the missing Decepticon symbol on Skyfire's chest in the original master footage from the 2002 Rhino release on the left, and the newly inserted footage from the 1" broadcast tape on the new Shout! DVD on the right...



The episodes included on disc 1:
-More Than Meets the Eye: Part 1
-More Than Meets the Eye: Part 2
-More Than Meets the Eye: Part 3
-Transport to Oblivion
-Roll for It
-Divide and Conquer
-Fire in the Sky
-S.O.S. Dinobots

The episodes included on disc 2:
-Fire on the Mountain
-War of the Dinobots
-The Ultimate Doom: Part 1
-The Ultimate Doom: Part 2
-The Ultimate Doom: Part 3
-Countdown to Extinction
-A Plague of Insecticons
-Heavy Metal War

As far as the packaging, presentation and bonus materials go, I was very impressed by the attention to detail and that Shout! had and eye on the style of the original toy packaging when designing the slipcase, sleeve inserts, disc art and the episode guide.  The foil embossed slipcase is brilliant and just plain beautiful (especially compared to the rather dull silver digipaks of the original 2002 Rhino release.)   This is the best work I've seen from Shout! when it comes to their 80s cartoon releases.  The menu navigation is light years better than the old Rhino DVDs as well, with an included feature to play multi-part episodes together without interrupting the flow of the cartoon by cutting out the opening and closing credits on the in-between episodes.  The 20 minute "From Toy to Comic to Screen" featurette takes its cue from the docs that Andy Mangels did for the BCI Eclipse He-Man, She-Ra, and Dungeons and Dragons sets, and is well produced.  The main focus of the doc centers around Hasbro acquiring the toy license from Takara, the development of the Marvel comic series, and eventually how the story-lines for the three platforms differed, and features creative talent that worked for Marvel, Hasbro and Sunbow past and present.  It's not quite as in-depth as I was hoping, skirting talk of the production of the series for the most part, but according to the specs of the Complete series set, we can expect two more docs in these individual sets, as well as two additional and exclusive docs on the complete set (including a voice actor reunion), so there's room for more down the road.   Also, it was kind of weird that the interviewees hid all mention of Marvel when talking about the comics, they'd just refer to "a comic company", or "that comic series".  As for the toy commercials, two of them pertain to G1 toys, while a third is for the G2 Optimus Prime re-release.   It's really interesting seeing these, though it can be distracting while watching them because the child actor's faces were blurred (I’m guessing for rights or residuals issues.)  There's also a glimpse of the Sunbow Marvel comics commercial in the documentary which kind of makes me hope that these will be included on future sets or maybe the complete set, but I'm not holding my breath...

All in all, for a set retailing between $20-30, fans couldn't really ask for anything better considering the Rhino DVDs have been out of print and fetching upwards of $100 a set.  This is the first time the Transformers series has been released with this much loving detail at such an affordable price in the US, and hopefully it's just the icing on the cake as there are three more sets, as well as the G.I. Joe series to look forward to. Brian Ward and the team at Shout really did a great job with this set.

If there's one thing that I lament about the film-going experience as I get older, it's that I move further and further away from the boy who used to watch movies with unquestioning wide-eyed amazement.  When I turned thirteen I started looking at film with a slightly more critical and as the years packed on with an increasingly cynical eye.   It's a very rare experience for me to walk into a film without the baggage of 20 odd years of cinema watching experience, comparing and contrasting to genre and style.  It's hard to not have a jaded outlook, in particular when I have any sort of vested interest in the material, and growing up a comic book collector during the 80s and 90s it's hard not to have such an interest in a film adaptation of the Watchmen.



More importantly, if this film accomplishes nothing else, it has made me question the point of adaptation in general.  I can't claim to completely understand it, but the yearning to see stories from various other media adapted into film is incredible for me.   As a pre-teen I couldn't think of anything more exciting than seeing the Lord of the Rings made into films.   As a comic collector I burned to see my favorite franchises turned into major motion pictures, and it's a feeling that's hard to shake to this day, especially in the wake of the Watchmen adaptation.  But when I stop and truly think about what adaptation requires, and what it ultimately offers, I have to wonder just how pointless it is.  What is the point of making a film like the Watchmen when I can read the comics the way they were intended to be taken in?  Is it to capture new readers of the comic, to hold up the greatness that a lot of us believe the Watchmen holds and force it on an audience that would only take a chance on it in the film medium?   Is it supposed to outshine the original?  As someone who has already experienced the story in its original form I have to say that no matter how spot on the film was, it would only ever be something that can come close to the original, but never supersede it.  The original, for what it is, has little in the way of flaws, and doesn't need to be told any other way.  It can only ever be a much quicker way to experience the story, something that is antithetical to the original work.  If I wanted to get somebody to experience the story, I'd just give them the book.  At the end of the day, the Watchmen is a specific story that works as it was created and any adaptation would just pale in comparison.  It isn't something like Spiderman, which is an icon, a concept of a character that can be used to tell any number of stories.  For someone who is not intimately versed in super hero comics to catch the film, well I think they'd be missing the point of the story anyway.

When I walked out of screening with my wife, my first reaction was that the movie was all muffin top and no actual muffin, but let me back up a second.  All the beats were there in terms of story points, and visually the movie is stunning.  I had the same reaction that a lot of comic fans seem to be having with the flick in that it's amazing to see the characters from the comic leap to the screen picture perfect.  Again, even this reaction is because of the baggage I'm carrying from watching super hero movies for the last 30 years.  Up until the mid 90s it was very rare that a comic book character could be visually translated onto the screen with such faithfulness to the source material.  The Christopher Reeve Superman was good, but only about half right.  The Michael Keaton Batman, though special in his own right, was a bit off from the caped crusader in the comics.  When you get right down to it, the foam rubber Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the first live action film were some of the very first truly amazing visual translations of characters from comic to screen.  Over the past decade this has been a focus that filmmakers seem to increasingly nail on a consistent basis, and for a group of characters like the Watchmen to make the transition almost wholly intact, is incredible, if only because the source material isn’t ripe for adaptation.  For a movie studio to put as much time and money into the translation without the benefit of a huge merchandising machine in place in this day in age is wild.

It's the visual culmination of years of trying to perfect the balance between pleasing the fans, logistics of production, and advances in technology.  The thing is that 30 years of super hero films have trained the audience that anything better than horrible is just fine with us.  So a picture perfect visual adaptation of the Watchmen isn't an aspect that the film can really rest its laurels on.   The other celebrated aspect to the film is the fact that it managed to keep enough of the tone and content to garner an R rating.  The original comics are unrelentingly "adult" in content; in particular when compared to the rest of the output from the publisher (DC comics) at the time it was published.   When you get right down to it, super hero comics are aimed at a young audience, and that was one of the conventions that the Watchmen sought to challenge.  The hurdle the movie is attempting to leap across is the fact that most films these days are specifically molded to appease the sensibilities of the largest possible audience, which is why most "adult" fare is targeted to a PG-13 crowd.  Show just enough to appease those with darker sensibilities, and hold back just enough so that the content is suitable for most teenagers, and bang, that mystically profitable age range is targeted.  Unfortunately, most uncompromised stories don't fit very easily into any sort of age specific category.  Life in general just doesn't fit into predetermined boxes all that well.  So the fact that the Watchmen is rated R, and a deservedly hard R, could be viewed as another accomplishment on the path to an uncompromised adaptation.  Again, though, a laurel not to be rested upon.   Side-stepping the mediocrity of the film industry, as admirable as it is, shouldn't be celebrated, it should be expected.  Even if it were, the violence and adult content in the Watchmen comics are not a selling point.  I think I'd have to philosophically side with Sam Peckinpah on this one and admit that these characteristics of the original comics are an abhorrent necessity in conveying the story.   It's not cool to watch Rorschach chain a child murderer to a hot water heater in a building he just set afire, giving him a hacksaw as a means to disfigure himself with the possibility of an uncertain escape.   It's not cool to watch as an inmate's throat is cut with a box cutter in order to get him out of the way of cell bars that need to be acetylene torched.   It's not cool watching a woman brutalized and half raped for character development; it's necessary to tell the story that Alan Moore set out to write, and it's there to disgust the reader.

So what's left?  Story, acting, tone (not just of the R rated variety, but in terms of overall plot and world), and execution (in terms of direction), this is where the film starts to fall apart for me.  It's been awhile since I've read the original comics, and after walking out of the screening I felt like a lot was left out, though I couldn't put my finger on exactly what.  I know of the fan gripes, that the Black Freighter comic-within-a-comic story was excised for the theatrical cut (to be released on DVD as a cartoon later this month, along with the possibility of be re-cut into the expanded edition of the Watchmen film on DVD), that the Newsstand and the relationship been the proprietor and the kid who reads the comic was left unexplored, the dropping of the prison psychiatrist's back story, and probably the most popular gripe, the alteration of the final sequence in the film and dropping of the giant squid Macguffin.  Those aspects didn't bother me as I'm much more concerned with the core story, not all the little details.   I mean when you get right down to it, it would simply be impossible to include all the plot threads and details, there just isn't enough time to incorporate it all.   No, an adaptation from a long format to a short calls for cuts to be made, fat, no matter how interesting, to be trimmed for the core story to come through.  So does it?  I have to say yes.  All the "important" stuff is there, the dynamic between Rorschach and the rest of the Watchmen (and the rest of the world for that matter), Dr. Manhattan's abandonment and eventual rediscovery of humanity, the dissection and exploration of super heroes as saviors or gods, the futility of doing things the right way, and an expose on the dark depths to which humanity can find itself when it loses its way on the path to righteousness and moral right.  All of the landmark elements from the comic series are represented, yet the film still seems (at least to me) to lose its own way in the midst of adaptation.

There are a couple themes that seem to have been partially dropped, and an aspect to the original story that can't translate verbatim and possibly could have been redirected but wasn't.   First off, I don't think the overall tone of the story was kept intact in the translation.  Reading the original comics isn't a fun beautiful experience on the whole.  I believe that many of the characters are drawn (both literally and stylistically) to be so ugly that it's hard to follow their stories without disgust.  In fact I think it's really hard to pick a character that as a reader you can truly get behind so that the focus isn't placed on watching that one character interact within the world created, but instead for the reader to be forced to watch all aspects of the world not unlike the social conditioning of Malcom Macdowell's character in A Clockwork Orange.  If there is a hero in the book it's the bond between Dan's Night Owl II and Rorschach.  Aspects of both characters are admirable, but neither is strong enough to carry the role of a hero for the story.  Back to the point, the world of the Watchmen is ugly and dark, it isn't polished, and when it appears to be it's just a thin veneer covering something rusty and broken.  Zach Synder made a conscious effort to adapt the material in such a way that this gritty ugliness is polished and beautiful to watch.  Scenes are set to overbearing music cues that are at once both too perfect and too pop for the good of the story.  The soundtrack is full of hit songs and memorable anthems and don't speak to the world of the film at all except in the most obvious and coincidental ways.  The one section in which this really worked for me was the opening credit sequence after the brutal murder of the Comedian, which is a couple minute montage set to Bob Dylan's The Times They are a-changin' (illustrating the formation and ultimate failure of the Minutemen super hero team, and their impact on society.)   It's heavy handed, but it works.

Unfortunately, there are too many sequences that follow during the next hour or so that keep up this absurd music video-like quality to the film so that the world of the Watchmen isn't given a chance to breath on its own.  It's suffocating, and in the end the obvious tone to the music is what informs the tone of the scene, not really what's playing out before your eyes.  At its most inhibiting, the music can completely tear you out of the film you're watching and put the viewer in the mindset of other films.  The flash back sequence of a 70 foot tall Dr. Manhattan obliterating Vietcong troops set to Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries is such an obvious reference to Apocalypse Now that it borders on pretentious ("You'all like crazy overblown scenes from films about the war in Vietnam?  Well here's a crazy overblown scene about the war in Vietnam, set to the music from that original example!")

The cinematography itself is also so pretty and picture perfect that it does nothing but damage the tone of the story being told.  Everything is so rich and colorful, every movement of the characters is so choreographed and precise that it's a wonder to behold, awe inspiring really.  But honestly, I don't think this is what we're supposed to be feeling while watching the film or reading the story.  I think the blame doesn't necessarily fall with the director so much as the source material which is being adapted.   If there is an obvious downfall of the comic book medium it's in the limitations with which the storytellers and artists have to tell a story.  The medium emulates life, but it's forced to take snapshots of movement and moments, and begs the reader to read between the panels.  Comic pages end up looking like a collection of all the most perfect moments imaginable in a story, but by nature it almost has to be (where film doesn't.)  Also, during the 80s (in particular) mainstream comics were still on the precipice of achieving a more realistic coloring style and were still shackled by the garish color conventions that printing had to offer at the time.  Where the film takes these cues and relishes in them, is when I believe it becomes a misinterpretation of the limitations of the medium.  It has to be very difficult as an artist to keep yourself from picking the absolutely perfect moments to draw in a comic.  Aesthetically specking this is process an artist normally goes through to make interesting and pleasing artwork.   To a degree this can translate to film in general, but it's only one choice of many to convey particular moods and tone.   For whatever beauty there is in the grittiness and violence in the original Watchmen comic, in the picture perfect snapshots of moments and it's vividly colored world, I think it has to be weighed against how unsettling it was when taken in context of practically every other super hero comic being published at the time.  This beautifully rendered chaos becomes ugly in this comparison.

As for the path not taken with the adaptation (that I alluded to above), another key factor of the original comics are their deconstruction of the super hero mythos within comics in general.  This deconstruction just doesn't translate well to film because there are too many factors to take into consideration for an audience not steeped in comic history, and it's too meta (for lack of a better term.)  It won't work for people who aren't steeped in these conventions because the concepts aren't novel to the history of cinema (which obviously wasn't a concern of Moore when writing the comic.)  Cinephiles and the majority of film goers have been inundated with truly realistic depictions of flawed heroism and the dangers of getting behind anti heroes,a nd honestly I don't think that audience distinguishes all that much between a character's chosen occupation.  Flawed cop or caped crusader, it's all the same to most people.  I believe there was a chance to redirect this deconstruction at a more clearly defined target, the super hero film as a genre in particular.  Sure, the content of this deconstruction would deviate some from the Watchmen source material, but the heart and soul of one of that source material's original aims would be kept intact.  I truly think that as a piece of "important" literature, the Watchmen's interpretation of the super hero ladden world is one if it's crowing acheivements. 

Getting back to the misplaced tone of the film, there are distinct choices to portray certain aspects to the story in a much more grandiose manner that mar the tone.  There is little super heroic fighting in the original comics for instance, and when Synder adapted the material he chose to heighten these moments, turning them into exactly what the original comics were intending to deconstruct and downplay.   Watching Silk Spectre II and Night Owl make an assault on a street gang or a maximum security prison is like watching all of the horribly unrealistic action that is common to films such as the Matrix, X-Men, and Ghost Rider (not to mention that the methodology and consequences of the violence is increased.)  These non-super powered characters are doing truly unrealistic and super powered things like punching through concrete, and throwing people clear across rooms.  Watching Rorschach scale the side of a building evokes the feeling one gets when watching Spiderman do the same thing, and that is a terrible misinterpretation of what the Watchmen is all about.

I will say that incongruous to my feelings on the adaptation above, I loved the change in the ending of the film.  Whereas the giant-squid-alien Macguffins that are used as a doomsday device/deterrent in the original comics are a terribly interesting way of bringing the final outcome of the story to fruition, I am completely blown away by the poetry Snyder managed to squeeze out of the new destructive device.  Having Ozymandias trick Dr. Manhattan into building devices that would emulate his powers of atom level disintegration under the guise of generating a free source of energy is genius.  When the "bombs" go off vaporizing many major cities in the world, both putting into play Ozymandias' ultimate goal of world peace through banding together against a common foe, and framing Manhattan for this destruction in the process (by using his power's signature and instrumenting a portion of his loss in humanity and eventual exile from Earth), Snyder effectivly turns Jon Osterman into God, the ultimate deterrent for war.  Synder taking such a stab at Christianity is so much in the vein of what Moore was doing with the original Watchmen comics that it almost makes up for the fast and loose way he handled the build up to the reveal of the story, almost.

I also have to say that again, adaptation issues aside, a good majority of the characters do translate well to screen.  Jackie Earl Haley as Rorschach is amazing (though a tad too emotional when compared to his monotone print counterpart), more so when not wearing the mask.  Patrick wilson's Night Owl manages to capture the essence of the original character, at some times more convincingly than int he comics.  Some don't fare so well though, particularly Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter.  Her portrayal of the character is too strong and confident, she's played as a sex bomb and doesn't seem to be the same broken down dependent character from the original comics.

All in all I still just have to wonder what the point of the whole experience was.

Hello all, sure has been awhile huh?  Guess it's about time I updated the blog and brought it into the new year, though I haven't been completely neglecting the site as you can see from the slight facelift I've given it.  I'm still pretty dense when it comes to website construction, so I've been slowly tinkering with the code in hopes of getting this place shaped up into a slightly less messy place to visit.  Call it pre-spring cleaning, except all the content is staying put, I just took some time to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls.  If nothing else, there is no fear of stabbing yourself accidentally on the old horribly sharp and generic header I used to have…



Anyway, on to the topic of conversation I wanted to get to today, the remake/reboot of Friday the 13th, which I saw this past weekend with my wife.   Granted it's not on DVD yet, but it will be so I figured the best place to store it on Branded would be in the Buried column.  It was sort of a weird experience as we decided to catch an evening screening (we typically only hit the theater before noon on the weekends to take advantage of the half price tickets at our local AMC), and we don't usually watch horror flicks in the theater since my wife really isn't partial.  She bit the bullet though as we had a free ticket courtesy of the pretty interesting Friday the 13th DVD documentary His Name was Jason.  I was expecting the place to be crowded as it was a Saturday night and we were seeing a relatively popular flick, but our screening was only about 1/4th full.  I was also hoping to have a decent audience as it's always more fun to see certain flicks (like comedies and horror movies) with a bunch of people who get into the screening, but we were plagued from the audience from hell.  Through the entire running time of the film the teenagers that were in the room with us kept playing musical chairs.  The ones that weren't seat hopping kept getting up to leave for five minutes at a time before stomping back in.  Needless to say it was hard to get into the movie what with all of the ADD addled kids about.

As for the film itself, I was sort of happily surprised and disappointed all at the same time.  I'm not a diehard Jason fanatic, and though I love plodding through the first 8 Friday films from time to time, I'm not particularly bothered by the idea of a remake or reboot, or whatever they hell they want to call this new flick.  In fact the one thing I kept reading going in was that the new movie squishes aspects of the first four Friday films into one plot, which seemed like a good idea and it boded well for the idea that the filmmakers might ditch the horrible 40+ minute lead up most of the originals employed.  I mean when you get right down to it not that many people are probably watching a slasher film for good character and plot development, at least not a series like the Friday films.  Actually, I think character development is a great place to start talking about the new flick.

If there is one thing that I don't envy about the process that sequel and remake writers/directors must go through, it's the balancing act between giving the audience what it’s looking for while also trying to put an interesting spin on an old story or concept.  I mean how many times can we see Jason kill a bunch of camp counselors before it gets boring?  In particular when dealing with a weirdly iconic character like Jason Voorhees, how do you paint him from a different angle?  He started out as a deformed "mostly-drowned" child/hallucination, shifted into a fully grow potato sack wearing inbreed hillbilly, took a side step into hockey mask stealing stalker, and eventually graduated into becoming an undying soulless zombie maniac (do we even need to envoke his cyborg years?)   He's been mother obsessed, self obsessed, Corey Feldman obsessed, a disgruntled pawn of Freddy Kruger, and yes, okay, he was even shot into space.  What's interesting to me is that throughout all of this Jason has managed to stay pretty static character-wise.  Sure, he's put into new situations from time to time, taken a stroll through Times Square, spent some time as a demon worm, an even been a guest on the Arsenio Hall show, but he's pretty much the exact same mute coveralls-wearing lovable mug.   The Jason I grew up with took the concept of Michael Meyers from the first Halloween film and brought it to a whole new level.  He is the boogie man, a mostly faceless killer who acts out of pure fanatic revenge at first and later on out of a meaningless impulse.   He's not of this world; he lives in the shadows and pops up totally unexpected from out of no where with an almost teleportation-like quality.   He serves at the ultimate punishment and the consequences of walking the wrong path, and he has no needs.  Hunger doesn't deter him, money won't stop him, and he won't even bat an unleveled eye at a half naked woman.  So as a part of the filmmaking team for the new flick, how do you deal with the character's iconic status?   Where do you deviate, what past character traits to you pay homage to or resurrect?

Well in the case of the new film, the creators decided to develop Jason's character, enough so that the new incarnation only resembles the tried and true icon.  Underneath the hockey mask is a new Jason, one that I personally don't care all that much about.  The problem I have is that the new Jason thinks too much.   He's painted as a monster with plans and day to day rituals, a man with needs, preferences, and dare I say it feelings!  The filmmakers have made him the worst kind of being, a human being.   In the new flick Jason has an underground labyrinth home base; a series of dugout tunnels where he keeps an odd assortment of baubles and junk.   I don't know about any of you, but the Jason I grew up with has no time to amass a collection of anything, even disturbing rotting junk.  The new Jason is so won over by the sight of a girl who looks enough like his mother that he not only hesitates in killing her, but he abducts her, keeping her captive in said underground lair.  On the surface this isn't all that beyond the scope, but when you stop to think about it for even a minute it flies in the face of what the character is capable of.  Hostages kept for any length of time need to be fed, they need water, and they need a place to poop for crying out loud!

On top of this the filmmakers have instilled an odd intent into the new Jason, leading him to set traps for his victims, keeping them pinned down so that he can come back to them later.   The new Jason isn't the unstoppable force of nature he used to be, but more of a plotting, scheming, opportunist.   I guess in my mind, when you're dealing with a character as iconic as Jason (yet not as old-as-the-hills like say Santa Claus), it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to humanize him.  Though I haven't seen it, I think Rob Zombie did something similar with his iteration of Michael Myers from his Halloween remake.  I don't need to identify with Jason as a character, I just need to be poop-in-my-pants scared of him or rooting him on as he kills annoying kids.  Even though I think the intent of making the character (in the new flick) relate-able was to up the disturbing factor, it just didn't work for me.

Part of the problem for me is Jason's antihero status from the original series of films.  Though the first film is 98% without the character, it's set up in such a way where the viewer doesn't really bond with the camp counselors, not to mention the fact that so many of the kill scenes are shot from the first person perspective of the killer.  It trains us to anticipate and eventually begin to enjoy the slaughter.  In the third film the main characters take on such underdeveloped stereotypical roles, that they serve as nothing more than lambs to the slaughter, deaths we just can't wait to see soon enough.   By the fifth film we're no longer watching for plot, and by the seventh Jason might as well be playing King Ghidorah to Tina Shepard's Godzilla!   What I'm getting at is that half of the fun of Jason is rooting for him (or against him in either Part 7 or Freddy Vs. Jason), and it's really hard to get behind his character in the new flick because he's more real, and well, to be blatantly obvious, he's killing people.  I know how stupid that sounds, but think about it for a minute.  As viewers, do we ever root for the three psychos in Last House on the Left?  Do we really want to see Laurie Strode lose to Michael in Halloween?  Do we really want to see the demon Pazuzu for Regan to masturbate/stab herself with a cross in the Exorcist?  Hell no.  But we do want to see Jason slaughter a bunch of braindead kids, and in order for this dynamic to work, I think his character needs to be as inhuman as possible (to the extent of making him a zombie in the later films.)

By this point I'm sure you're asking yourself how I could have simultaneously been happily surprised with the flick.  I guess my biggest fear going into the film was that it was directed by Marcus Nispel, the same guy who brought us my least favorite horror film of all time, the remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  I don't really want to get into that flick, but I will say that I absolutely adore the original film, and the remake missed the point of its predecessor completely.  I don't particularly care for the trend in modern horror of making the genre so damn mean.  Be it torture porn (Saw, Hostel, et al), or flicks like Severance (that take interesting and fun characters, let you get to know them for 40-50 minutes, and then force you to see them killed in a sadistic and just downright mean fashion), I just have a hard time relating to this generation's horror.   I expected the new Friday the 13th to be just more of the same, and I was completely surprised by how well Mr. Nispel nailed the tone of the original series.  There's a little bit more of each of the trademarked elements for sure (more T&A, more annoying characters, more gore, etc.), but it really works as a whole.  Believe it or not, even for the faux-Jason, the film is fun to watch.  Go figure.  I wish I had more to say about it, but it's really just refreshing to see a flick like this and enjoy myself in this day and age.

I've been on a John C. Reilly kick lately, and this past week I sat down and watched the flick The Promotion (written and directed by Steve Conrad.)  I wasn't expecting to really connect with the film at all as it's sort of set up with a pretty standard comedy plot and stars Seann William Scott (he of Stiffler fame from the American Pie movies) who I'm not all that enamored with.  Honestly, I was expecting to enjoy Reilly's performance, a few jokes here and there and that's about it.



Part my initial disinterest was that the flick seemed to be drawing from the same cultural ennui of flicks like Waiting, Office Space and more importantly Clerks.  I experienced Clerks at the perfect age, 19, right smack dab in the middle of my initial career as a grocery store stock clerk and budding film buff, and connected with it in a very visceral way.  For my money Kevin Smith totally captured what life was life like for a 20-something pop culture nerd working in retail, whittling away the hours with humor as the world (customers, supervisors, family, etc.) slowly sucked away at your soul.  Well, with a lot of genres (sub-genres, sub-categories, what-have-you) it seems like there are one or two films that do a great job of addressing the particular subject matter, and thereafter other flicks just seem to be watered down imitations or parodies.  For me, in the minimum wage lackey category of comedy films, Clerks stands head and shoulders above the rest (with a nice honorable mention to Office Space, even though it deals more with corporate misery), and after watching flicks like Waiting or Kill the Man I was getting kind of tired of the genre.  When I saw the trailer for the Promotion, I was expecting just more of the same.

Actually, I think part of my disinterest lies simply with the fact that I've moved on from that time and place in my life.  I'm over ten years older, working a slightly more rewarding office job (I still emotionally connect to Office Space just fine thank you), and I'm less interested in wallowing in sarcastic hopelessness, preferring a bit more upbeat fare (in general, not as a rule.)  Again, watching the trailer for the Promotion, which revolves around two grocery store assistant managers vying for the coveted store manager position at a new location, I was expecting to be less than engaged by the plot.

For the first half of the film everything was going exactly as I figured.  I was really enjoying John C. Reilly's Richard Wehlner, there were a couple of really funny jokes (in particular a handful about an annoying banjo teacher/gay dominatrix type), and a few surprising cameos (in particular by Jason Bateman and Bobby Cannavale.)  I was actually a little surprised that Seann William Scott didn't bug me all that much (something I also noticed in the flick Southland Tales), though there wasn't anything particularly engaging about him either.  Then, as the rivalry between Reilly and Scott started to heat up a bit I found myself wanting the film to side-step the clichéd plot (where one of the two would take on the role of the villain and you’d start rooting for the other by proxy) and veer into more uncharted territory.  The weird thing is that it did.

I as mentioned before, the film stars Scott as Doug Stauber, who is an assistant manager at a grocery store chain located in Chicago, and along with his wife (played by Jenna Fischer) is just trying to make a go of life in middle class America.  Figuring on being the shoo-in for the Store Manager position at a new location under construction, the couple decides to take a chance on buying their first house.  At the same time, Canadian transplant Richard Wehlner (Reilly) (and his family, including his Scottish wife played by Lili Taylor), also an assistant manager (though for a chain of Canadian sister stores), and a recovering drug addict, transfers to Chicago putting Stauber's "shoo-in" status in jeopardy.  As the bigwigs descend on the store to check up on Doug and Richard, each end up dealing with their own demons, be it a gang making life on parking lot duty hell, the possibility of slipping back into depression, alcohol and drugs, or their need to get 'promoted' in order to grab a hold on their life.

Though the film is mainly a comedy, it manages to avoid some of the more obvious or gratuitous plot machinations, and pretty much plays the jokes in a subtle manner (even the more outrageous humor isn't in your face.)  The flick manages to balance the gags with plenty of introspection and does a surprisingly amazing job at illustrating a more real-life struggle for success.  This is what kills me about most movies where the characters are always shooting for the stars, where success is defined only by achieving what in the long run only a very few people can.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for striving for greatness, but I'm also content in not shooting myself into the cosmos.  Becoming an amazing success is wonderful, unless the trip there and beyond is horrible.  Anyway, about halfway into the film I started hoping for a particular outcome, and was surprised when it occurred.  Where Clerks deals with the grind of working a Middle American job with sarcasm, apathy and slack, The Promotion deals in hope, duty, and a positive work ethic.  It's the other side of the coin, and sort of the next logical step after a film like Clerks (which is sort of where Smith was going with Clerks II, just without the goofy dance sequences, inexcusably ignorant fanboys, and donkey sex.)

There are a ton of reasons why I'm a nerd/dork/geek/what-the-fuck-ever, but if I had to pick one that exemplified this blog, it would probably have to be the word document file that I've been working on for the past four years that I call "the list."  What is on this list you probably aren't asking?  Well I'll tell you.  It's a list of every film I've ever seen.  Not so dorky you say?  Well it's also annotated.

Over the course of the past four years I've spent a good bit of my spare time reading over IMDB lists, complete video and DVD release guides, and any other list of films I could find to compile a list of everything I've ever seen, film-wise.  I was pretty proud of myself at first because this sprang out of boredom at work as I tried to think of some project that would take a long time, and when I decided to draw up the list, I figured that I'd never finish it.  I have seen quite a few movies, but the thing that I felt was going to be the biggest stumbling block was finding thorough lists of flicks.  See most of the lists and guides I was reading were either yearly best-of's, or limited to what has been released either on video or DVD, and even then these weren't exhaustive as they leaned toward more popular fare.  So between these, 6 million Google searches, and my collection of movie ticket stubs that I started collecting about 20 years ago I managed to put together a pretty exhaustive list.

Is anyone still reading this?  God bless your inexhaustive patience and limit for boredom if you are.  So were there any stipulations to what could and couldn't find a home on the list?  There sure were.  First off, I had to feel like I remembered a decent amount of the plot in order for the flick to make it on the list.  If I remembered the title but couldn't remember the plot, I nixed it.  Second, and this is the super stupid anal part of this list considering I'm the only person who will ever see it besides what ever estate lawyer lackey is forced to read through it upon my death, I had to feel like I watched the flick from beginning to end.  So anything that I've seen edited on TV didn't make the list either.

So what are these annotations you probably aren't asking about?  Well, once I finished the general list it didn't seem quite as cool as I had hoped.  I did mention that I was a dork right?  So in order to make the list cooler than G. Gordon Liddy the night before the Watergate scandal broke, I decided to run through the list and mark each movie with some code.  First, each flick was marked to show who (out of my circle of friends and family) that I saw the flick with.  Then I marked it as to whether or not I saw it in the theater.  Then whether or not I owned it.  Then I figured I'd try and mark the approximate number of times I could remember watching it.  This list was really starting to take shape now.  I had to make a key for the various notations.  As a coupe de grace, I decided to highlight all the flicks that I wanted to own on DVD, and then whether or not they were available on DVD, so now the list was all colorful as well.

Outside of feeling like the biggest anal-list-retentive geek on the planet, I felt like all the time and effort I put into the this was well worth the, well, effort, if for nothing else, than for giving me fodder for other boredom relieving activities like "count the seconds".  Have you ever found yourself on the toilet with a calculator so bored that you decided to mathematically deduce the total number of seconds you've been alive, or the approximate number of breaths you've taken, or the possible number of times you've pooped in your life?  Liar, I saw you doing it.  Wil Wheaton has done it.  Well, he wasn't on the toilet, but that's neither here nor there.  Anyway, this list has a ton of statistics fodder for crap like this, from the approximate proportion of my life I've spent watching movies, to the ratio of films seen with each of my friends, and who I am more likely to see a flick with.  Last warning, I mentioned I was a dork, okay, so stop screaming at me.

One thing I'd like to do it to be able to compare this list to someone else's like another movie buff that's seen a ton of movies.  I mean, even though the list took four years to finish and refine, at the end of the day there are only 1950 films on it. Is that a lot?  Dunno.  Doesn't look like a lot, but then it felt like a lot when I set out to make it.  I think I might need therapy...

Wow, when the heck did the middle of November jump in our laps?!?  Mentally, I'm still back in late August trying to figure out how to not go stark raving mad because of all the changes at work.  Sheesh.  I'm totally neglecting the internet right now (actually it feels like I've been out of the game so to speak since the start of the year.)  But I'm not writing to complain about my silly life woes, no I'm back to get into a fun head-space, and what better way to do this than by cracking open a bootleg copy of one of my favorite all time movies, the 1986 BMX cult classic RAD.

Growing up in the 80s I had a chance to catch the insane home video boom right from the beginning, what with all of the mom & pop rental shops opening and the initial flood of movie titles on VHS and Beta.  My family was a late adopter in terms of getting our own VCR, so instead we'd rent one every other weekend from a little store tucked in a corner of a Gooding's shopping center down the street from us.  As a kid I was a creature of habit when it came to renting movies, not only because I loved watching the same flicks over and over, but also because there were only a handful of titles that I was interested in packed into that tiny rental store.  I remember that the store was divided pretty evenly between Beta and VHS, and the little old couple that owned it only ordered the flicks in one format or the other.  For some reason my parents only ever really wanted to rent a VHS player, so I was severely restricted in terms of titles to rent.  Usually it was a choice between three or four movies, Red Dawn, War Games, SpaceCamp, and RAD, and for some reason the flick that I was always choosing was RAD.   It was also around this time that I realized just how much VHS tapes used to cost back in the day.  I think on my sixth or seventh rental I got up the courage to ask my mom for a copy of the movie for Christmas, so we asked the rental store owners how much a copy cost. ;'When they told us that a new copy of the movie would run about $110, both my and my mother's jaws hit the floor.  Owning VHS was apparently only for the very, very rich in 1986 (well actually it was aimed at store owners for rentals as the industry really hadn't caught a whiff of just how much people wanted to own copies of films.)

So I never got a copy of RAD on VHS, and later on when I starting building my own library of films, I was cheated again as RAD has never been officially released on DVD.   I had to resort to picking up a bootleg copy on ebay, which was just a crappy port of an old VHS rental ripped and burned to disc.  My copy did come with a nice bonus disc though, which included the majority of the RAD soundtrack songs.

The flick begins with the very iconic Tri-Star opening (with the Pegasus running kitty corner into the screen and then leaping over the logo), something that I associate with plenty of Saturday afternoons spent glued to the TV during movie marathons.



Anyway, I thought I'd sort of go through the movie chronologically and talk about the stuff I find interesting.  RAD is part of an unofficial trilogy of flicks in the 80s that touch on the 3 main popular extreme (for lack of a better term) sports of the decade (skate boarding, which was covered by the movie Thrasin', surfing covered in the seriously underrated flick North Shore, and BMX.)  Though there were a couple other BMX movies in the 80s (namely the Aussie flick BMX Bandits, which was more about escaping murderous thieves than BMX), none were as cool to me as RAD.  The opening features a plethora of professional BMXers free-styling over the credits, set to the rocking Jon Farnham tune, Break the Ice (which deserves to be held up with other 80s triumphant movie rock ballads like Rock Until You Drop from Monster Squad, and You're the Best from Karate Kid.)



The flick was produced by Jack Schwartzman, the husband of one of the film's stars, Talia Shire (and father of Wes Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman.)  It was directed by Hal Needham, the guy responsible for many of the goofy Burt Reynolds car-centric comedies of the late 70s and early 80s (like Smokey and the Bandit and the Cannonball Run series), so you know that he can handle the fast paced action of RAD.

I think it was during this credit sequence that I got the most jazzed while watching the flick.  The pro BMX riders doing all sorts of stunts (which I can only hazard a guess to what the names are by using the internets) would always get me in the mood to go outside and try them myself.  Trouble was that I'm horribly uncoordinated when it comes to most physical activities, not to mention that I'm deathly afraid of pain and looking too much like an ass (a trait I've since grown out of), so I'd get pumped, go outside to ride my bike (a sweet powder blue and white GT Performer covered in pink GT stickers), fall off once while trying to do a simple trick and then pedal back home in a huff.  Pretty sad I know.  Guess I would have been the definition of a poser.

Anyway, the flick's main star is Bill Allen who at the time was a 24 year-old guy who looked a hell of a lot like a young Powers Booth.  Playing opposite of Allen was a young Lori Loughlin, who would later on play Uncle Jessie's girlfriend/wife on Full House for six or seven seasons.  Rounding out the cast (in terms of the more known established actors) are Ray Walston of Fast Times at Ridgemont High fame, Jack Weston (who I remember mostly from Dirty Dancing, Ishtar and Short Circuit 2, but who also had turns in flicks like the Cincinnati Kid and the original Thomas Crown Affair), and H.B. Haggerty (who was a familiar wrestler and starred in another underrated flick from the 80s, Million Dollar Mystery.)



In the above screen caps you can take a gander at two of my favorite 80s BMX memories, the first being a fabled full pipe and the second my favorite freestyle move though I have no idea what it's called.  Basically it's when someone does an endo, starts pogoing on the front tire and whips the frame of the bike around in circles, stepping over it as it flips around.





The opening credits sequence is one of those (for me) breathtakingly awesome bits of 80s nostalgia and excitement that I revel in like a drug.   Between the sickly sweet fist pumping heartfelt ice breaking and right making anthem playing over the free-styling action, and the non stop montage of professional BMX riders doing all your basic tricks and such, it's just 80s perfection.  Every time I hopped on my GT Performer heading out for school in the morning, this is the kind of thing I had in my mind's eye.  Sure, I couldn't do much besides popping a wheelie or coming to a side-sliding stop, but I always imagined I was just as talented and, well, cool.  Never meant to be though.

Anyway, back to the film.   The action opens on Cru Jones and his two friends Becky and Luke, splitting up to do their morning paper routes…



What follows is a montage (of which this film has in spades) of the three playing out every possible BMX cliché and fantasy, at least in terms of riding around a local neighborhood goes.  There's riding through construction sites (which was always a favorite of mine growing up within a series of newly built subdivisions…)



…followed by the perfectly timed (or not so much so) jump off of one structure onto a car (and the hilarious wipe out that ensues, complete with straightening of hair and uttering the word "gnarly".)



To illustrate just how ensconced Cru and his compatriots are in their small town, the local fire department is shown getting their delivery mid-street at the appointed time, as well as a friendly garbage man who obviously gives Cru a 'lift' on a regular basis…



Of course, everything isn't wine and roses.  The filmmakers had to make sure and keep an edge to the characters, which is where the ornery residents of the 'hood come in.  You've got the guy who doesn't appreciate his paper thrown into his flower bed, and the most typecast curmudgeon of all time, Ray Walston, who gets a walkway full of spilled coffee and newspaper, courtesy of our hero Mr. Jones.



The sequence ends with Cru in the middle of town staring down an iconic clock tower pumped at another shot at his own best time.  Again, though this sequence is pretty cliché, it does address a lot of what it felt like to cut through my own neighborhood, using my regular shortcuts through golf courses, and light woods to get to school or my friend's houses.

There's even a nicely executed bit with Cru riding though a specifically rigged section of fencing (again, another childhood fantasy of secret passageways hidden throughout the subdivision), which he then turns to face revealing the plot of the film in an advertisement for Helltrack, a 7-Eleven sponsored BMX event coming to the small town.



Again, the plot is pretty straight forward with the corrupt owner of a BMX company (an actual company Mongoose, who I'm sure didn't realize how their company was going to be painted when they agreed to be featured in the film) putting on Helltrack to promote one of his star riders, Bart Taylor (played by real life Olympian Bart Conner), and securing a million dollar T-Shirt licensing deal.  The catch, and the entry of our hero into the story, comes with a local town hall meeting where the residents want to know if local talent can enter into the race.  After some thought, Mongoose owner Duke Best (played with plenty of sleeze by Jack Weston) decides that there will be a qualifying race, the top contenders of which will be featured in the final Helltrack race.



If you've ever seen a kids flick in your life you can probably figure out the rest of the film from here.  But this is beside the point as the cult status of this film isn't in its intricate plot shenanigans, but in the 80s laced cheese, and fun BMX sequences.  One of my favorite of which takes place in a lumberyard where our heroes have a clubhouse (again, another staple of my childhood fantasies realized on film.)  Again, like with the morning paper route antics, this group of BMX nerds is apparently frequently confronted by a local motorcycle cop (played by the iconic H. B. Hagerty) who chases them for sport.  In this bit, it involves riding around huge stacks of freshly cut & stacked wood, as well as a mountain of logs that Cru ends up very unconvincingly riding up to evade the policeman (you can see the planks through the logs the stunt rider used to scale the heap.)  It's crazy and over the top set to a goofy fun rock song called Get Strange by the act Hubert Kah.



Of course, there's also the angle of the Cru's home life with precocious sister Wesley (place in pitch perfect Peppermint Patty tomboy by Laura Jacoby), and his hardworking depressed mother played by Talia Shire (who brings way more gravitas to the role than the film probably calls for, but is plenty welcome.)   Basically, the old push and pull of Cru's hopes and dreams of becoming an ace BMXer, and his obligation to get good grades and go to college (the money for which his mother works hard to earn.)   It's not enough that there's a super evil greedy BMX company owner to contend with.



Completing the template set up by films like the Karate Kid, Cru also has to master that perfect race winning BMX trick, the awe inspiring 360 degree mid jump back flip.  It's surely the crane kick of this film, though is eventually more or less useless in the grand scheme of things.



The film really picks up steam with the introduction of the main villains of the piece, Bart Taylor and his twin toadies, Rod & Rex Reynolds (played by the dreamy real life twins Carey and Chad Hayes respectively.)  They're introduced in the weirdest fashion, a parade through the center of town.  Granted, the whole Helltrack business would probably be a big deal, but parade worthy?  I don’t know.  Of course, blowing into town along side Bart, Rod, and Rex is the lovely Christian Hollings (played by the one and only Lori Loughlin, who looks about ten years older than the character she was cast to play.)



One of the weird themes in this flick involves our hero Cru not always portrayed in the best of lights.  As I mentioned in the beginning of the film he's not the best paperboy, annoying shop keeps by riding through their stores, and knocking coffee out of senior citizen's hands willy nilly.  There's also a short bit with Cru jumping a fence into the school parking lot right into the middle of a group of yuppie teens, who granted probably deserved it, though it's still unprovoked and not the nicest.  During the parade, there is a weird sequence where Cru and his friends stop the parade to let a lady in a car on a side street through the traffic, but then to the angry sneers of the evil BMXers and being chased by the local fuzz, Cru beats a hasty getaway by jumping his bike onto a car and riding over it.  Maybe it's just the crotchety old curmudgeon in me, but this would have pissed me off and I'm sure dented the hood and roof to hell and back.  Maybe I'm just getting to old to appreciate these teen action flicks.



By far, my favorite sequence in the entire film revolves around a school dance that Bart, Rod and Rex are forced to attend while in town.  The scenes feature two of the zaniest, most ridiculous dance sequences ever put to film (including both Rodney Dangerfield performances in Caddyshack and Back to School.)  The first is the stupendously retarded evil line dancing bit, set to the song Music That You Can Dance To by Sparks.  Bart Taylor is decked out in his supremely "cool" suit jacket over a plain yellow T-shirt looking like a reject Billy Zabka clone and is dancing with a hussy all gussied up to look like Debbie Harry.   They're both so stiff and trying way too hard to exude sexiness that they come off laughable, particularly in their Macarena-like dance moves (don't you dig the crossed arms grasping the shoulders dance move?)   The look of evil intensity on their faces is offset by the absurd faux break dancing styles of the Reynolds twins dancing around a zebra-striped, skintight-lycra-wearing shell of a woman.  Hands down, the evil dancing craziness reaches a nice crescendo when the twins drop to the floor doing the god awful push-ups move, followed by a double dose of the worm that has to bee seen to be believed.



As all this is going on inside, Cru (who has come to the dance Dutch after being rebuffed earlier in the film), is doing a bunch of freestyle BMX tricks outside the school gym.  A crowd begins to gather, when all of a sudden Lori Loughlin arrives and a very tenuous, yet lasting connection is formed between the two star-crossed lovers…



…which leads to the single most insane dance sequence ever!



Set to Real Life's Send Me an Angel, Cru and Christian proceed to rip up the floor BMX style, dancing on their bikes.  The above screen captures just don't do this sequence justice.   In fact I don't have the words to adequately describe just how over the top, hilarious, and amazing this sequence is (check out youtube for the proof and judge for yourselves…)
This craziness is followed by a lightening fast procession of falling in love montage scenes set to With You by John Farnham.  Again, it's predictably hokey, but lovable just the same and ends with the oddly named Ass Sliding scene.  Why is there a nice concrete slide in the middle of the woods leading down into a nearby lake?  Don’t know, but it makes for some zaney love scenes…



Again, adding to the idea that Cru isn't the best person in the world, he ends up sort of cheating during the Helltrack qualifying races by riding outside of the boundaries to avoid entangling with the other racers, and skipping over obstacles.  It's a weird message to send to kids, and it sort of ends up muddying the film a bit.  Ces't la vie though.  The sequence is scored by the rocking Thunder in Your Heart by John Farnham, which is equally as high five inducing as the opening song Break the Ice.   It's rare that a movie like this get two fist pumping anthems…



Of course, by taking part in the qualifiers, Cru has to pass up on taking his SATs, and really pisses his mother off.

To complete the clichéd plot, Cru is wooed by both Duke Best and the evil BMX hussies to come ride for them, and just as soon as he turns them down, our hero finds more obstacles in the way of riding at Helltrack…



Enter the last bit of cult styling to the movie with the introduction of the Rad Racing team, as Cru and his friends find that they have to have a liquid corporate sponsor in order to ride at Helltrack.  The group decides to print up their own T-Shirts with their newly formed team logo and sell them to raise the money they need to race.



Of course in all the ruckus there is some strife for the blossoming relationship between Cru and Christian.   If this film holds the record for the most insane dance sequence, then it also holds the record for the corniest make-up love scene involving a god awful poster featuring pandas and ice cream, reenacted by the two doe-eyed lovers.



As a quick aside, take a look at that monster comic book rack in that ice cream/convenience store!



Again, falling back on the Karate Kid template, the film features a 'sweep the leg' moment as Duke Best informs Bart, Rod and Rex that they need to wipeout Cru no matter what it takes (punctuated by Weston knocking back some whiskey.)



The film builds to the crazy BMX track called Helltrack, and boy does it live up to its name.  Featuring an almost two story vertical drop and some craze jumps (for standard BMX bikes at least), not to mention a giant cereal bowl (of Kix no less), Helltrack was a very convincing set piece.



Again, another strength of this movie was that it featured a bevy of real BMX superstars…



A). Team Hutch – Jeff Ingram. B). Team Robinson – Richard Fleming. C). Factory DK – Robert Rupe. D). Powerlite – Danny Millwee. E). Redline Team – Scott Clark. F). Norco – Kirk Bihun. G). GT – Mike Napareho. H). Binghams Schwinn – Glen Adams. I). Peddle Power Rider – Chris Phoenix. J). Team Robinson – Travis Chipres. K). GT – Eddie Fiola (who also did most of the stunt riding for Cru in the Film as well as being the Technical Advisor on the stunts.) L). GT – Kevin Hull. M). Skyway – Richie Anderson. N). Vans – Beatle Rosecrans. O). Hutch – "Hollywood" Mike Miranda.







All in all, this is one of my favorite cheesy films from the 80s, one that I can watch a hundred times in a row and never get tired of.  I'm sure true BMX fanatics can't stand the flick, but as a kid I loved it to pieces.  Hopefully one day it'll get a true DVD release, but in the meantime I hear that Bill Allen is signing copies of the bootlegs (as well as selling headshots.)  Also, don't forget to check his site for some more Rad trivia, straight from Cru's mouth...

Did you ever wonder how some people can find the time to have multiple blogs?  Well I did, and then for some insane reason decided to start up a second about a year or so ago called Buried in DVDs where I waxed deconstructive on my favorite movies and my DVD collection.  I felt awesomely productive for a few months, and then I was all of a sudden asking myself where in the hell did I think I'd find the time for a second site and promptly stopped updating it.  I think I initially wanted to keep this content separate from Branded as I was going to get into a lot of non-eighties flicks and TV shows, but honestly, I don't really think it's necessary to paint myself into such a tight 80s corner.  So I've decide to integrate the archives of Buried in DVDs into Branded (a process that is one hell of a time sucker. )

Anyway, for anyone curious, there are a handful of Buried posts, well, buried in this site now (you can access them through the banner on the sidebar.)  Hopefully this will free me up to posting about movies and TV shows again as I at least feel it's all working toward the same goal (and site) now…

Well, this Halloween season has buzzed by so fast I feel like I could use a whole second month to celebrate.  As per usual, we haven't yet heard the pitter patter of tiny trick-or-treater's feet at the door, and again we'll have a ton of candy to try and eat over the next month.  One of these years we're going to get at least one kid and I'm telling ya, the whole candy bowl is going in that bag (and trust me, it's always the good stuff!)  Anyway, I hope everyone has enjoyed my countdown, as well as visited the other fine blogs doing their creepy part to keep this month chock full of spooky goodness.   Heck, I'll probably still be catching up on all the Halloween craziness for the next few months.  Also, before I get into the meat of this post, I just want to give an official Happy Halloween to everyone out there.

So on to the last countdown post for this season (barring any leftovers I might throw up tomorrow.)   Before I broke down my mother's will and her kibosh on watching horror movies, there were only a handful of flicks that I was allowed to catch that fell into the horror vein.  One of these was a favorite rental throughout my childhood, though for the life of me I didn't remember 90% of the film when I re-watched it this past month (after picking up an out-of-print copy from a local Hollywood Video that was closing its doors), Saturday the 14th (circa 1981)…



I think I remember the film's 1988 sequel (Saturday the 14th Strikes Back) a bit more, though after watching the trailer for that film as well I'm not so sure.  All I know is that for awhile growing up Saturday the 14th and the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown seemed like the only seasonal fare on TV.



I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting when I plopped this flick in the DVD player, but it sure as hell wasn't what I ended up watching.  Fluttering between god awful silly slap stick, bad pun comedy, and a pretty pedestrian horror film spoof, Saturday the 14th just doesn't know what it wants to be.  Again, seeing as I watched this a few times as a kid, and considering the film opens with a very goofy animation sequence, I figured this film to be kids flick fare…



The film stars husband and wife duo Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as John and Mary a couple who has just inherited a decrepit and spooky house.  Of course, there are others who want the house, namely a couple of vampires named Waldemar (played with camp by Jeffrey Tambor) and Yolanda (played by Nancy Lee Andrews)…



The flick was produced by Julie Corman (wife of famous B movie producer/director Roger Corman) who also brought us the illustrious trilogy of exploitation nursing films, The Night Nurses, the Young Nurses, and Candy Stripe Nurses, as well as Chopping Mall (a film I’ve been obsessed with since falling in love with the poster art at a young age, but have never actually sat through.)  Howard R Cohen directed and penned the script (as well as writing the aforementioned the Young Nurses, which is where Corman probably came to know him; he also brought us episodes of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Rainbow Brite, and Emmanuelle V!)



As I mentioned above, the film opens with Tambor and Andrews lusting after the old creepy house that has been inherited by Benjamin, Prentiss and their two kids, Debbie (played by Kari Michaelson of Gimmie a Break! Fame) and Billy (played with smart-alecky goodness by Kevin Brando…)



It seems that the house is cursed/haunted/possessed, and includes a copy of the Book of Evil, which has the power to unleash evil on the earth.  Billy being the perfectly precocious and curious kid finds the book, opens it, ignores the warning and proceeds to let fly the monsters of evil (which include a rouges gallery of men-in-rubber-suit-monsters such as a mummy, a beastly werewolf, and a goofy looking monster with eyes on stalks that reminds me of the aliens from the Explorers movie.)



There are a million bad puns and jokes, most issued by Richard Benjamin (who delivers the horrible dialogue with a grin and a smile.)  After the 1st third of the film I felt that this was surely a kid's flick, and was then totally taken aback by the drawn-out stripping-before-a-bath scene that (in the kid's film context) seemed inappropriately alluring…



I probably wouldn't have noticed if the scene didn't keep going and going, with plenty of close-ups on Kari Michaelson removing each piece of clothing slowly, and then continuously getting interrupted by phone calls and the like.  Granted, there was a shark-fin-headed gill monster lurking in the water of the tub, which was supposed to be suspenseful, but was really more of an irritation that kept the camera off Michaelson here and there during her strip tease.  I don't mind the disrobing scene in the least, it's just sort of weirdly placed in what I assumed was a kid's flick.   Also, is it weird that my wife and I freeze-framed the screen to see the breast covering bubble bikini that Michaelson was wearing to keep the movie clean?



The film takes another turn for the weirdly violent after the monster chases Michaelson throughout the house, and it's finally confronted by a cop (a neighbor of the newly moved-in family who happens to be passing by), who proceeds to shoot the creature in the heard (with large animated blood squirt and all…)



The creature then strangles the cop to death in a very frantically gruesome manner, again propelling the film outside of children's movie territory and into a b-horror film.  Nothing wrong with this, it just makes for a mighty odd combination.  We then slip back into the goofy kid's comedy arena after the family calls an exterminator for an owl infestation (actually it's bats, but the running joke is that they're owls) and they get a house call from none other than Van Helsing himself (played with glee by Severn Darden.)



The flick then see-saws between goofy and horrific as the wife is turned into a vampire by Tambor, and the family soon discovers that they are in fact trapped in the house by the power of the book (getting whipped in the face by a gust of wind and bright lights whenever they try and open a door, yet newcomers to the house seem to negate this effect.)   It's all way-too-darkly-lit montages of monster parties, severed heads, and eyeballs in the coffee as the family (and the live-in Van Helsing) decide how they can defeat the book of evil and the house-crashing vampires.



Saturday the 14th has one more surprise up its sleeve, as the plot comes to a head and we discover that the menace is really Van Helsing, who wants the power of the book to take over the world, and it's Tambor and Andrews who are trying to stop him…



Billy brings the book to the vampires, and a battle of immense strength and wills takes place (e.g. Darden and Tambor make a bunch of silly faces at each other for a few minutes while trying to levitate Billy…)



…and then the real action begins (well not really, but it was fun to type anyway!)  There's plenty of goofy special effects involving Tambor and Darden throwing lightening and fireworks at each other before Waldemar defeats the evil Van Helsing…



In the end, the family makes up with the vampires and agrees to sell them the house (they end up moving across the street into much nicer digs.)



Honestly, I don't know what to think of this film.  It's at times so-bad-it's-good, but mostly it's just bad, and I wonder what I found interesting about it as a kid.  You can barely make out what the monsters look like as the majority of the film is shot in darkness, though this is probably for the best as the costumes seemed to be pretty cheap.  All in all it just seemed like one big schizophrenic mess of a film that could only be surpassed by the sequel, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back…



Again, I've only seen the trailer, but a lot of the imagery (especially the shot of the blonde girl who is huge inside of the house and you only see her eye from a window) and cast strikes a bell with me.  This will certainly be one for me to track down…

Well, that does it for this year's countdown.   Here's to hoping I can find enough material for next year's.  Happy Halloween folks!

Today was a much needed day of rest and movie watching; in fact it was the first day of a vacation that should last through the 31st (knock on wood.)  So what was on the agenda at casa de Robare?  Well, the 1974 flick titled Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (or possibly the 7 Brothers Meet Dracula if you're more familiar with the shorter version with some alternate editing.)  I'd been meaning to see this flick for awhile (after hearing Ben and Dan talk about it on the Mondo Movie podcast), and today seemed like a great day to sit back and watch the very odd pairing of two cult movie studios, Hammer and the Shaw Brothers.  Yeah, I know what you're thinking, how exactly do you mesh kung fu and horror?  I was skeptical too, but after watching it I have to say that these two go together like chocolate and peanut butter.



I don't have a ton of experience with either studio's work though I have seen a few films by each and I've really liked everything I've seen so far.  Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires was Hammer's shot at trying to breathe some new life into the studio, aiming to cash in on the burgeoning popularity of kung fu cinema in the 70s.  The film was written by Don Houghton (who had penned some episodes of Doctor Who as well as a few other Hammer films) and directed by Roy Ward Baker (who was also part of the Hammer stable of creators), though it's also been noted that Shaw's most prolific and well known filmmaker Chang Cheh also worked on the film.

The film opens on a lone monk walking through the wilderness in Transylvania, 1804.  Right out of the gate you can tell this is a Shaw Brother's film as there are a couple of patented SB camera zooms…



After scaring the bejezus out of a local goat herder, the monk makes his way to a castle in the distance, a location he seems overjoyed to have found.  Though you pretty much have to figure it would be castle Dracula, what with the Transylvania subtitle and fact that it's a co-Hammer production, it was still pretty cool none the less when the monk makes his way into the castle to find a giant tomb with a large letter D on it.  In very quick succession, the tomb opens itself and the ghastly Dracula (played by John Forbes-Robinson) rises to greet the monk, who we find out is named Kah.



We get the basic gist of what's to follow as Kah begs Dracula to help him awaken the legendary seven golden vampires so that he can take control of a province in China.  Dracula refuses, and instead decides to take over Kah's body and so that he himself can return to rule over China and eventually the world.



Honestly this film should be a horrible disaster as right off the bat there are a ton of conflicting story holes, not to mention that the film relies heavily on the films that have come before it, but I still couldn't help smiling with glee throughout the whole thing.  The insanely colorful lighting, the corny dialogue, the interesting though pretty sub-par effects work, it all mashes up into a wonderful hour and a half of crazy monsters and fun kung fu action…



Peter Cushing reprises his role as Professor Van Helsing, though this time he's traveling through China in 1904 in hopes of enlightening the local Universities with his knowledge of the undead.



He recites the legend of the seven golden vampires, a story about a local farmer in an all but forgotten village who chose to stand up against a vampire uprising.  The farmer decided to go out to the vampire's lair one night only to find his daughter, kidnapped (along with six other girls) and tied to a rather ominous looking alter and surrounded by Kah (Dracula) and the seven golden vampires.  The farmer, distraught after seeing his daughter, busts into the temple and proceeds to attempt to free his daughter (unsuccessfully) and to steal one of the vampire's golden bat talismans before fleeing.



In a particularly awesome sequence that follows, Kah summons an army of ghouls who, along with the golden vampires, are set out to track down the farmer.  I was pretty amazed at how creepy and effective the sequence with the ghoul army was considering the film probably didn't have that large of a budget.



Unfortunately Van Helsing's pleas fall on deaf ears, well all but one set that is.



Hsi Ching (played by David Chiang) breaks into Halsing's hotel room to beg him to come back to his ancestral village, the very village being over run by the golden vampires.

To shake things up a bit Houghton introduces the audience to Van Helsing's son Leyland, (played by Robin Stewart) who is at a party when he becomes enchanted by a Swedish widow, Vanessa (played by Julie Ege.)  The two manage to piss off a local Triad Leung Hun, after Vanessa rebuffs his advance.



This leads to the first of five main fight sequences as a group of Triad enforcers attack Leyland and Vanessa.  The duo is saved by two mysterious warriors who we quickly find out are Hsi Ching's brothers, who have been lying in wait to protect the Van Helsings during their trip through China.  Because of their newly acquired troubles with the local mafia, and being pressured by both Hsi Ching and Vanessa, Van Helsing decides to embark on a journey to Hsi Ching's ancestral village to rid them of the vampire plight.



Right as the group sets out on their journey they are besieged by an army of Triad warriors led by Leung Hun.  The battle is a great chance for the seven brothers and their sister dot, er, I mean Mai Kwei, to show off their awesome fighting abilities.  It's a little hard to see, but the seventh brother is in the first screen shot on the top right off in the background (he didn’t get a close-up as he’s an archer and needed to be further away to be effective.)



This is another great moment for Shaw studios to shine with some really fun choreographed kung fu action, as well as some well placed crazy in-death reaction shots…



What surprised me a little was how much Cushing wasn't doing, action-wise.  If there was one thing that I noticed about Cushing's performances in the other Hammer films I've watched (Curse of Frankenstein, the Horror of Dracula, Hound of the Baskervilles and Night Creatures), it is how amazingly action packed his roles have been.  When chasing down Dracula, the man is jumping on tables, running and tumbling everywhere, so different from his turn as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars.  In Lo7GV Cushing pretty much kept to the background as soon as any fights broke out (of course, he was 61 or so at the time, but still.)



Strangely, in the middle of the film, love blooms everywhere as Leyland makes eyes with Mai Kwei, and Vanessa nuzzles up to Hsi Ching.  This felt kind of odd considering the two genre backgrounds meshing together, but then again it's also very modern, and maybe a little ahead of its time.





There's another great battle set in a cave that the group of heroes camps in along the way.  This is their first battle with the supernatural, one in which the group figures out how to destroy the demons.



I was reassured of Cushing's mobility in this sequence as he grabbed up a torch and started some vampire slaying…



After the battle, and even though the group is tired and disheartened, Van Helsing rallies the troops who quickly make their way to village.  The group builds some defenses while waiting for the final battle they expect that evening.  At this point the film is basically becoming the blueprint for films to follow like the Lost Boys.



This is also the point in the film when the tone takes a dark turn as the battle plays out and vampires, brothers, and Swedish widows start dropping like flies…



Vanessa is turned into a vamp, who in turn bites Hsi Ching, leaving him to make a hard choice deciding ultimately to kill her, and then himself…



That was a surprisingly dramatic sequence that actually had me on the edge of my seat.

There's a final race to the temple as the last golden vampire kidnaps Mai Kwei.  Leyland rushes after to her rescue almost dying in the process…



Now that we're in closer quarters with less villains, it's papa Helsing's time to shine as he saves his son and confronts Kah/Dracula, convincing him to transform back into his more normal visage…



During the transformation sequence there is a subtle bit where Dracula takes on the form of a giant bug-like creature that makes me wonder if this was a way of revealing his true demonic form.

In the end, Van Helsing stakes his man, and like in all the previous films Dracula bites the dust…



What's kind of weird is that this whole movie sort of negates Helsing's battles with Dracula as the characters supposedly disappeared from Transylvania in order to travel to China to awaken the seven golden vampires.  Even though there are giant plot holes, this is still one of the most enjoyable vampire flicks I've ever seen.

Beetlejuice is one of those flicks that I think I've seen at least 50 times over the years and I never get tired of it.  This is one of those film projects where practically every aspect of film making just came together to produce something that for my money is just about as close to perfect as you can get.  It's funny and light while also being fairly dark and morbid.  It has a wonderful mix of special effects, from practical and optical to animation (mostly stop motion), most of which haven't dated at all, and still look better than 98% of the CGI out there.  It's perfectly cast, featuring some of my favorite performances from actors like Alec Baldwin, Gena Davis, and Catherine O'Hara, not to mention Michael Keaton's turn as the titular character (who has enough amazing scenes that he steals the film while only being in it about 20% of it.)  Most of all it's one of Tim Burton's most solid efforts that captures both his vision and style without seeming like a "Burton" film (like say how the Corpse Bride, Sleepy Hollow, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all seem to be a Burton film first and foremost.)  Everything in the film feels like it's part of the Beetlejuice universe more than the Burton universe.



Because it's been on TV so much in the almost 20 years since it was released it was never a film that I felt a need to own, but as soon as I began focusing my DVD collection to be comprised of only the films that I want to watch if I gave up TV, it became one of those films that shot to the top of the wish list.  Unfortunately, because I'd seen it so much I also didn't feel like spending all that much on it and it wasn't until recently that I ended up buying the film when I found it for super cheap.  I think a lot of my must own movies have fell into this category, flicks like Beverly Hills Cop, Caddyshack, One Crazy Summer, Die Hard, Red Dawn, Young Guns, the Goonies, these are all flicks that I waited to buy until I could find them for like $5.  It's hard to drop $15-$20 on something that you know so well you've practically memorized it.

Batman Returns is such a weird movie.  It sort of holds the opposite distinction than the first Batman for me because whereas I was the perfect age for the first film, when this came out in theaters I was 15, sort of jaded and ended up pretty disappointed in the movie.  In fact this is one of the first flicks that I should have loved but didn't which has only gotten worse and worse as I've gotten older.  Tim Burton has provided a lot of firsts for me I guess.



What I remember most about seeing this film in the theater was that a local comic shop, not my favorite but one I was trying to support anyways, had booked all the seats for the 8:00pm Friday night screening on it's opening weekend.  This comic shop was sort of out of the way, but it was a weekend, the weekend before the movie opened, and my dad had agreed to drive me out to the shop, though I could tell he really didn't want to.  When we got there I saw their flier for the screening and decided right then and there that I had to attend.  I ditched buying comics for that week and picked up a ticket to the screening which was a little pricier than the normal ticket rate, but he was going to raffle off prizes before the movie so I thought it was worth it.  Well on the trip home I all of a sudden remembered that my friend Stephen would probably like to go, but I wasn't sure and I didn't have enough money for another ticket, so I begged my Dad to drive all the way over to his house so that I could ask him (I had it in my mind that this had to be done right away as the screening was going to sell out.)  Obviously this was before cell phones become so common, but my dad was a trooper and took me over.  Stephen did want a ticket, but he didn't have a ride, so in came the next round of ride begging from my dad, who begrudgingly, very begrudgingly took us both back to the shop to get Stephen a ticket.  I think my dad must have driven us at least a hundred miles back and forth all day just to get these two tickets, and in the end I didn't even really like the film.  Upon reflection I think it's kind of weird the lengths I went to , to see the film in that particular screening, I mean it's not like we couldn't have just gone to the movie at a different theater or showing.  I didn't even like the comic shop owner and pretty much didn't know any of the other patrons of the shop, so it seems kind of weird that I was so hell bent on seeing the movie with a room full of comic fans.  I guess I thought that it would make the experience cooler, but then I guess years of going to comic conventions since then has soured me on that notion.

Over the years Batman Returns has grown on my quite a bit.  I love the lengths that Tim Burton went to in order to keep some semblance of creative freedom, even going so far as making Batman a minor character in a film full of villains just to keep his interest up.  At the time I hated it, but now I just think it was an amazingly brave move.  Hell, done right the villains usually provide the more interesting fodder for stories any way, so it stands to reason that they could conceivably carry a movie.  I've always thought that Danny Devito was the only choice to play the Penguin, in particular in the somewhat gory, dark, twisted Burton style.  High Society, Top Hat-Wearing, crime lords just seem goofy, but put 'em in dirty pajamas, with actual penguin-like deformities, surround them with sideshow flunkies, and I'm on board.

If the first film felt like Tim Burton invading Batman's world, than this film feels more like Batman, Catwoman, and the Penguin invading Burton's.  It's unfortunate though that the series didn't end here because this film introduced a lot of aspects that, though they worked here, would go on to help ruin the further sequels.  Having the Batmobile be able to jettison two thirds of it's mass to fit down a narrow alley was kind of silly and it lead to doing all kinds of weird crap with the car later on, not limited to driving up the side of a building.  It was in this film where the villain to super hero ratio was upped as well.  For all intents and purposes there were three villains in the film (between Devito, Pheiffer, and Walken), which would be surpassed in Batman forever by mixing Two-Face, his gang, his girls, the Riddler, and a weird gang of neon, glow-in-the-dark paint wearing freaks, and then again in Batman and Robin (Bane, Poison Ivy, that weird doctor guy, Mr. Freeze and his crazy henchmen) though at least by then there was a Robin and Batgirl to help make it a silly character filled madcap romp that, 2 hours of my life that I'll never get back.

For the longest time I had the basic no frills cardboard snapcase editions of these first two Batman flicks, but I traded them in for the nice special editions that came out about a year ago, which were really long over due.  There aren't many movies that I've traded up for on DVD, but these were just too important to me to pass up.

I was at the perfect age when Batman came out, 12, which was not so young that the movie was over my head and not quite old enough to start being jaded about adaptations.  More personally, I was also a year into collecting comics pretty heavily so I felt like I was at the forefront of the entire comic industry boom that literally blew up overnight after the release of this flick.  This film also marked another turning point in my life as it was what was bouncing around my head right before my family left Florida (where I'd spent most of my life at the time) for first New England, and then Georgia (where I've planted my roots ever since.)  With every move Batman was always there for me as both something comforting to watch, or an ice breaker when meeting new people, at least when looking for comic book minded people.  To top all of this off, Batman also marked the point when my parents caved in and finally bought our first VCR, something that on the surface doesn't seem all that important, but to me it changed the way I watched movies from that point on.




With our new VCR I found myself starting to build my own little movie library, first by taping flicks off of TV (mostly HBO and on Saturday afternoon UHF matinées), and eventually by saving up and buying the flicks that I loved.  Of all my collections over the years, my film library has been the the only one that I've consistently worked on or grew.  Before I made the plunge to DVD I had amassed over 300 VHS cassettes, which doesn't sound all the impressive until you realize that it took two full bookshelves to hold.  Now I'm not playing "mine is bigger than yours", I'm just stating a fact that no one I knew seemed crazy enough to have that many movies on hand, I mean you rented VHS tapes, you didn't buy them.  Now I have a collection of over 600 movies and 130 odd TV shows on DVD, which if you asked my 1989 self if I'd ever have a collection like that I/he'd be likely to laugh you out of the building.

Like I said above, since I was only 12 when the flick hit theaters and I wasn't quite old enough to be jaded, I fully accepted the Tim Burton version of batman as the way Batman should be, all latex muscle suits and super long phallic bat-mobiles.  Before Batman hit I was sort of into the Super Friends cartoon and honestly I pictured Batman to be more like the Adam West TV show.  Burton managed to completely change this for me and was a window into a more serious interpretation, something that suited my new found interest in characters like Wolverine and the rest of the X-Men.

Though I only saw the movie in the theater once, I bugged my parents for every possible scrap of Batman merchandising, all of which I squirreled away in a comic box for years.  I had boxes of Batman cereal, plastic piggy banks, ping pong ball guns, stickers, coloring books, action figures, die-cast cars, micro-machines, souvenir magazines, picture books, movie novelizations, candy dispensers, and trading cards, you name it, I had it.  Well, I had everything but the actual comic books.  I was so into the Burton Batman that the regular comic series didn't hold much interest for me at the time.  In fact the only Batman comic that I could get into surprisingly was the Dark Knight Returns.  Being 12, the book was way over my head, but I loved it anyway.

Pretty much this flick has held up for me consistently, though in more recent years I've begun to see how it's sort of changing from what I once thought was the perfect example of a realistic live action comic book adaptation into a singularly stylized interpretation, the kind of film that sort of needs to stand on its own instead of being the basis for any sort of continuity (a mistake that I believe lead to the downfall of the movie franchise much more so than hiring Joel Schumacher, George Clooney, or Arnold Schwarzenegger ever did.)  Tim Burton's Batman is much like Frank Miller's Dark Knight work, it's a very passionate work that is best served as a diversion from the concept, a great companion piece.  Stick with it too long and it'll only end up becoming a parody.  Honestly, I think this can pretty much be applied to most iconic comic work, in particular the super hero genre.  Why are we as comic and movie fans so hung up on continuity?

Well, to get back into the swing of things here I thought I'd take a second and go through a my DVD collection by director for awhile, starting with one of my favorites, Tim Burton.  When I was younger I don't think I realized that there was even such a thing as a director, and honestly I'm still not exactly sure exactly what a director is responsible for, but it's hard to deny that some stand out more than others.  Well the first director that I recognized by name was probably Tim Burton, probably because of Batman, though Beetlejuice was also high up on my list of favorite movies at the time.



I figured it'd be fun to get some of my least favorite DVDs out of the way first, so today I'm going to talk a little bit about Mars Attacks!, one of only two movies that I can think of which are based on trading card sets (the other being Garbage Pail Kids the Movie.)  I first saw Mars Attacks in the theater with my friend Jeremy a little bit after we graduated from high school, which was a heavy theater-going time for me. I think I was averaging about 1 flick every two weeks or so during that time because I finally had a car and could go by myself, not to mention that I worked the night shift and there wasn't much else to do during the day when I couldn't sleep.

By this time I was a pretty big fan of Burton's, having basically come of age watching Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Batman and Batman Returns, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands.  I also loved Ed Wood, which I saw after picking up Plan 9 From Outer Space on clearance at my local Media Play based on the tag line that it was the worst movie ever and loving it.  When Mars Attacks came out I thought Burton could do no wrong and I fully expected to fall in love with the flick.  Sadly I didn't.  Actually I hated it the first time I saw it.  I've never been a big fan of CGI and the flick is loaded to the gills with it, which surprised me since one of the reasons I dug Burton so much was his amazing work with practical effects and set design. It didn't help that I wasn't all that familiar with the card set and I was kind of getting sick of the trend where actors would play multiple parts in films (ala Eddie Murphy.)

There was one scene in the flick that I loved though, enough so that years later when I was browsing through the $5 DVD section in Target I couldn't help but pick the flick up.  The scene in question involves Sarah Jessica Parker and Pierce Brosnan.  They both have their heads removed and there's this crazy moment when their severed heads are rolling around and then they come together with a kiss.  While I was re-watching it recently it occurred to me that this is the key to this film.  Sure it's got a silly plot and it's mostly about inane visuals, which typically makes me tune out while watching a film, but in this films case it's truly it's strength.  See the flick is based on a trading card set, and at the end of the day that's all this film really is, a collection of crazy scenes that are very loosely connected into a story.  Any one of these scenes would make an awesome trading card, and the inane plot which drives it would perfectly fit in a small caption, either on the front or as a summary on the back.  The fact that Burton and Jonathon Gems (the screenwriter) would try and focus on this aspect of the source material astounds me.  In fact it sounds more like a film school experiment than a big budget Hollywood film, which I think took a lot of guts and is also probably to blame for it's lack of acceptance.

This is what I would consider to be one of the perfect discount DVDs, one that I would have a hard time paying much more than the cost of a good lunch for.  I do have to admit though that I probably wouldn't have as much admiration for it if another director had done it, but then again, I can't imagine too many other people out there who would have (well maybe the Chiodo brothers who brought us the classic Killer Klowns From Outer Space.)

Being that I'm on a sort of super hero kick lately, and since I've found a few extra pockets of time to watch some DVDs that have been sitting on the shelf for months, I thought I take a moment to share one of my favorite super hero movies of all time. Now after I'd been into comics for a while, (always a "Make Mine Marvel" kind of kid) and after I've fallen into a group of similar minded friends, we would sit around and talk SH movies all of the time, arguing over which was better. Though the original Star Wars trilogy was our bible, super hero films were the next ring of interest and speculation. Of the four of us that hung out together, each of us had our preferable set of Marvel characters: I was into the Punisher and the X-Men, though Wolverine in particular was my favorite, Jeremy was into Spiderman and Namor, though Cyclops was his favorite character, Darrel was an expert on the more fringe characters in the Marvel universe (Cloak and Dagger, The New Mutants, Star Jammers) as well as some indie comics like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, though he had a pretty strong affinity for Gambit, Kitty Pryde and Night Crawler, and Stephen was the resident underdog lover, covering everything that the rest of us weren't into like Iron-Man, Daredevil, and the Avengers, though like the rest of us he was partial to an X-Men character, Colossus.

Anyway, while we were comparing and contrasting flicks like Tim Burton's Batman, TMNT: The Movie, The 1989 version of the Punisher, Superman the Movie, the Flash TV Pilot, Swamp Thing, the 70s-80s Spiderman TV movies, and the 80s unreleased Captain America movie, all of us always neglected to bring up the original pilot movie for the Incredible Hulk TV series. Sure, all of us were familiar with the later TV movies that introduced characters like Daredevil and Thor to the big screen, but I never saw the pilot movie in repeats until the late 90s. In fact I'm not sure if it was ever released on video, and it sure wasn't released on DVD until the merchandising and publicity started to ramp up for the Ang Lee version in 2003. Universal put out four DVD sets that year, the pilot movie, a really expensive Best Of, and a couple of TV movie collections with the Return of, Trial of, and finally Death of the Incredible Hulk.

Well considering the mass amount of super hero flicks that have been released since '95, I thought it would be fun to see how this 1977 TV movie held up in comparison.


First off, the pilot movie DVD, which might still be available individually (it comes with the awesome 1st season set which also includes commentary on the flick) on DVD, is pretty good for the price. I've only ever seen it in $5.50 bins in the various chain stores, so it's cheap, and in addition to the pilot it also includes the bonus fan-favorite episode Married. The DVD also contains some fluff special features like a sneak peek at the Ang Lee feature film and a decent introduction from Lou Ferrigno (who if you don't know was the Hulk to Bill Bixby's David Banner.)


Ferrigno doesn't get all that much time to reminisce, but he manages to get a few interesting nuggets out about getting the gig, the annoying time in the make-up chair, etc. He's also very aware of the fan base for the show and he even hits the convention circuit every year taking time to talk with the fans and stuff (unlike a lot of the other "celebrities" who frequent the circuit and are amazingly rude.)


The pilot movie was basically the pitch for the regular series, which was produced, written and directed by Kenneth Johnson the mastermind behind another 80s TV sensation that I was obsessed with as a kid, V. The flick opens up very quietly with a very 70s hazy out-of-focus feel to the text, an effect that makes the flick seem like a bad soap opera more than anything else. It opens with Bill Bixby's name over the title, and eventually it scrolls to Lou Ferrigno who was more or less an unknown to viewing audiences, but would soon rocket to stardom.


After the credits, the is a quick quote which in a very unsubtle way (completely fitting into the Marvel tradition) lets us know that we are about to see a flick about hidden fury. What's kind of funny, and what ultimately makes this silly quote work for me is the barrage of imagery that follows. There are approximately six million mini scenes that educate the audience about just how much David Banner and his wife love each other.


I mean this couple does every stereotypical thing imaginable from walking in flower-strewn fields, to cavorting in the rain, hilariously goofing off while fishing, loving kittens, comforting each other when receiving a sad telegram...


...perfecting their tom foolery while baking, having snowball fights, eating breakfast in bed, lovingly autographing a cast (remember those times of trouble), tailoring each other's pants (no, seriously, that's how much he loves her)...


...laying in bed at night (did I mention they love spending time together), and walking through more fields of flowers. It was about this point when I seriously considered shutting off the film (actually it was during the un-pictured "we-love-each-other-so-much-we-went-disco-dancing" scene.) I mean, hit me over the head why don't ya. Jeez, where was the playful swimming at the beach scene, or the post coitus afterglow-hugging scene, huh? Anyway, the movie takes a very ironic turn for the better when the couple climbs into their car and some very foreboding piano music starts playing in the background. As much as I hate to see people in pain and suffering, this movie needed to get off the Hallmark "I love you ever so much" train and back on track to being a super hero flick.


It's at this turn where the movie really starts becoming interesting, and it sets a tone for the rest of the film that I think works amazingly well and is something absent in most super hero origin movies from that point on. In this last opening sequence the audience witness the tragic car accident that leads to the death of David Banner's wife as well as his pent up aggression and rage that will propel him in becoming the Hulk.

Real quick I'd like to make it clear that I am going to spoil the hell out of the story and sequences of this film, so if you haven't seen it and want to be surprised, you might want to ditch this trip down nostalgia road.


Anyway, during the accident, when the car is flipping out of control, David Banner is flung from the vehicle. The car bursts into flame and as he struggles to try and get the door open and his wife out, but it's impossible no matter how hard he kicks or pulls. It's a very disturbing scene and does a very good job of putting the audience in the character's place, frustrated with the flame spreading everywhere. Just as the character reaches his breaking point he wakes up from what we now know is a reoccurring dream he's been having since the incident. This is where the casting of Bill Bixby really pays off in this film. Bixby was an amazing dramatic actor and he completely owns the role of Banner. One thing I was super glad about from a technical standpoint was when Banner awakens from the dream the whole hazy, out-of-focus, Vaseline on the lens effect stops, which is very dated and annoying. This type of overbearing visual cue really gets on my nerves, as it doesn't trust me to make the connection that it was a dream. I mean, having Banner wake up is quite enough; you don't need to do any more work than that.


Another thing to note is that right from the start, Johnson has made major changes to the mythos of the Hulk universe, yet most of the changes are perfectly natural and help to ground the character in a reality that the comics don't need. The character from the comics, though he has some repressed issues with his father, didn't really have a tragic incident like this to put him in the mood of the piece. As we see in the next set of scenes, Johnson also chose to change the character's name from Bruce to David, as well as switching him from being a nuclear scientist to a doctor studying the untapped resources of the human body. I'll be honest, it's changes like this that typically get my fanboy fur to stand on end, but in this film most of the changes help bring the character to life in a much more natural and less coincidental way. Whereas in the comic Banner is pelted by a mass amount of gamma rays in a weapons testing accident, in this film it's worked into the story and becomes more of a deliberate act. The one change that I can take or leave is the name change. I believe Johnson decided to switch it to David because he didn't care for alliterative names (which are Marvel and DC specialties), but he also reportedly made the change because he felt that Bruce was too "gay" of a name (which I think is a rumor that Stan Lee started on that interview DVD he did with Kevin Smith.)

Anyway, the story continues by introducing Dr. Elaina Marks, Banner's research partner, who together are searching for the untapped source of strength that some people seem to hit upon during times of high stress or tension. They interview a series of people including a mother who saved his son from a car accident that mirrored Banner's accident to a T. The duo keep hitting a wall though as they can't seem to find any common links between the subject outside of the fact that they all had a traumatic experience.


It's at this point that we're introduced to a very (now) common super hero movie trait, which is looking to very realistic scientific explanation for super heroic powers. In most cases, this film included (and it may be the first film to explore this), this means getting deep down into the DNA, up to including a sweeping shot where the audience is taken on a ride into a person all the way down to one individual DNA strand. You see this in two of the the Spiderman movies, the X-Men flick, the Ang Lee Hulk film, and some of the super hero TV series as well I think. It's just a very common visual effect, and one that's very effective as we live in a world that is so DNA-centric what with the various crime scene investigation shows, flicks like Jurassic Park, paternity tests, and the possibility of cloning and designer babies right around the corner, DNA is pretty much the most iconic representation of body science imaginable.


Well, in a breakthrough, the couple figures out that in all of the cases they're investigating, all of the subjects have an odd DNA signature that is abnormally high in adenine and thiamine. This leads them to testing Banner's DNA, which in true super hero form is not only abnormally high in these same elements, but much more so than the rest of the subjects, which only adds to the frustration that Banner is having with losing his wife. Why couldn't he tap into this power and save his wife? Though Elaina packs it in for the night, David can't let it go and continues to search for something that would point to why this abnormality might produce excessive strength. He stumbles upon an idea as he's talking to a fellow scientist about gamma radiation activity from sunspots, and matches up the time line on the subject's increased strength to sunspot activity and high levels of gamma radiation.

This is where the film's slow build begins to pay off for me. In the comic, and in most comic stories and movies, there is one quick incident, usually an accident that requires a jump in logic to buy the fact that a character has gained monumental new powers. Be it Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider, Matt Murdock having toxic waste flung into his eyes, or Bruce Banner running out to save a friend during a gamma bomb test (man, I see Johnson's point on the alliterative names), there usually seems to be a coincidental accident that results in powers that are unbelievable (though in a good way.) When Banner realizes that the key the hidden strength lies in exposure to gamma radiation it's a much more natural conclusion when he decides to test this theory out on himself.


Something else I really love about this film and its realism is probably the side effect of being filmed on a TV budget. It looks like a real laboratory was used in these scenes, or at least some real equipment, and it's completely non-flashy. When Banner doses himself with the gamma rays it's silent and invisible, much like getting an x-ray. For all of it's non-flashiness, it's still a very effective an haunting scene filled with much of the iconic imagery that would eventually make up the opening credit sequence of the TV show, from sitting the in the contraption to the x-ray of David's skull.


It's in this sequence that the camera travels deep into David, so deep that it gets down to his DNA in a very effective sequence, which makes it out to look like tiny glass beads and bubbles, a much more detailed sequence than the movie lead me to believe it would get. It's also here where the accidentally over dosage that Banner gives himself is revealed (which was foreshadowed in a previous scene in which Elaina mentions that most of the research equipment had been upgraded, which is why new tape marks have been added to consoles, effectively showing that the makings can go up to 11.)


For me this is when the movie shines as in the next few scenes we see the build-up of anger that David is suffering from. After the gamma dosage, Banner is unable to lift anything heavier than normal and again he is frustrated as he hits another wall in the research. On the way home he gets stuck in the rain, has troubles starting his car, and then blows a tire after running over some road debris. There's a slow burn as he gets out to take care of the flat, hurting himself getting the spare out of the trunk, fumbling with the jack in the rain, and then hurting his hand as it slips off the tire iron. This all just builds and builds in a very natural and understanding way (we've all had days like this.) This finally hits a crescendo that pays off in David's first transformation into the Hulk, an effect that could make or break the movie. The effect is pretty astounding, beginning with the tinny high-pitched hum where David flicks open his eyelids to reveal that his irises have turned a light greenish-white, and is then followed by a barrage of quick edits showing his features changing, his muscles bulging out and ripping his sleeves, his shirt ripping up the back and eventually his unnaturally green skin. This first transformation is done flawlessly and is really beautiful, even when compared to the advanced effects work today and is the perfect illustration of how you don't need a ton of CGI to do really effective and believable effects work.


There's a great moment as the camera pulls back and shows the Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk for the first time in the pouring rain and then is highlighted and illuminated by a lightning strike which is helped along by the great orchestrated score. When then get to see David let out all of the tension that's been building (through the slow first half of the film) on his car as he pounds on the hood with both fists clenched.


This whole sequence where he thrashes his car, smashing the windows, ripping off his flat tire and flinging it into a nearby ditch is all very exciting and fun and culminates in the Hulk picking up and flipping the car into the ditch where it explodes very unrealistically, but at this point realism doesn't matter as much as the audience has bought into the concept. That's the first major strength of this film, that the first half is gruelingly realistic, it totally sets up the transformation scene. The second strength of the film is that there is no set up for a villain that the Hulk will fight. By this point in any other super hero movie there's usually a very obvious and awkward villain built up and in place for the final showdown sequence. It's a cliche that I really don't care for, and something that I think should be left for a sequel. This flick completely sidesteps the villain angle.


It's at this point where Johnson starts playing with the character. He's basically set up with the back-story straight out of one of the Universal monster movies, so Johnson playfully homages the little girl and the lake sequence from Frankenstein. The Hulk confused and dazed wanders through the woods until he stumbles upon a little girl fishing at the edge of a lake and just like Frankenstein he scares the living piss out of her. Unlike Frankenstein the Hulk doesn't hurt the girl, instead she gets herself into trouble paddling out into the water in her canoe and then falling overboard. As the Hulk tries to save her, her father comes back from hunting and ends up shooting Banner in the arm. This is when Johnson decides to hammer home the point that his version of the Hulk will not kill or really even hurt innocent people (or villains for that matter) and instead of "Hulk smashing" the dude, he takes the gun, breaks it, and then throws the dude into the lake with his daughter.


There's another really strong scene here where Johnson films the Hulk from over the shoulder as the Hulk stoops by the lake and sees his reflection for the first time. In this moment of calm Banner slowly changes back to himself in a series of edits that are cut between the character reaching out to touch his reflection in the water, a very nicely executed and creative effect.


It's at this point that the film goes full force into only exploring the Hulk's origin as Banner flees to his friend and colleague Dr. Marks, and together they try to understand this crazy situation. They retreat to a deserted portion of the research facility they work at which houses a pressure chamber that Banner hopes will hold the Hulk if he ends up changing again. The movie reverts back to its plodding pace, but honestly it's a very welcome deviation to the over-produced frantic pace that most super hero films follow today. The two try to recreate the transformation inside the chamber, going so far as to artificially make it rain and lightning, but try as they might they can't do it. Then hours later, Banner decides to rest, and during another episode of his reoccurring nightmare where he once again powerlessly has to relive his wife's death, he unconsciously begins the transformation into the Hulk. Even though the chamber is constructed with thick metal lining and six inch thick glass, the Hulk still manages to smash and break his way out where he confronts Elaina, but once again we see as the Hulk isn't just violence incarnate, but human bound by his alter ego's morals.


Again, Johnson makes homage (though a little more heavy handed) to another monster, one a little more close to home, Dr. Jekel and Mr. Hyde. Unlike Hyde the Hulk isn't evil or a beast derived from all of the hidden carnal instincts of man, but merely a physical manifestation of anger, frustration and rage. He won't hurt Elaina, in fact he even obeys her much like a dog. She also has enough of a calming effect on the creature that he slows down enough to revert back into Banner.


This time, unfortunately, the effects work doesn't shine and is very dated with a cut-out segment of film that flashes between various versions of Ferrigno and Bixby, overlaid with a very odd green light that just services to make the transformation all the more awkward. Buried within this though is a very awesome bit of subtlety where Bixby has the white contacts in, he closes his eyes, and in an imperceptible cut, opens his eyes and the contacts are gone. It's funny how you can have all ranges of quality in the effects work within one shot like that.


Another thing that this movie does very well is to introduce story threads that are left in the background until later, which makes the story seem more over arching that it might really be. At the beginning of the film we are quickly introduced to Jack McGee a reporter for a crappy tabloid that's trying to score an interview with Banner or Mark about the work they're doing on hidden strength. Well, he pops up again towards the end, though this time he's more interested in the sightings of the Hulk and it's connections to Banner who he was already pursuing. Here again Johnson makes allusions to monsters, this time to Bigfoot, and places McGee in the role of the monster hunter.


Johnson uses McGee as a catalyst that will set up the continuing TV series later on in a move that it a little bit of a groaner, but not so bad now that most of the movie is dedicated to discovering the understanding the Hulk. There is an accident after McGee breaks into the lab where Banner last turned into the Hulk; he's hiding in a closet listening to Banner and Mark when he's discovered and then knocks over a jug of a highly reactive chemical. As Banner escorts McGee out of the building the chemical reacts with another substance causing a drastic explosion with Dr. Mark trapped inside.


Banner, reacting to the incident, turns into the Hulk and rushes into the building to save Elaina. He manages to get her outside and into the nearby woods (where McGee sees the Hulk carrying her) but she's badly hurt and ends up succumbing to her wounds. Before she passes she tells Banner as the Hulk that she loves him, which is heart breaking as Banner doesn't remember much that happens during the hulking out episodes. This is another story thread that is carried throughout the show as Banner is never sure whether or not he killed her, and always carries this guilt around with him.


The film ends with a funeral for both Banner (who was thought to have perished in the facility fire) and Elaina. There's a fun nod to the character's original name (Bruce is now David's middle name, which is actually the same as in the comics, the character is Robert Bruce Banner) on his headstone. As the mourners slowly drift away Banner emerges and pays his last tribute to Elaina, illustrating his remorse and guilt (also mentioning that he loved her and thinks she did too), and then he turns and walks away with his backpack slung over one shoulder, and to the tune of Super Heroes (from the Rocky Horror Picture Show) in a scene that would be repeated at the end of every episode of the show.


After I was done watching this I was surprised how much I really ended up loving this movie. I wish that other super hero movies would take the time to tell a well-crafted story like this and do it at a pace that is right for the story and not what the audience expects. Hell after watching this, I wish Bryan Singer had, had the guts/clout to go ahead and completely nix the Lex Luthor plot line from Superman Returns, instead focusing on the characters and the love story. I'm sure it would have pissed off a bunch of people (I mean the ones that the film didn't already piss off) but it would have been bold and satisfying (at least for me.) I guess I'm sick of every single super hero film having to be an action film first and then a good story second. I know it's a convention of comics and all, but there are other stories to tell. Astro City is a great example of a comic that tried to defy these conventions, at least partially and tell other types of super hero stories, from other perspectives (like a regular Joe watching this craziness from the street.) The Incredible Hulk does this really well for me. It might be boring for others, but oh well.

As a P.S., there was one change that Johnson wanted to make from the comics that I'm glad didn't happen. He wanted the Hulk to be red to mirror the anger that the character was suffering from. Man, though would have totally negated everything I said above and would probably have been a fanboy nitpick that completely took me out of this film (much like the absence of the Punisher skull was for the 1989 version, which up until just recently made me hate that film.)

I guess I'm hitting a semi-productive spurt this week. I found that I had an afternoon free so I decided to take a look at another TV on DVD set that I've been meaning to get to for weeks now, the BCI Eclipse release of the 1975 live action Filmation series, The Ghost Busters.

Now I'm more familiar with the cartoon that was spun off of this show, but even then I only saw handful of the episodes in syndication. Over the years and thanks to sites like wiki I've leaned a lot more about both the original show and the cartoon, in particular the whole debacle with the 1984 Ghostbusters film and how Filmation successfully sued the studio over the likeness to the 1975 show's logo. In fact, I believe that the Filmation cartoon spin-off is directly related to that lawsuit because Lou Scheimer wanted to go ahead and call it off in exchange for getting the license to create a cartoon based on the movie, but the studio chose not to do that, instead creating their own cartoon. Scheimer and company shot back by making a cartoon based on their previous show.


So anyway, I am a more or less coming to this show with no preconceived notions or nostalgia. So what's in the box? This set features the entire live action series, 15 episodes in total over two, double-sided discs, which are packaged into two DVD slim cases. There are five episodes per each side of the discs, with the flip side on the second disc containing all of the special features. The slipcase itself is pretty nice, though the cover has a very odd "colorized" look to it, which is weird because the show was shot in color. I believe the still that's used for the cover may have originally been B&W, but I’m not sure. Though the "colorized" look gives it that icky Photoshop feel, the image is pretty darn accurate to the feel of the opening credits, so I easily cut it some slack.




Also included is a foldout insert that is loaded with episode summaries as well as cast and crew information and trivia for each episode. Pretty much this insert is a nicely printed version of anything you'd hope to find on the show trivia wise and is a welcome addition to the set.


The reverse side of the insert features some basic info, mostly the same stuff that's included on the back of the box set, though as a nice little bonus they've added the theme song lyrics.


The menus on the DVD are pretty simple and easy to navigate. There's a "play all" function as well as a sub menu where you can choose a specific episode or where you can jump to a specific chapter. Pretty standard stuff. Since all of the special features are on the fourth side, most of this stuff is strictly episode oriented. Watch out for easter eggs though. I stumbled upon one while navigating through the menus on side one of the first disc. To access it, enter the chapter section menu for the episode "The Canterville Ghost" and then select the back option to return to the main episode menu. Next, press the up button once and you should be automatically taken to a snippet of Lou Scheimer talking about his feelings on nepotism that's pretty funny.


As far as the picture quality goes on these episodes, it's not so hot, maybe a 3 out of five or so. The show looks like it was shot on video and there are plenty of scenes that are hazy with some ghosting and light trails. Nothing that isn't common for TV shows of the 60s and 70s. Like the WKRP set, there's not much restoration work that can be done with video so the quality is about the best it's going to get and probably isn't that far gone from how it looked when it originally aired.


As far as the show itself I was pleasantly surprised. Having missed out on most of the live action children's shows of the late 60s and 70s I've always been curious to see what these shows were like, mostly because it's the sort of programming that my sister grew up with. The show is very campy and crazily over acted, but it's totally on par with stuff like Sesame Street or the Electric Company, though with a lot less education and a lot more laughs.  In fact it's a little bit more like Land of the Lost, though obviously not on such an epic scale but it's more about entertaining kids than teachin them anything.  Actually the show reminds me a lot of a live action Scooby Doo, only on limited sets with less characters.  Tracy is very much cast from the same mold as Scooby Doo, except he grunts and snorts instead of "ralking rike riss."


There are basically three main stars in the show, Forrest Tucker as "Jake" Kong, the leader of the group of ghost busters…


Larry Storch plays Spencer, Kong's sidekick and comic foil. Both Storch and Tucker are playing off of the same dynamic that they used in the show F-Troop, so it's certainly refined and comfortable.


Rounding out the group and bringing a little bit of absurdity into the mix is Bob Burns as Tracy the gorilla, playing Harpo Marx to Tucker & Storch's Groucho & Zeppo. In a silly twist, Burns is credited as the trainer for Tracy, which lead many people to believe that Tracy was a real gorilla and not Burns in his Gorilla costume.


Each show opens on the same graveyard set where the ghost or creature would introduce themselves and layout the basic plot, typically in search of something in the nearby house or castle. This would then fade into the credits sequence which introduces the Ghost Busters.


Coming from a studio that specialized in animation it was interesting to see Filmation using some animated sequences to bridge the gap between sets, in particular a nicely painted and pretty spooky scene of the nearby old house.


All of the episodes used more or less the same format. A ghost is introduced before the credits roll, then there would be a silly scene with Storch, Tucker and Burns in the Ghost Busters HQ that inevitably ended with Kong ordering Spencer and Tracy out to get their weekly mission from the mysterious Zero. These mission gathering sequences kind of stand out from the rest of the show because they were the only ones shot on location instead of on set. These sequences for all 15 episodes were shot back to back and then edited into the various episodes later to save on production costs.

In each episode, Spencer and Tracy would pull up to a junk shop where Tracy would get an object that would have a hidden secret mission in it from Zero. Playing off of shows like Mission Impossible and Get Smart the object would always self-destruct 3 to 5 seconds after the tape ended blowing up in Tracy's face, a gag that was later utilized in the Inspector Gadget cartoon. Sometimes the message is hidden in a rubber chicken, sometimes in a bike or cake, and it always explodes with a silly effect. The rest of the show would play out with the Ghost Busters bumbling their way in perfect slapstick style to a confrontation with the ghost or creature which would then be dispatched with their ghost dematerializer.

All 15 episodes were written my Marc Richards, and in many cases overnight as the production schedule was rushed for monetary reasons on the show. Because of this the shows all feel very much like they were written in a template style, but honestly it works perfectly for the audience they were shooting for. Yet even with these threadbare plots, insanely over the top visual gags, and bad puns there was also a certain amount of creativity and subtlety. In the first episode, The Maltese Monkey, the resident ghost is a character named Big Al, a gangster who is more or less the mirror twin of Spencer (right down to the cool colored zoot suit and is obviously also played by Storch.) Storch hams up the Big Al character by doing his best Marlon Brando Godfather impression, yet later in the episode when the Spencer character goes under cover as Big Al, Storch switches to his James Cagney, a gag to be sure, but something that would completely go over the head of the target audience. It sure as heck isn't Shakespeare, but it's a welcome bit of good acting and humor that surprised me nonetheless.

The production values on the show were pretty good considering how fast and cheaply it was shot. I believe there were only about five or six sets (a graveyard, a castle, a few rooms, and the GB HQ) and only one actual location (for the "accepting the mission" scenes), and the costume work was decent. They managed to do up a pretty good Frankenstein's monster, thought he runner mask on the wolfman left a little bit to be desired.  Then best part of the show though was the gorilla suit that Bob Burns brought with him to the show.  In particulat it has an awesome mask that was custom made to fit to Burns' head and face and therefore he can really bring it to life.  To this day it's still one of the better gorilla suits I've ever seen.

There were also a nice cadre of guest stars including Billy Barty and Ted Knight who both turn in relatively fun if not crazily over the top performances.

Being a BCI Eclipse box set, the Ghost Busters DVDs have their fair share of special features produced by Andy Mangels.


Included in the special features are interviews with the show's producer and Filmation head honcho Lou Scheimer…


…as well as Bob Burns who both provided the Tracy costume and preformed in it. Burns recalls the story of how he got the gig on the DVDs as well as on his website. Basically he was friends with a lady who was associated on the Ghost Busters project who knew he had a gorilla suit and suggested he try out for the role. Burns is also well known in horror, sci-fi and fantasy circles for his stunning collection of movie props and memorabilia including such sought after treasures as the original armature that served as the skeleton for the original King Kong movie. Peter Jackson sought Burns' help when working on his remake and even gave both Bob and his wife cameos in the film.


The set also features some more basic features including production and behind the scenes photo galleries, trailers, DVD Rom scripts, and an nice collection of trailers from other Filmation DVD sets (already available or upcoming.) The interviews were a little weird as you can see above that the screen was shrunk down to a little box with Ghost Buster imagery behind it. Typically these interviews, shot against green screen like this, are then composited into a show style background like the graveyard or something, and it almost seems as if these were rushed and just dumped on the DVDs.


By far though one of the best special features, and one of my favorite special features that I've seen in recent years, is a bonus episode of the animated spin-off show from 1986. It's interesting to compare and contrast the style of the 70s Filmation style with that of the 80s.




The episode included on this set is titled, "I'll be a son of a Ghost Buster" which serves as the origin episode and ties the new series to the old. The episode revolves around the original characters passing their ghost busting business onto their sons, as well as introducing a new main villain, Prime Evil.


Surprisingly (at least to me) Filmation took a lot of care to keep the tone and feel of the original show as well as making sure the characters looked like the original actors. This animated still of Spencer is pretty dead on for Larry Storch, a feat that the Real Ghostbusters cartoon notoriously failed at (a blond Egon, multi-colored GB jumpsuits, and a punked out Janine for starters.)


The design crew even managed to get the costuming correct, right down to Kong's porkpie hat and basic number shirt (though they changed his #5 to an 8, I assume incase any of the cells were flipped during the animation or editing processes.)


The Tracy character remained the same though (I guess he doesn't bump into too many gorilla chicks in the city.)


The son characters, Jake Kong Jr. and Spencer Jr. are more less the same as their fathers in terms of personality and style, but it works pretty darn well with the action bumbed up as well as the physical comedy.




All in all, this set, which retails for between $20-$30, is more or less produced with a specific audience in mind, those that grew up with it and want to recapture some childhood nostalgia, so it probably won't appeal to most people, in fact I think most people would probably hate it. But it does have a lot of appeal for those of us that enjoy monster related entertainment, in particular fans of the sillier stuff like Scooby Doo, the Groovie Goolies, the Milton the Monster Show, the Munsters, or the Addams Family.  It'll also be of interest to anyone who really digs the 1986 cartoon and wants to know a little bit more about that show's roots.

Of all the TV shows that I watched obsessively as a kid there were always a handful that I completely missed the boat on and for years have been mighty curious about. In particular I've never seen any episodes of M*A*S*H, Magnum P.I. or WKRP in Cincinnati all of which had a pretty big impact on the pop culture of the 70s and 80s. The first two have since been released on DVD and they are on my Netflix queue, but for as long as TV has been blowing up on DVD, the latter, WKRP, has been considered the show that will always remain in limbo in terms for re-release because of insane music licensing issues. I pretty much figured that I'd never get a chance to watch the show as I don't subscribe to cable and I tend to shy away from bootlegs as much as I can, but to my amazement the first season of the series was actually released on DVD just last month.

Well, I took the time to sit down with the set recently and to see what all the hubbub is about. Lets get some of the basics on the set out of the way and take a look at the packaging and what's in the box. Unlike some of the newer TV on DVD sets from companies like Paramount that are switching over to a super slim packaging scheme, this set, released by Fox is sticking to a more traditional box set feel with the season spread over 3 discs which are packaged in two slim cases. The art and design of the packaging is pretty cool with a nice production photo on top of a minimal black background, and some nice sublte use of color as a border (unlike the eye ache that is the That '70s Show covers.) The only bit of flash is in the prismatic foil inlayed into in the title font, which is actually quite subdued when compared to some other sets. I really dig the use of actual production artwork on the cover in lieu of a hasty Photoshop job, which is typically what we tend to see, especially on older TV on DVD sets released today.


Actually, to get an idea of what the cover could have looked like you don't need to go any further than the slim cases for the set…


At the end of the day I actually dig the this generic colorful artwork in the interior, I guess I've just got a pet peeve about bad cover artwork.

This complete first season set includes all 22 episodes from the 1978-1979 opening season of the show spread out over three discs, with 8 episodes on the first two discs, and 6 on the third disc.


Here's an example of the episode menu screens…


As far as Special Features go, this set is better off than most, but far from loaded. There are two commentary tracks, one on part 1 of the pilot, and one on the episode Turkeys Away. Both commentaries feature the show's creator/writer/director Hugh Wilson and stars Loni Anderson (who played Jennifer Marlowe) and Frank Bonner (who played Herb Tarlek). You can access either commentary by selecting the episode, and then picking the commentary audio track from the episode sub menu, or as a nice easy alternative both are accessible via the disc one special features menu.


Though short, these commentaries strike a nice balance between behind the scenes insight and enjoyable cast reunions and ruminations (particularly on an aspect of Loni Anderson's physique that is often a running gag on the show.) For instance, you're just as likely to hear the cast talk about how the character evolved, even after the first episode (when Loni's character, Jennifer, insults her boss, Arthur Carlson, behind his back, and then in subsequent episodes switches to a more motherly role), than you are to hear the three laughing for minutes on end or pausing to watch Howard Hessman's Johnny Fever ad lib, which though funny, is distracting as far as commentary goes. There's another great story about Loni Anderson's "assets" that CBS was all up in arms over. I guess there were too many scenes where Loni was nipping and therefore the wardrome department had to end up covering her nipples with Band-Aids to keep them from showing through her blouses and sweaters. I wonder who got the job of applying those?

This set also has two mini featurettes, both about 7 minutes long, one that focuses on Loni Anderson and her character Jennifer Marlowe, and a second that focuses on the episode Fish Story. Both of these featurettes include appearances by Frank Bonner, Tim Reid, Loni Anderson and Hugh Wilson.










Now before I get into the issues I have with this set I'd like to address the quality of the show in terms of both visually and how well it holds up over almost thirty years.

As far as the visual quality goes, it's about a 3.5 out of 5 in terms of the sharpness of the image. This MTM show was notoriously shot on video (unlike other MTM productions including the Mary Tyler Moore show ) to take advantage of a loophole in the music licensing fee rules, so the show's visual quality was low to begin with. I believe that most if not all of these episodes are also the syndication versions, which had to be altered for both time and content (again those pesky music licensing issues) so new master copies were made which are a generation past the original airing copies. Even with that in mind the show looks pretty good. There's a little bit of haziness to some scenes, and I noticed some slight ghosting of the images in a few places, but it's more or less presented in the quality that it originally aired, and I don't think there was too much remastering that could be done.

As far as how well the show holds up, I'd have to say again that I'm coming from the perspective of someone who's never really seen the show. To be honest I thought that the show held up very well, and aside from a few references to some older pop culture icons I feel that it's just as funny now as it was at the time. Granted the show is a sitcom, and you have to be into that style of humor (running gags, over the top characters, etc.), but when viewed next to more contemporary shows like New Radio, it's almost indistinguishable except for a few obviously dated qualities like Venus Fly Trap's very pimpin' attire or Herb's horribly 70s swinging wardrobe.


The entire premise of the show is set up in the two-part pilot, which opens with one of the show's main attractions, Loni Anderson as the WKRP radio station secretary Jennifer Marlowe (who does almost no secretarial duties.)


In fact one of the longest running gags opens the show as Herb, the slightly out of touch swinging sales rep (played by Frank Bonner) comes strolling in and immediately begins slinging a barrage of horrible pick-up lines to Jennifer.


Then just as swift as can be we're introduced to the crux of the show when Andy Travis (played by Gary Sandy) is introduced as the new station manager. It’s through Andy that we get introduced to the rest of the cast in quick succession including Arthur Carlson (played by Gordon Jump) as the son of the owner of the station.


Andy meets Les Nessman, the resident news/sports/weather/hog futures man on the scene (or more likely no where near the scene as we get to see his impression of a traffic helicopter that he fakes on air) who is apparently clumsy as he sports a band-aid or bandage in every episode (an un explained running gag that is also an in-joke reference to the rehearsal for the pilot where the actor, Richard Sanders, was hurt by a light and had to wear a bandage in the pilot episode.) This continues on and on until all of the main characters are established.


One of the strongest moments in the first episode involves Howard Hesseman as Johnny (who has a different last name for every single DJ job he's held/been fired from) who is the daytime DJ reduced to playing very old, very "bad" choral music. Travis comes in and institutes a format change to top 40 rock and roll which both brings the station and Johnny (who re-christens himself Dr. Johnny Fever) back to life. There is a great moment as Johnny pauses as the last song of the old format is playing and in the middle he scratches the needle across the record as he switches over to the stations first rock tune. This actually brings up another interesting point that was mentioned in the commentary, that the producers and writers of the show were well aware that radio stations had abandoned using actual records in the booth by this point, that they had switched to using cassettes and reel tapes, but they felt that the imagery of records and albums was too cool to pass up, and I'd have to agree. Seeing Johnny literally rip an album to pieces off of a turntable makes for a great moment in the show.


In this scene we're also introduced to Bailey Quarters (played by Jan Smithers, an actress discovered as a teenager when she played hooky from school and was photographed on the back of a motorcycle in a bikini by a guy from Time Magazine and subsequently made the cover) who is promoted from being a gofer to Travis' assistant.


The episode ends with Arthur Carlson's mother, Momma, (played by Oscar nominated Sylvia Sidney, who was replaced after the pilot, possibly for clashing with the rest of the much younger cast) who owns the station and hates rock music comes to shut the station down, but Travis and Carlson convince her to keep it open. The last gag, and last main character to be introduced, is when Travis shows in his new-hire DJ, Venus Fly Trap (played by Tim Reid) a very pimped out, successful New Orleans disc jockey. This cements the psuedo counter culture ideal the station is shooting for and the style of comedy that will follow for the next four seasons.


Now, as far as the issues I had with this DVD set. WKRP, like I mentioned earlier, is notorious for being the perfect example of a show that would not be able to withstand the financial burden of music licensing, which would in turn keep it from being released on DVD. But it is on DVD, so how did that happen?

Well, the studio decided to strip the show of most of it's original music, replacing it with generic or sound-alike tunes, as well as editing the show to remove any plot points or vocal mentions of specific songs that were removed. Also, again like I mentioned earlier, I'm coming from the perspective of someone who didn't watch the show when it originally aired, or in its first batch of reruns, so honestly most of the music changes have completely slipped past my radar. Now for a more hardcore fan though, this might be very jarring. There are a couple of sites that have kept up with the music replacements and edits, such as Jamie Weinman's blog.

Now, I believe in addition to this, and like a lot of TV on DVD sets these days, the studio has either decided to use the syndication version of these episodes (which are cut for both time and content, and since the WKRP syndicated episodes were cut for music issues in the early 90s already this may be the case) because of music issues, or because it's the only version they own for distribution. Either way, these are not the uncut original versions out side of the music scenes. I'm not sure if Hugh Wilson was aware of this as he and the cast members allude in the commentary that these episodes are restored, or original versions. In fact Loni Anderson makes a hilarious comment about how an entire plot was removed from the syndication version of an episode involving her character getting a sex change. I'm not sure when or if this happened on the show, but it’s something that I'd hate to miss if it was edited out. I also found a separate guide to the music replacements and edits the show underwent in the 90s for its second run of syndication, also written by Jamie Weinman, that goes into some of the who's and why's of the situation.

Randy Salas of the Minneapolis Star Tribune also wrote an article about the whole situation, which the awesome TV on DVD.com passed on to its readers a few weeks back. I know a lot of fans are up in arms about the whole mess, and it's gotten to a point where the DVD is rated fairly low on sites like Amazon.com. Granted there are alternatives to cutting up a show, like having a smaller distribution company like Shout! Factory release the show, though at a much higher price point (as they did with Freaks and Geeks a couple years ago), but it begs the question, would people plunk down $60-$100 for a single season of a sitcom. In this day and age where we're getting used to paying $20 for TV DVD sets, I think not. Also, this first season set, like most 1st season sets, is more a less a test to see if it's financially viable to continue with further seasons. There are a ton of catalog releases that die upon the release of the initial season, shows like Growing Pains, Gimmie a Break, Murphy Brown, and The Fresh Prince, shows that are hugely popular but just don't sell on DVD, so the future seasons are flung back into the studio vaults. I think that this is going to be the case with WKRP, since so many fans seem to be shunning this release, which I think is pretty sad because I enjoyed the heck out of watching it.

Granted, I can totally see the fan's point of view, and if it had been a show or movie that I loved and was changed I'd be just as pissed, but there are always going to be concessions in life, and it is just a TV show. Sometimes fighting the good fight won't lead to victory; it'll only lead to a much longer battle where no one wins. If enough interest was shown in this set, and enough of those people who purchased it also voiced their concerns to both Fox and companies like the ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC who license the music, than maybe things would change. Instead I think this set won't sell well, and sooner or later it'll go out of print and that will be that.

All in all, I would say that if you can find this set on sale and you're even the least bit interested or curious it'd be worth picking it up, if only to show the studio that there is interest in catalog TV series on DVD.

At long last, and with a sigh of relief from yours truly, there is finally some concrete information on the upcoming release of The Monster Squad on DVD. Lionsgate will release the DVD on July 24, 2007. Here's a look at the cover art...


Now I'm not a big fan of this cover. It exemplifies everything that is wrong with most DVD cover artwork. Not only is it NOT based on any of the original poster or home video release artwork, but it's a terrible mock-up of new and old images that makes it look like it's trying to cash in on a bunch of unrelated films, not to mention that it misses the point of the film by about three inches. First off, it looks like an amalgamation of the Pan's Labyrinth posters, the Bridge to Terabithia poster, and hell, it even invokes the Team America poster as well, which is kind of silly.


Why exactly does the kid have a rifle ammo belt on? Or a short sword for that matter? Not that I'm trying to be super nerdy picky or anything but the main weapons used in the movie were a complex bow, a shotgun, a pistol, a few stakes, and a slice of freakin' pizza (with loads of garlic.) Now other than Photoshopping in a trio of the monsters at the top of the artwork, it's basically lacks the feel of the movie.  I hate that they ditched any artwork of the original actors and just went with a new kid that sort of looks like an Andre Gower clone.  Here's the original poster in all it's hand-painted 80's glory...


At the end of the day, I don't really care. I'm just happy this movie is finally getting the release it deserves. Hell, I would have been happy with a bare bones single disk at this point. If the cover art really bugs you, then I suggest you send Andre Gower an e-mail as he states on his site so that he can forward them on to the appropriate people. Speaking of which, Mr. Gower (who played Sean in the Monster Squad) has a pretty cool site with some MS trivia, links and other fun odds and ends.

For me, this is the culmination of 20 years worth of waiting for a nice copy of the flick that I can call my own. In fact, today is almost a year to the day when I forwarded the plea to get the Monster Squad on DVD. It was last year around this time when some of the Ain't it Cool News people set up a reunion screening at the Alamo Drafthouse that would start the ball rolling on straightening out the mired rights issues and focus the interest in this film.

I saw it in the theater when I was 10 years old with a friend, Bryan Borsom, in 1987. We'd seen the trailers and I remember scanning the newspaper for our local theaters to see when it'd be playing in our area. I don't know what it was about the trailer, but I was super jazzed to see this film. I think I was just at that perfect age, I was on the verge of leaving elementary and moving into middle school, so a huge part of me felt like that was the last summer where I could really feel like a kid. I was about to give up carrying a lunch box, I just got into skateboarding (with an older cooler middle school crowd), I was pretty much graduating from Bunnicula to Stephen King novels, and Metallica was the only band in the world for me.

One of the things that I remember most about that Saturday is that we (Bryan and me) had planned on seeing both the Monster Squad and the Garbage Pail Kids movie, but neither of us had enough money for both. So after we finished watching the Squad kick Dracula's butt back into limbo we begged our way into a free screening of the GPK flick by telling the clerk at the customer service desk that our mothers weren't going to be able to pick us up for three more hours. Man, I was a dork as a kid. In the end I'm glad my hard-earned allowance money went towards Monster Squad as it's by far the better and more deserving flick. When Bryan and I were finally picked up, we spend the ride home arguing about what Sean yells to Horace when confronted by the wolfman. I kept saying it was "Kick him in the nards" while Bryan assured me it was "Kick him in the balls." Once again, time would answer the question as male 30-somethings everywhere will attest that kicking a monster in the NARDS is the best way to go.

I'm not sure if the letter writing campaign that director Fred Dekker suggested was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I know I wrote my fare share. I intended to write like thirty separate letters, and I managed to do about half of that before I felt like I was writing to a brick wall. Then a few months ago the DVD release rumors began to gain steam. Granted, it was about the third or fourth time in as many years that internet rumors started circulating, but this was the first time when both the director and the actors started to chime in on the subject.

Today the whole thing really feels solid for the first time in ages as I read this post on Ain't It Cool, and saw it mirrored around the net. The bad cover art being released is actually what makes it feel real to me. I know this sounds silly and all, I mean it's just a silly kids movie from the 80's, but somehow it feels like it's my movie, and I'd be willing to bet that a lot of kids growing up at the time feel like this. For years I was the only person I knew who loved this movie to death, to the extent of buying an old rental copy from a store for the hefty price of $30 (at a time when the average new video was about $5.) None of my friends felt the way about MS that they felt about say the Goonies, or even Space Camp. So it's always felt like my movie.

Here's a list of the special features that have been announced on this 2-Disc set:
- Audio commentary by writer/director Fred Dekker and cinematographer Bradford May
- Audio commentary by Fred Dekker and actors Andre Gower, Ashley Bank and Ryan Lambert
- "Wolf Man's Got Nards! The Making of The Monster Squad" documentary
- Deleted and extended scenes
- Monster Mania reunion featurette
- Vintage interview with Tom Noonan (in Frankenstein's monster makeup!)
- Poster and still gallery
- Theatrical trailer
- TV spot
- Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Widescreen

Looking back at all of the bootlegs I've purchased for this film, this set pretty much covers everything I had before (trailer, widescreen, poster and still gallery) with more than enough additional features. Though I'm not fond of cast commentaries, I'm really looking forward to the director/cinematographer commentary track as it seems like Dekker is genuinely into this flick. I hope it's not all, "Hey, remember when we made this movie? Yeah, it was a blast." I also hope the making of documentary is a little more than a studio fluff piece, and seeing that the film is 20 years old this year I'd hope it would be new stuff and not an archival "making of". It'll also be cool to hear Tom Noonan in the vintage interview. He's a pretty interesting fellow whose performance in Manhunter is pretty imposing. He's got a website up where it looks like he hosts workshops on acting, directing, and writing.

As far as why there might be as much interest in this film after all these years you don't have to look much further than some of the creative talents behind the monster creation and writing. The legendary Stan Winston was given the task to create the re-vamped look of the classic Universal monsters, and he did so with an amazing gusto and a welcome realism. The film features one of the best Creature suits I've ever seen, not to mention one hell of an imposing werewolf, and a mummy that strikes a nice balance between Karloff and Jack Pierce's version and the current CGI crap fests that were the Stephen Sommers films. As far as the writing goes, Shane Black (he of Lethal Weapon fame, not to mention starring in Predator) was involved on the project, though I'm not sure to what capacity.

As far as the kids that starred in the film, most are either still active in the entertainment industry or are on their way back in. As I mentioned before Andre Gower is still active and I believe has begun work on his putting together his own film festival. Ryan Lambert (who played the older punk Rudy in MS, not to mention starring in Kids Incorporated, a show whose theme song will etch itself into your brain if you aren't careful) fronts a band called Elephone, and Ashley Bank (who played the young Phoebe the feeb) has grown up into a lovely woman who has worked in a more behind the scenes capacity. Sadly, Brent Chalem, who played Horace (and who exhibited the exact same fashion sense that I did, same T&C t-shirts, and surf shorts), died of pneumonia in 1997 at the age of 22 while he was attending law school. Robby Kiger, who played Patrick, pretty much fell of the map though, and in some of the recent interviews I've read with the other cast members no one seems to have kept in touch. Michael Faustino (who played the cute Eugene and who is the brother of David Faustino of Married with Children fame) has also sort of dropped off the map.

I also found Duncan Regehr's art site a couple weeks ago, so if you were ever interested in what a once great Dracula actor does on the side of his acting gigs, take a gander. I also thought I should mention that Michael Sembello has a site up. Sembello recorded the awesome Monster Squad theme song "Rock Until You Drop", not to mention music for flicks such as Flashdance. He's said for years that he'd eventually release a nice high quality MP3 of the MS song on his site, but has yet to do so. Carl Thibault, the man that was under all of the wolfman make-up (not to be confused with Jon Gries, the actor that played the human incarnation of the wolfman) has also struck out on his own creative endeavor recently with his first directorial feature film, the Garage.

What's truly an awesome coincidence for me is that July 24th is just one week after my 30th birthday, so I'll truly get the perfect geek present this year. Man, I can't freakin' wait to see this in nice quality DVD. In 2007 wolfman indeed has nards.

Boxing Helena for me is the perfect example of potential-wasting, gutless filmmaking.  Warning, spoilers follow.  Philippe Caland and Jennifer Lynch presented a genuinely interesting and bold plot, that of a masochistic, mother-obsessed doctor (Nick) who desperately latches onto Helena, a beautiful temptress who wants nothing to do with him.  Nick, after having inherited his mother's palatial estate and running into Helena in a bar, decides to throw an impromptu house warming party as cover for inviting Helena into his home where she yet again rebuffs his advances.  Nick then lures her back to his house where she is accidentally hit by a car and has her legs horrible crushed.  Being a brilliant surgeon, Nick manages to save her life though he amputates both of her legs, and it's at this point that the film becomes both remarkable and lackluster at the same time.



Jennifer Lynch, daughter of filmmaker David Lynch, seems as if she's taking a page out of her father’s surreal dream-logic filmmaking book as Nick keeps Helena prisoner and begins to slowly and literally deconstruct Helena limb by limb until she's truly an object of his desire.  Helena, on the other hand, spends her time digging into Nick's psyche, taunting his manhood and in a very demented twist falling in love with him, I believe based purely on his desire for her, which transcends physical beauty (something she is used to men fawning over.)  Unfortunately this second act is severely hampered by pointless complexity (in terms of the number of characters in the film) and some very forced and unconvincing performances (namely by Bill Paxton who's trying his best to invoke his character Sevren from Near Dark and Sherilyn Fenn who stoicism is almost laughable.)

Though the acting is generally bad and the directing generic the plot would save this otherwise mundane film, but this to is thrashed by a very trite and gutless third act that ends with an ambiguous twist ending, which implies that the entire second act was either a hallucination or a dream.  When I rented this film I had very high hopes based on the loose connection to David Lynch and the story in general.  I mean who sits down to write a movie about a man so obsessed with a woman that he makes her into a living Venus Di Milo, and then pussies out at the end and implies that it's either a dream that Helena has had after the accident, or a hallucination that Nick is having in the hospital after he brings her in (instead of keeping her in a psuedo-box on his dining room table.)

I thought I’d talk a bit about the Ewoks DVD today.   I don't hate this cartoon, but I do hate the way Lucasfilm has handled the property.  Basically what this release is, is 8 episodes from the first season of the show cobbled together to form two very unbalanced animated films with new adult Wicket voice-overs.



What we don't get is the opening theme song, original end credits, and I have a feeling original music (though I guess I'll never know since this will probably be the only release in this format.)  At least the "chapters" are labeled with the original episode titles.  I know this sounds nit-picky and in the vein of the "complainers" of the ill done reissues of the Original Star Wars trilogy on DVD, but come on.  What is the purpose of releasing an old saturday morning cartoon, almost certainly because the fans demanded it for nostalgia purposes, and then heavily editing it so that it has almost no feel of how it originally aired?

I don't particularly want this in my collection, but I do want episodes of the show, so I bit the bullet and bought it.  I outright refuse to buy Droids though as I didn't care as much for that cartoon and can wait for a better version (though it will probably never come...)

So in the wake of my burgeoning interest in car flicks, post Death Proof, I finally got around to catching Vanishing Point, the 1971 road film that, like Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, is one long car chase.  This flick above all else, is the film most mentioned in Death Proof, both by the characters and with the use of the white 1970 Dodge Challenger that the girls are test driving at the end of the flick.  Like all the other car flicks I've seen lately, I tried to go into this with unspoiled and with an open mind.



Like Two-Lane Blacktop, this flick begins with a slow burn that builds up to become much more than the sum of its parts.  The inter-cutting of scenes with the main character Kowalski (played by Barry Newman) with those of DJ Super Soul (played by Cleavon Little) are first unexplained and odd, but soon become weirdly telepathic, where one character becomes the body and the other the voice of a being that is past it's time on this earth.  The films existential leaning, though, isn't as up front as Two-Lane Blacktop, as the director (Richard C. Sarafian) and the writers (Malcolm Hart & G. Cabrera Infante) very creatively insert some telling flashback sequences that throughout the film bring the audience up to speed with Kowalski and suggest some reasoning behind his long last stand on the road.

Though the film is structured a little more commercially viable than Two-Lane, it's not quite as much so as Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and not nearly as mundane as most of Gone in 60 seconds, so it's kind of cool to see a progression of existentialist road movies throughout the 70's.  It's kind of interesting to note that in TLB speed alienates, in DMCL and VP speed kills, and in GI60S speed titillates because by that point people were becoming so enamored by the action that they were probably looking past the meaning.  This is an downward spiral that action movies take throughout the 80s (with films like the Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run, and even to a point Top Gun) and which ends ultimately with films like Days of Thunder or Speed and its utterly pointless sequel, Speed 2: Speedier on a Boat No Less (or what ever the hell it was called.)  Car movies are all flash and hardly any substance anymore.  Stuff like the Fast and the Furious or the Transporter (though both fun and exciting) are simply eye candy.  Honestly, Death Proof isn't much better, but at least it turns its head back in the direction of the 70s flicks that it pays homage to.

I'm curious is this is one of the first times the where the whole DJ as a confidant/copilot concept makes it's way onto film.  It seems like a very stereotypical idea now, but I'm not sure where it came from.  I also really dig its telepathic inference, which reverberates nicely in later cinema like in the scenes between the Forest Whitaker titular character and Raymond (played by Isaach De Bankole) in Ghostdog: Way of the Samurai, where even though neither character can understand each others language, they still hold up their ends of a conversation through some sort of unexplained telepathy.

I also think that this is a pretty tight example of counter culture cinema, in the vein of Easy Rider, so it's sort of funny to see that there was a made for TV remake in '97 starring Viggo Mortensen that completely ditches Kowalski's drug fueled existential ride to the end with a plot about having to get home for the birth of his baby.  That just sounds so silly.

 
Sin City isn't a perfect film; in fact it isn't even close.  It's hard to say inclusively that it's bad or good, because there are a lot of different aspects to the flick.  I can say that I loved it, even for its issues.



As far as translation from book to screen, the movie is near flawless.  Rodriguez and Miller have managed to recreate Miller's heavily stylized comics on the big screen without losing an iota of the heavy black or stark white.  They also manage to keep the dialogue and internal monologue intact, which are both a merit and a major problem with the film.  Most people who've read Miller's Sin City work don't make the connection to Mickey Spillane and Sam Spade, to Humphrey Bogart and the lingo of the Hard Boiled detective pulp novels.  So when they hear the dialogue in the movie delivered in such a manner it'll probably come off as comic or exaggerated.  People today just don't remember or care for the older genres that so many of today's writers and directors fell in love with as children.  People expect an update not a faithful homage.  Yet they complain when they feel a book to film translation isn't faithful.  Simply put, people don't know what they want.

That being said, I think the theatrical cut of the film also suffers a little in it's editing.  Being so faithful to its graphic novel roots, I feel that Rodriguez failed to treat the three novels as individual stories.  The three chapters blur into one another in a slightly uncomfortable manner with only a change in narrator to tip the viewer that we are switching gears.  I think the film would benefit from titled chapters (ala Kill Bill) or better yet, a title card utilizing the original Miller artwork for each chapter, which would be in keeping with the source material.  Thankfully, in this box set we also get the opportunity to view these stories separately which significantly adds to the experience.

The film is also heavily CG'd, but I think that helps to define baSin city as its own world just outside of our reality.  It also makes it easier to swallow the use of bright highlights of color and the exaggerated cartoon violence, though I know that there are a lot of older film fans that think the movie is actually a CG cartoon, so maybe it's not for everyone.

I also feel the film was superbly cast with Mickey Rourke as a standout and Elijah Wood as a surprisingly creepy Kevin.  Though at the end of the day I pretty much enjoy all of the performances, I was a little bummed by both Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba's Nancy.  Willis just didn't nail the exasperated, at-the-end-of-his-rope Hartigan for me.  As for Alba, honestly, if you've got a problem with on screen nudity, don't audition for the role of a stripper.  I'm surprised that Miller and Rodriguez decided to leave Nancy dressed through the film seeing that they accurately portrayed the over the top violence and gore.  I mean, the silhouette of a half naked Nancy, back lit with lasso in the air is a trademark image of the Sin City books.

All in all I think a lot of people are going to have a problem with aspects of the film that are actually quite faithful to Miller's graphic novels.  The "corny" dialogue, over the top unrealistic violence and action, the slightly cartoonish or simple characterization, all of these are in the Sin City books, and I think a lot of fans forgive this in the comics but won't in the film.  To me this points to unrealistic expectations of the adaptation to the silver screen, or more commonly, be careful for what you wish for, you might just get it.

For the special edition DVD I think that Rodriguez and company outdid themselves.  There are two insightful commentaries, tons of making of featurettes including a fast forward view of a large chunk of the film sans CGI overlay, and a second and very fun installment of the 10 Minute Cooking School series, this time focusing on two types of breakfast tacos (including easy-to-make fresh flour tortillas.)  Not only is the DVD portion of this box set loaded and awesome, but you also get a complete copy of the first Sin City graphic novel packaged in as well.  For around $25, this is a huge bargain and should illustrate the gold standard for special edition box sets.  I mean, sure, statues and book ends are nice, but at the end nowhere near as cool as source material.  Why aren't more special editions packaged with a print edition of a film's script or something, now that would be great.

What can I say about the original 1974 Gone in 60 Seconds that probably hasn't been said before.  The flick is insanity personified.  I basically came to this flick after I saw Death Proof in the theater a couple weeks ago.  Since Tarantino also made a reference to this in Kill Bill (the scene where Texas Ranger Earl McGraw comes driving up to the wedding chapel massacre and the P.O.V. is from the driver so you see the dashboard and out the window; there is a row of sunglasses, each with different color lenses, this come directly from GISS), I figured it was time to finally sit down and watch it.



This is certainly one of the greatest examples of American cult cinema as it was independently written, produced and directed by H. B. Halicki a self-made businessman/gear-head.  Halicki also starred in the film as well as doing all of his own stunt driving, which even includes a unplanned crash into a telephone pole that resulted in halting production as Halicki was badly injured in the wreck.  Not only did Halicki write, produce, direct, act in, and do the stunt driving in the film, but he also owned or paid for almost all of the vehicles seen in the movie including the police cars and a garbage truck that he bought at auction for around $200 apiece.  To say this guy was 100% behind his film would be a vast understatement.

What kills me though, is that for all of this love, most of it doesn't shine through unto the screen.  The first 50 minutes of the film are horrible, badly acted (mostly because Halicki cast friends and family in most of the roles to keep the production costs down), badly paced, and for the most part badly written, if only because the viewer has no idea what's going on through most of the film.  Much of the initial dialogue is delivered via voice over because 75% of the footage is in long shots, so you really don't know who is talking half of the time.  Even when the plot gets a little clearer later on there are still plenty of plot holes that aren't explained (like who hired Maindrian in the first place.)  It also doesn't help that all of the car thieves have the same disguise (which I have a sneaking suspicion was a big influence on Spike Jonze for his concept in the video for Sabotage by the Beastie Boys), so the viewer isn't even sure which character is on screen some of the time.  The worst part though, is a 5-10 minute scene where Halicki inter cuts a plodding scene of his character walking through a warehouse looking at all of the cars his crew has stolen with a weird shot of Marion Busia (who plays his associate's wife) as the camera just slowly arcs around her sad face while she sits in the crew's office.  The scene feels like it's ten years long and is utterly pointless.

All of this, though, is paid off in the last forty minutes when the film turns into one long car chase that has plenty of interesting gimmicks and gags.  Throughout the film Maindrian keeps having problems getting his hands on or keeping "Eleanor" a yellow 1973 Ford Mach 1 Mustang.  The film takes a drastic turn after Mandrian steals his back-up Eleanor and is double crossed resulting in a pretty daring police chase.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 cars are wrecked in the ensuing chase including Eleanor, though she's still able to drive pretty well (thanks to Halicki reinforcing her body for the stunt-work.)

At the end of the day though, this all makes for a pretty mundane film, especially when compared to similar flicks like Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, though it's staunch independence makes it one heck of a unique viewing experience that will probably never be duplicated.  The perfect 3 star flick.

For some odd reason lately I've sort of fell into watching a bunch of car and road movies.  It started when a friend at work lent me his copy of Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and came to a head when I saw Grindhouse in the theater a couple weeks ago.  I completely flipped for Death Proof, and in total Kill Bill fashion, I've been tracking down the references and homages to get a feel for where he was coming from.  Death Proof is really a nod to three styles of film, the slasher flick (which I'm pretty comfortable with so I don't really need to dig into that stuff), the car/road movie (which I'm getting into now), and chick revenge flicks (which I'm sure will be my next obsession.)



DP mentions a few flicks by name, DMCL, Vanishing Point, Gone in 60 Seconds (the original 1974 flick, not the remake), and when I started doing a little digging I realized that I couldn't just do these three as there were a few more that sort of fit the bill as well, Bullit, Deathrace 2000, and Two-Lane Blacktop.  Well the first thing I realized when I started looking up all the car/road movie references is that a couple of those are out of print. I was lucky enough to have kismittically been introduced to Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, which was out of print, but so was Two-Lane Blacktop, also released by Anchor Bay and also now OOP (**Update**  there is now a nice version of the film available through Criterion, just click the picture above.)  I did some price comparisons and was bummed by my initial discovery that most sites like Amazon and stuff list it used, but for like $100 or more.  No movie is worth that, it's just stupid extortion.  So I hit eBay hoping for bootlegs.  Some of the boots were pretty high priced, like in the $40 range, but luckily there was a dude in Australia selling some for $15 a pop.  I picked up a copy not expecting it to arrive until like next year since the international postage he was asking for was only $3.85 (very unlikely, but I went with it.)

I was surprised this past week to find it in the mailbox.  I chucked it in the player hoping it was a decent bootleg and sighed in relief when I realized it was a perfect port of the Anchor Bay release which meant it was nice quality and widescreen.  I wasn't sure what to expect from the flick as I refused to read the blurb and wanted to go in completely unspoiled.  The flick stars a young James Taylor (yeah, that James Taylor, the Fire and Rain, ex-hippie soft rock king), Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys), Laurie Bird, and Warren Oates (who I only really knew as Sgt. Hulka from Stripes.)  Basically it's sort of an existentialist gear-head flick that follows two friends, a hitchhiker, and a compulsive liar as they race across the country.

The first thing that surprised me was how much I loved both James Taylor (as The Driver) and Dennis Wilson (as The Mechanic); both perfectly nail that disassociated quietness that comes from truly cool obsessive hobbyists (you know the type, that dude that's uber knowledgeable and has pretty much seen or experienced every aspect of something and just kind of hangs out mildly interested in the scene (think Chevy Chase in Caddyshack or Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.)  When they're checking out potential cars to race against, and they're rattling off engine types and model years it's with a total stoicism that's way more realistic and convincing than a more manic method approach (like Nic Cage in the Gone in 60 Seconds remake.)  Very early on you get used to the two as a unit, almost inseparable, so later in the film with the introduction of Laurie Bird's hitchhiker, even though it's played out very subdued, you can really feel the distance growing between the Driver and the Mechanic.  It's kind of painful to watch (in a good way.)

Overall the film is very slow, plodding along just fast enough with almost no plot that you might actually fall asleep if it weren't for the occasional engine revving or race.  Warren Oates' character, an older guy with a much nicer looking car (a yellow 1970 Pontiac G.T.O.) than the duo (in their dark gray primer colored '55 Chevy) ends up adding a lot of unnerving humor and a lightness to the overly brooding film.  He's constantly picking up hitchhikers and coming up with a new spiel about how he ended up with his G.T.O., none of which you can believe by the time he hooks up with the duo.  There's actually a great cameo by Harry Dean Stanton as a gay hitchhiker that manages to be both funny and very disturbing at the same time.

This movie plays out much in the same way that Jack Kerouac's On the Road feels.  What probably helped this along was that the director Monte Hellman only dished out a day's worth of the script at a time which seemed frustrating to the actors, but which helped to insure very organic performances.  He also tried his best to deprive the actors of sleep so that they would be in the same head-space as the characters which were on a non-stop trip.

The flick also has a very abrupt (though interesting), pre-third act resolution, ending which I think says a lot more about the film than I realized when I watched it through the first time.  The basic plot is that the duo, after picking up Laurie Bird, are confronted by Warren Oates' character at a gas station (though they've sort of had a couple run-ins with him before where he tries his best to initiate a race and both times they blow him off) and you can tell he's dying to get these three on the road with him, the two guys in a race, and the girl in his car.  After a bit of macho posturing, Taylor and Wilson challenge Oates to a race across the country to D.C. with the two car's pinks as the trophy.  They put their pink slips together and mail them to D.C. care of general delivery and head out.

During the film all three guys make passes at Laurie Bird, who is more than willing, though only Wilson makes contact, however pointless and fleeting it is.  At the same time Bird is sort of wary of the guys as it seems that she's looking for a bit of stability and all she can see in them is their need to race above all else, or in Oates' case, a little bit on insanity.  Eventually she splits from the group and hitches a ride with some dude on his motorcycle, exiting the film and setting the tone for the rest of the picture which is when everyone sort of realizes that nothing is going to change and they all just sort of abandon the race, getting back to where they started the film leaving the bare plot resolution as a mere loose end.  The race is really just a MacGuffin.

Pretty much, I've only really been excited about seeing one or two of the 50 or so major films that come out each year, probably for about the last decade. I think there's something chemical about the whole process. When I was a kid, practically everything I saw on the screen I loved, not to mention the hundreds of movies I caught on HBO at home. Most of my DVD collection, in fact, is comprised of flicks that I saw first in the 80's, and most of them are of questionable quality, but I love 'em anyway. When I turned fifteen though, and with the release of Batman Returns, things started to change. For the first time I was disappointed by a film that I should have loved outright. Since then, every year, it seems like there are fewer and fewer movies that I get excited for.

Well, the two flicks I really want to see this year are Hot Fuzz and Grindhouse, and this past weekend, my fiancée, a couple friends and I took in the crazy double feature that is Grindhouse.



I tried my best to ignore practically all the news, plot spoilers and reviews before I saw it because I wanted to go in and experience it for what it was. If you haven't seen the flick and want to stay in the dark, don't read on because I'm going to hit on some spoilers.



Going into the film I pretty much only knew about the running time, the most basic elements of the two film's plots, and the gimmicks behind the experiment (like the fact that there were going to be a handful of fake exploitation/horror trailers that would be sandwiched between the films, that grain, dust and scratches were added digitally, as well as well-placed missing reels of footage.) Pretty much whenever I needed to convince someone to go, or if someone asked what I was so excited about, or why I was going to see the flick all I kept repeating was, "There's a chick with a machine gun leg and that's all you need to know." Hell, I don't think I've seen a machinegun leg since that crazy sequence in Sam Raimi's Darkman where one of Durant's henchmen pulls the leg off another one and reveals it to be a hidden machinegun with which he mows down a bunch of guys while his friend just hops on one leg and laughs.

The whole experience is kicked off with the trailer for a flick called Machete starring Danny Trejo and Jeff Fahey, and directed by Rodriguez. I'd say that it's fake, but apparently because Rodriguez had already shot a bunch of footage (like 40 minutes or so) and because it played so well to audiences, he's decided to go ahead and finish the feature and release it direct to DVD around the time that Grindhouse also comes out on DVD. The trailer features Trejo (who is a Rodriguez veteran and typically plays characters named after bladed weapons in his films) as Machete, a Mexican day laborer/federale who is hired by a well-dressed politician (Fahey) to assassinate another official, and then in turn is double-crossed. Machete then bands together with a priest, played by Cheech Marin, and a few others to extract revenge on those that pissed him off.

This is a pretty funny way to start off the double feature, and after watching an entire DVD of exploitation trailers called 42nd Street Forever I have to say that the Machete trailer feels pretty dead on, though some of the special effects scenes are way too over the top for what Rodriguez was trying to recreate. It is, though, a perfect lead in to Planet Terror, the first flick in the Grindhouse double feature, also written, directed, and shot by Robert Rodriguez.



Planet Terror is book-ended by two very different versions of its starlet, Cherry Darling (played by Rose McGowan), and the trip that leads the audience between the two is pretty damn crazy. Most people seem to like this flick a lot more than Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, and if I had to guess why, it's probably because there isn't a second wasted on plot or character development, both of which are eschewed in the name of insanity and action. Well, that's not quite true; there is a twenty second scene between Dr. Dakota Block (played by Mary Shelton) and her father Texas Ranger Earl McGraw (played once again by Michael Parks) where you get a little character development, but twenty seconds out of 85 minutes isn't much to suffer through.

Nothing in this film makes much sense or is explained, and I'm not sure how much of this is intentional because of the style of film it's trying to be, or if it's because the script was rushed as Robert Rodriguez is prone to doing. At the end of the day, though, it really doesn't matter because this mindlessness is really the film's main strength. On some level this is what exploitation cinema is all about in that it tends to play off of people's instinctual desires, sex, violence, and the type of depravity that we can't help but stare while we watch it. Sure, at the end of the day you can try to explain away why you'd watch a flick like Last House on the Left by saying stuff like, "It's important to examine extreme violence, especially in the wake of televised wars like Vietnam, to see how far our society is willing to subdue our morality…", but really deep down people watch it to see rape, murder and ultimately revenge play out on film. We're all voyeurs at heart, and who can blame us. The human creature is built to question and wonder, and eventually we all turn to areas of life that we tend to have no experience in.

Planet Terror manages to pack in a ton of exploitative elements, even going so far as to provide some mockingly funny social commentary during a scene where Dr. Dakota leaves her son (who she's spent the better part of the film trying to protect from the evil influence of his father Dr. William Block (Josh Brolin)) alone in her car with a gun, which she instructs him to use just like he does in his video games. Of course, two seconds after the boy is left alone he shoots himself in the head. It's scenes like this that entire exploitation films were built on in the 30's-60's, films like Kroger Babb's Mom and Dad which was anchored by a scene that shows the actual birth of a baby, and exploits the depiction of a vagina on film.




In fact, much like Kill Bill, which was a duck press of Tarantino's interests and influences (including Spaghetti Westerns, Samurai Flicks, Kung Fu flicks, and revenge movies), Planet Terror is a similar duck press for exploitation and horror. There are so many scenes in succession that in other films would be that solitary key element, that one scene to make the movie memorable. For instance, the hobbling scene from Misery is mirrored when Dakota breaks her wrist (arm?), or the scene in Dawn of the Dead where a zombie is scalped by helicopter blades which is mirrored and made homage to in the end sequence where a strip club owner pilots a helicopter, decapitating tons of zombies in his wake (which also might be a very distasteful, yet exploitative reference to the accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie where Vic Morrow and two children were killed in much the same manner.) There's even a lost opportunity here as well. There is a character named Abby (played by Naveen Andrews) who has a fetish for cutting off and collecting his enemy's testicles. This goes unexplained, and could very well have been switched to the Bruce Willis character, who played Hartigan in Sin City, a character that ends up ripping the penis and testicles off of the Yellow Bastard character in one scene. I think it was a missed opportunity.

Anyway, no matter how fun all these balls to the walls moments are, there really is nothing working to focus them together, unlike what Kill Bill managed to do. It really is just a series of fun scenes slapped together into a very loose story, which makes for a very uneven experience. Though in the grand scheme of things, with the double feature and all the trailers, the film plays fine, but taken out of the gimmick it might end up being a very hard film to watch. The other thing that kind of bugged me was the excessive use of CGI. I know Rodriguez was attempting to make an exploitation-esque horror/action film that for once actually lives up to the crazy movie posters these films often have, but in light of the homage he's trying to construct, it feels out of place because the films he's referencing never looked this good.

I will say that I love Rodriguez's casting in the film. He managed to use a ton of actors that either don’t get enough work, or haven't really been given the chance to shine yet. Josh Brolin does a wonderful job of channeling his father's intensity from the Amnityville Horror into his Dr. Block character; while Michael Biehn and Jeff Fahey really steal all the scenes they're in, especially when they're paired up on screen (the scene with the BBQ recipe is actually very touching.) Freddy Rodriguez is pretty badass, getting a chance to really cut loose as El Wray, the mysterious hero who never misses. Least I forget, Rose McGowan also kicks some zombie ass as Cherry Darling, and the machinegun leg is just as awesome in the movie as it looks on the posters, up to an including a silly limp. I also dig how the end of the film mirrors the end of From Dusk 'Til Dawn, though in a much more uplifting way.

Between Planet Terror and Death Proof we are treated to three more fake trailers, Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS, Edgar Wright's Don't, and Eli Roth's Thanksgiving. Werewolf Women really fell flat for me, even with such a crazy and homage filled concept. The trailer is a play on the title of the 1974 Dyanne Thorne film Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (in which Thorne is the commandente of a Nazi concentration/work camp who submits her prisoners to hideous medical and sexual experiments), except Zombie takes it a step further and actually has werewolf women. I should love this trailer, what with Sherrie Moon Zombie in almost non-existent Nazi garb with a horse whip, Udo Kier as the Nazi commander, and even a silly Nicolas Cage in a funny turn as Fu Manchu, but the trailer just didn't work for me. I think what ruins it the most is when all the lead actors are named both on screen and by the narrator, and because most of them are recognizable actors (or at least Zombie regulars) it makes this 70's era type of film feel way to modern. It doesn't help that Nic Cage is in it since he helped ruin the pointless remake of the Wicker Man.

Edgar Wright's trailer for Don't was much better in terms of feeling like an exploitation trailer, though coming off of Zombie's it takes a bit to build up its steam. Wright does an awesome job of mimicking the repetitive narration and warnings that are common to these exploitation film trailers, like the "It's only a movie…" mantra from Last House on the Left. There’s also some genuinely disturbing imagery, what with the (what I can only imagine is) poop coverd Nick Frost, and the weird lady with the stigmata that is dripping white liquid instead of blood.

The last fake trailer, and the one that I thought I would hate when I heard that it was directed by Eli Roth, is called Thanksgiving. It's about a psychopath dressed as a pilgrim who torments a town, in particular a girl named Judy (played by Jordan Ladd) who has an endless succession of jock boyfriends beheaded while she kisses (or fillates) them. I was actually really impressed by the trailer, and am now convinced that Eli Roth is best served making three minute films instead of the drawn out tasteless and boring fare he's been producing. I even loved the turkey fucker at the end.

The one thing about the trailers, though, is that it did feel a little weird knowing that they were all fake. I think it would have been neat if they would have stuck a few real Grindhouse trailers in as well, much the same way they inserted the real "feature presentation" and "coming attractions" animations (at least I think they're real.)

All of this leads up to my favorite part of this entire experience (and it really was an experience, and at no part did it just feel like one big anthology movie) Death Proof. Quentin's fifth film (Kill Bill Vol.'s 1 & 2 really are one film in my book) manages to both fit into the whole Grindhouse gimmick as well live up to the rest of his body of work to date. The film starts off like a slasher flick with a group of girls getting together in Austin Texas for a "chicks only" weekend. It has the exact same build up as the first four Friday the 13th films, with the same conventions (e.g. the subtle side plot of two lovers hoping to get together, the trip through a small town in a packed car, the first night of drunken and drug induced semi debauchery, and even the loser guys trying to get into some girls pants who are obviously out of their league.) They only things that are missing are the weathered old man shouting warnings and excessive use of the "killer point of view" camera set up. The flick is really strange in that it has four acts, the first act, which is the slasher movie build-up (which is really a red herring setting up the insane conclusion to the film), and then three more quick acts where the film switches gears and becomes a chick revenge flick.

The first thing that struck me about Death Proof is that for all of its key Tarantino aspects (like long, pointless, yet endlessly interesting witty dialogue scenes, the extreme close-ups on women's bare feet, and the perfect use of naturally occurring music) the film is lacking in one of his most obvious and over arching conventions, jumping backwards and forwards in the chronology of the film. Though there are some leaps in time (and location, as I believe the film might jump from Austin Texas to Tennessee in the middle) the film pretty much plays out in straight chronological order. It makes me wonder why he chose to change his style for this film. On the one hand, it could be to keep the film in line with the films of the Grindhouse era that might not be as stylistically filmed as more modern films, or on the other it could just be Tarantino saying what the fuck and breaking his own conventions. Either way it makes for an interesting leap in his storytelling, especially after Kill Bill, witch played with the chronology jumping so much that it almost became pointless to the storytelling, almost confusing in parts.

If nothing else, and once again, Tarantino manages give an invigorating boost to one of his lead actor's career by casting Kurt Russell in the role of Stuntman Mike. After Tombstone, Russell began to slide into one boring role after another, getting further and further away from the parts that really defined him as an actor in the 80's (like Snake Plissken and Jack Burton in two Carpenter greats, Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China.) In Death Proof, Russell gets to play both the older badass psychopath and the pathetic whining coward, and with both he shines. Tarantino also shines the light on Zoë Bell who was the stuntwoman who doubled for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill (and Lucy Lawless in Xena: Warrior Princess) and stars as herself in Death Proof. Bell’s career leading up to her getting cast in Kill Bill is featured in the documentary Double Dare, which illustrates why Tarantino probably chose to have her play herself.



In keeping true to the style of his 70's road film influences, which he makes no pains to hide, going so far as to list them numerous times in the film (Vanishing Point, Two-Lane Blacktop, and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry), Tarantino shot all of the action at speed with real cars (instead of using trailer hook-ups and stuff.) Like in Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, he even had the actors at the wheel whenever he could. This makes all the difference as far as the intensity of the car chase and car bump scenes goes, as you can feel every swerve, engine roar, and crack in the pit of your stomach. You might as well be on the hood of the car with Zoë Bell.

The only leap that Death Proof makes for me is when the three girls (Rosario Dawson, Zoë Bell, and Tracie Thoms) finally "escape" from Stuntman Mike and they decide to track him down and kill him. I mean it's not like these characters are killers, they're two stuntwomen and a make-up artist. In most flicks of this nature there is an incident that prompts this last resort sort of action, either a family member or friend gets killed or raped, or something horrible happens. In the case of Death Proof, we do get the slaughter of the initial four women, but this is baggage that only the audience and Stuntman Mike carry, so when the trio snaps, it's not quite as convincing for me. In fact, I guess what throws this off for me is the final freeze frame of the film where Rosario Dawson brings her heel down on Mike's head, crushing it. Up until that moment it's just three girls beating the holy hell out of a guy who scared the shit out of them and possibly tried to kill them. In fact, before Thoms shoots Kurt Russell in the arm, it's almost as if he wants to make friends with these girls who share his love of stunt work. Ultimately it works fine for me, but it's still a jump in logic.

There were a lot of little touches in the vein of the Grindhouse gimmick in Death Proof that were fun, and I can't wait for an annotated version of the film to help pick them all out. One that I caught at the very beginning of the film was that Death Proof isn't the "original" title to the film. For a split second there was a different title screen, and the only word I could make out was "thunder". The Death Proof title card was then inserted, much like other releases of exploitation fare I've seen recently like Inglorious Bastards, which the copy I managed to get my hands on was re-titled G.I. Bro, and it was replaced in the exact same fashion. Another thing was that there are scenes from the Grindhouse trailer, in particular the scene with Vanessa Ferlito crawling on the floor towards Stuntman Mike to give him his much earned lap dance that aren't in the actual film (they're part of a missing reel that makes a great joke in the middle of the film.) You see this all the time with normal movies, deleted scenes used in trailers that are just infuriating if you're expecting it when you see the film, but here it's all part of the gimmick and joke. I'm sure it'll be on the DVD as a deleted scene.

All in all, the overall experience was great, and there's just a ton of great moments that make the 3 hour and 11 minute running time seem to pass rather quickly. I'm also glad that a lot of the digital gimmicks ended up not bothering me. I was sure that there would be too many scratches, pops, cigarette burns, sound problems, etc., but there was just enough to make it interesting, and I noticed that they even stopped half way through Death Proof. I guess they "found" a nice preserved reel or something. This actually bring up another point about one of these gimmicks, the missing reel that both film suffer from. Now in both flicks, the missing footage actually adds to the experience and both are executed in such a way that it gets a laugh. I think it's interesting though that this isn't typical of the Grindhouse experience, as usually what's missing from flicks is only seconds of film, not entire reels. Tarantino thought this would be a good idea for the film based on his experience with one of his own older prints that was missing a reel and it added a certain mystery to the film that was obviously unintended but a nice addition.

I'm surprised that it only took in around $11 million over the weekend, though it was released on Easter, and I'm sure people were more likely to go see a movie as a family and Grindhouse just doesn't fit that bill. Unfortunately, the Weinstein's have made some really weird decisions based on their fear of marketing films like Grindhouse. I mean, they forced Tarantino to split Kill Bill into two volumes instead of releasing it as one long film, and they wanted to do the same with GH though Tarantino and Rodriguez managed to argue their point well enough to get it released as one film. It probably helped that Kill Bill and Sin City did so well, but now that GH debuted so low, the Weinstein's are considering pulling it from theaters and re-releasing Planet Terror and Death Proof as two separate films with the missing reels added back in. They are already doing this in all non-English speaking countries anyway, which I think is a total rip-off. I'm glad I got a chance to see it on the big screen in the way it was intended to be seen though. Based on the international posters (an in keeping with the original plan) the fake trailers, Werewolf Women of the SS, Don't, and Thanksgiving are being dumped in favor of new trailers directed by Rodriguez (to be seen in front of Death Proof along with the trailer for Machete) and Tarantino (to be seen in front of Planet Terror.)





There was actually one thing that I heard going into this movie that was kind of bumming me out. I read that Rodriguez had cheated on his wife with his starlet McGowan, and it came out in the middle of shooting which prompted them to get a divorce and halt production on the film for a while. Since the movie's release though, Rodriguez and his wife Elizabeth Avellan (who is also his film producing partner) have issued a press release saying that the rumors aren't accurate and that they decided to file for divorce before the film even began. As much as it sounds like the press release was issued to patch up any problems, I kind of hope it’s true because Rodriguez seems like such a down to earth kind of guy, someone who wouldn't fall into the Hollywood trap of wrecking long standing relationships to go on a doomed fling. Either way it's none of my business.

I hope that Rodriguez and Tarantino spend a decent amount of time on the eventual DVD release. I've read that Rodriguez has joked about there being two versions of the film, one that matches the dirty theatrical print, and newly "found, restored, and re-mastered" editions of the flicks. I'd also have to imagine that if there were a Rodriguez 10-Minute Cooking School on the DVD, it would have to be for BBQ pork sausage, or at least just the BBQ sauce recipe. I'd also like to see some of the fan made trailers like Hobo with a Shotgun make it on the DVD, not to mention possibly a compilation of real exploitation trailers to give a nice frame of reference. I'm also holding out hope that the full version of Machete will be included as well, but I think that's a long shot, but it would be the ultimate special feature.

In my quest to dig up all the crap from my childhood that I loved so much I've run into a bunch of people and sites that have opened my eyes to an overlap in nostalgia between the 1970's and 80's. For the most part my nostalgia tends cover a lot of stuff that falls between 1977 and 1989, as those were the first 12 years of my life, pre-pubescence in all it's goofy glory. Well I sort of have a link to the previous generation's childhood pop culture junk via my sister who was born in '69, and just as we're going though this boom of 80's re-hashes and re-launches today, in the 90's there were a ton of 70's references that bombarded me throughout high school. Basically, at best, there was a weak link to the 70's that I've sort of been interested in but never really took the time to investigate, like the Sid and Marty Croft stuff, some of the weird Hanna Barbera cartoon stuff.

Well thanks to BCI Eclipse, I've been able to begin investigating the wonderful world of pre-Masters of the Universe Filmation when they were producing live action television as well as cartoons. One area in particular that's struck my fancy is the television fantasy/sci-fi boom in the mid to late 70's, of which Filmation was a big part. I was already a fan of the more mainstream super hero shows like the Incredible Hulk, the Spiderman TV series, the Linda Carter Wonder Woman show, as well as Buck Rogers, but I completely missed out on stuff like Battlestar Galatica, Space 1999, and the slew of Filmation shows like Ark II, The Secret of Isis, Jason of Star Command and Space Academy.

I recently sat down and took a look at Space Academy, the second show in Filmation's space series after Ark II, but before it's spin-off Jason of Space Command.



Though I'd never seen this show before, it was immediately familiar in both tone and style, not to mention for Johnathan Harris' overly dramatic mug. The show stars Harris (of Lost in Space fame) as Commander Gampu of the titular Space Academy, surrounded by a very ethnically diverse cast of young actors including Ric Carrott as Chris Gentry, Pamelyn Ferdin as Laura Gentry (Chris' psyonically connected twin sister), Maggie Cooper as Adrian, Brian Tochi (voice of Leonardo in the three live action TMNT movies as well as Toshiro Takashi from the Revenge of the Nerds movies and Cadet Nogata from the Police Academy Movies) as Tee Gar, Ty Henderson as Paul, and Eric Greene as the blue haired (well black haired with a slight blue dusting) Loki, an orphan picked up in the first episode from a desolate planet that is about to explode. The other character that rounded out the show was Peepo, voiced by Erika Scheimer, daughter of Lou Scheimer (who helped found Filmation and was executive producer on most of it's shows.)

The show ran for 15 episodes on Saturday mornings in 1977 and follows the adventures of the space cadets and their Commander as they seek out and explore space from their academy space station via their Seeker space ships (which is actually the recycled Ark II craft, and would later be used on Jason of Star Command, a loose spin-off of Space Academy.) Though the show is fairly dated in terms of wardrobe and hairstyles (they certainly didn't take a cue from Star Trek in this) it's immensely enjoyable in it's kid level Star Trek homages and campy light hearted-ness. One of the shows strengths is it's decent effects work with a mixture of really good shots (like a Seeker coming in for a landing in a docking bay) and some not so great ones, but all of it is almost on par with shows like Star Trek and Space 1999.

It's hard not to smile at the bad jokes and overly dramatic lines, which make it easy to look past the implausible plots and psuedo-scientific occurrences. Watching Chris and Laura psychically conversing or when Loki uses his infrared vision to spot particles of meteor dusk on the body of a seeker has a very campy charm. The only thing that really stood and kind of bugged me was the bile inducing amount of smiling the kids did. It's almost to a point where you can read a 1984-esque environment of fear into the acting style (you almost expect some of the characters to bust out with a line like, "Keep smiling or Gampu will kill us with his death ray.") It's the perfect Saturday morning trash though, that is a stepping-stone to the more adult shows like Battlestar Galatica or Dr. Who, and at the end of the day is a perfect example of a very important part in nostalgia, which is that there are some things that are meant only for kids, and that can be very important. You see that type of mentality in things like Lunchables that come with Pop Rocks-esque fizzy toppings, or commercials for Apple Jacks, sometimes things don't need to be anything more than they appear, they don't need to make sense, they just need to be cool for kids.

Shows like this are also a great example of something a child can use as a basis for kick starting their imagination. That's something that's lost on children's television and it's inevitable merchandising today. I truly think that this is a lost art in that by not going into large amounts of researched detail it forces a kid to fill in the gaps of logic (sort of like Donnie Darko for kids, but with less disturbing and much more scientific uncertainty), which is something that low budget or highly logic jumping shows tend to invoke.

At the end of the day, though the show is flawed, it is mindless fun (maybe too much because of it's datedness) and that's about all I want out of a Saturday morning TV show anyway.  I will say that's sparked an interest in finding out what Jason of Star Command (which centers on a special ops-like extension of Space Academy) is like.

I never caught Due South when it aired in its regular nighttime slot, but I overdosed on the show when it was playing in reruns on TNT here in the states.  There was just something amazing about this show that I have a hard time putting my finger on.  It's the same something that makes shows like Moonlighting and Northern Exposure so great as well.  Anyway, I so wanted to be Benton Fraser in high school, but no dice, I wasn't tall enough, pretty enough, smart enough, or nearly as Mountie enough though I did pick up his "Thank you kindly" affectation for awhile.



When DVDs first started trickling onto the market, this was one of the shows I was dying to have at the time because it was the one most fresh in my mind, not to mention sadly canceled and making it's way out of syndication at the same time.  I didn't remember seeing the first season until around 2001 or 2002, and even then it was a Canadian only release of the show, which was alright because they're in the same region coding, but also not so alright because it's MSRP was around $120.  This of course was back before the huge TV on DVD boom that we're currently living through, so it wasn't that much of a surprise, but it was disheartening.  Between the high price and shipping from Canada, I was thinking I'd never own the show, though I managed to find a much cheaper copy on eBay which made me happy.

When I got the set I was sort of bummed because it both didn't include the 2 hour pilot movie and was also one of the first times I came across a DVD set that was jam packed into a much smaller case than it needed.  It was the first time I'd seen overlapping DVDs, not to mention the fact that they were also double sided, so a six disc series was crammed on three discs and packaged in a double disc case.  Not my idea of a set that was asking $120.  Add to this the fact that the case was crushed in shipping, and I was just really bummed about the whole thing.



A few years later though, the company that released the series in Canada, Alliance Atlantis, made an agreement with an American company, Platinum Discs, to distribute it here in the states.  Once again I was very happy, first because they like 10 times cheaper, then because the first set would include the pilot movie and last because they looked like they would be available in slipcases with one sided discs.  Then I bought it and I wanted to cry.  These were hands down the worst quality DVDs I've ever purchased.  Sure, for the price it's not that big of a deal, but considering the alternative of picking up the remainder of the Canadian releases for something like $240 it just didn't balance out.



Platinum Discs ended up released the entire series in three very cheap sets (like $15 each) and every possible problem I could have I did.  When I picked up the second season the 3rd disc in the set was actually a disc from the first season.  Then when I returned it to Best Buy, which luckily had one to replace it, the replacement copy had broken spindles so the discs don't lock into place.  On both sets the slipcases are made of the cheapest, thinnest paper board, that it might as well be made out of lined paper.  The video quality is horrible, and every disc had problems with pixilation and grain issues.  Then after season three came out (there were four seasons in Canada) I was pissed because there was no word whatsoever on season 4.  Little did I know that it was actually included on season 3 while the whole time I was thinking that I was missing a season that I never got a chance to see in syndication.

I ended up chucking the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th discs of the 1st season American release, replacing them with the Canadian versions, so now I have a moderately nice set with both the pilot movie and better quality versions of the shows from the first season.  I guess this series of DVD sets wins my prize for worst releases ever, well not quite.  That prize would go to the $20 2-episode per release Star Trek the original series DVDs, but they've since been replaced with nicer, cheaper (though not all that much) versions.

I would have to hesitate in calling any movie perfect, but if I were forced to pick one example of a flick that was near perfect for me, it would have to be Kill Bill Vol.'s 1&2.  These two films (well really one cut in half) embody everything that I love in a movie going experience; it's amazingly stylistic, there's a ton of action, there's plenty of plot and character development, it's gory and exploitative, yet light and silly at times, it's story is well versed in the history of cinema, it's incredibly detailed with so many layers of reference and homage that there's an entire book dedicated to annotations and references, it's inventive in it's form, has great music, and most importantly it's quick and fun and it knows exactly what it is and makes no pretensions about it.



I saw these flicks in the theater, and literally from the first frame of the old grindhouse feature presentation screen I was in love.  Every single frame of this movie is dripping with cinema love, nothing is boring, and no time is wasted.  As an example, almost every single scene in the movie has a connection to something else that either in an joke or a reference to another movie, like the sunglasses lined up on the dashboard of Texas Ranger Earl McGraw's car, these are a reference to the original Gone in 60 Seconds, and then the actor himself is playing a character from another Tarantino movie, From Dusk 'Til Dawn.  What I really love about these moments is that even though there is so much to them, none of this is important to the plot, so the average movie goer should be just as entertained as those who do know this stuff.  This is done even better with the character of Hatroi Hanzo, the sword maker that forges the Bride's sword.  The actor, Sonny Chiba, is playing a character that he's played before (in the show Kage No Gundan), yet everything that you need to know is right in the movie.  This movie also cements the odd mixture of universes that Tarantino has been slowly establishing in his films.  Basically there are two Tarantino universes, the "real world" and the "cinema world".  Pulp Fiction takes place in the "real world" and Kill Bill in the "cinema world", so for instance, the character of Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction, who is a failed actress who once did a pilot for a television show about these five girl action-spies (Fox Force Five), is quite possible "playing the role" of the Bride in Kill Bill (not to mention the fact that the DiVAS, Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, in Kill Bill is based on Fox Force Five from Pulp Fiction.)  So Kill Bill would effectively be a movie that the characters from films like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, or Jackie Brown might go see.

This is the same sort of idea that's established in Stephen Kings body of work via his spaghetti western influenced fantasy series the Dark Tower, that all things, fiction, literature, movies, and ultimately the real world are all interconnection in a much more drastic way than just existing together.  That if one were able to make a tear in reality there would be a possibility that that person could then drift into another world, possibly even a world that was established in a work of fiction.  Hell, it goes so far as to suggest that even our "reality" is someone else's fiction.  Kill Bill is the embodiment of this idea.

Because the flicks are so filled with references to other cinema, I took some time out a year or so ago with a friend to explore them as best as we could.  I picked up the great annotation book by D.K. Holm, Kill Bill: An Unofficial Casebook, and with the help of the internets, Amazon.com, eBay, Netflix, and even some local video stores, managed to put together a list of most of the films referenced.  Here's what we ended up watching based on our interest in Kill Bill:

Lady Snowblood, Thriller: A Cruel Picture, The Street Fighter, Kage No Gundan (series one, episode one), 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Circle of Iron, Kung Fu (tv series, episode one), Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars, Death Rides a Horse, Game of Death, Green Hornet Vol. 1, Five Fingers of Death, Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart on the River Styx, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Fists of the White Lotus, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, Black Mama/White Mama, Switchblade Sisters, and Battle Royale.

We also had the Five Deadly Venoms, the One Armed Swordsman, and Samurai Fiction on the list, but the FDV kept arriving from Netflix broken or unplayable, OAS was unavailable in the US, and we didn't get to Samurai Fiction.  Even this list is just the movies that feature prominently in Kill Bill and not stuff like the Gone in 60 Seconds reference.  I ended up finding a lot of flicks that I absolutely love though Kill Bill, the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Lady Snowblood, and Death Rides a Horse in particular, so in essence Kill Bill is invaluable in what it opened me up to cinema-wise.  How many movies can make that kind of claim.

What's also beautiful about all of this is what I said before, that none of this homage even matters to the movie itself, so alone, Kill Bill is still amazing.  It manages to distill the essence of everything it plays off of into a very perfect version of this type of cinema.