“From the mind behind the mega-hit Syfy show you’ve probably never heard of (EUREKA) comes a tribute to all those no-budget Syfy original movies and the “so bad, they’re good” films that inspired them. Move over Roger Corman, step back Ed Wood, make way on your weekend programming schedule Mr. Stern, because here comes Andrew Cosby’s 365 DAYS OF SCI-FI.

And it’s all happening here! Each day, your friends at CHUD will bring you a brand new bad movie pitch — the best of the worst title Cosby can come up with, no matter where he’s at or what he’s doing, rain or shine, drunk or sober. That’s a whole year of the quality concepts you’ve come to expect from the network that brought you MANSQUITO and SHARKTOPUS.”

365 days of Sci-Fi Archive

And now… DAY ONE-HUNDRED AND NINETEEN:

“A new twist on an old favorite.”

– Andy Cosby (Twitter)

“Shop ‘Til You Drop.”

Pitch:

DEADSVILLE – In what will hopefully become television’s first successful 30-minute“zom-com,” a misfit group of suburban survivors of the undead apocalypse decide to make a stand, building a new life in a dead world, living, loving, laughing and laboring inside the relatively safe confines of the last bastion of American consumerism… the local mall.  But unlike the movies we’ve seen, they don’t want to get out; they want to hunker down and start their lives over.  This is an opportunity for each and every one to reinvent themselves and begin anew, and they’re grateful for the opportunity.  Now, if only they didn’t have to deal with those pesky zombies.

Nick Says: There’s no way a zombies and mall concept would ever fly.

Disclaimer:

This article series is in no way affiliated with SyFy. This is a creative experiment and ongoing test of nerves that is perpetrated by a few insane people and should be construed as such. If for some reason these people actually make one of these as a feature it must be chalked up to their own lunacy. These are the intellectual property of Mr. Andrew Cosby and not the property of CHUD.com or SyFy.

Film/TV: Midnight Movie. A staggering Braves loss thanks to horrible umpiring and bad luck. I hate the Cardinals and Tony La Russa so much, it pains me to see them beat the Braves. Anyway…

Music: Some old Suicidal Tendencies. Man, the production on every album before The Art of Rebellion sucks a druid’s dick.

Comedy: Nada.

Food/Drink/Inhalents: We shared some Chinese for dinner. Made myself lunch from scraps around the house. No booze. No smoke.

Family: I hung with the whole gang for a while, and it was a work night but one which was interrupted by Rocco getting up over and over and over…

Friends: Nein.

Work: Tons. Lots of little bits of content and all sorts of business stuff. Did an interview with the director of Midnight Movie.

Animal of the Day: Vulture!

Art: Nope.

Goodies: Some little items to make the lizard’s home more palatable.

Screenwriting: Why yes. But not hardly enough.

Projects: Had a very interesting call with of the producers on my action flick. Apparently they’ve been waiting on something from someone else since I turned the treatment in in November. Granted, it needed work but we should already be out to studios by now.

Minutia: If people in regular jobs had to put up with their personal shit being public they’d flip out on a regular basis.

Activity: Cardio. Some work in the garage. Prepping for the bike and the punching things being taken out of storage.

Ailments: Nope. I think my conditioning, at least for softball, is in a decent groove now. Been running better, being more confident, and aggressive.

Shrink’s Chair: I don’t see how anyone can feel any person they are attracted to is “the one”. There’s one around every damn corner. There are a lot of things that tear at me and things that kneecap me emotionally, but there are SO many people out there. I don’t see how anyone can not feel the odds are pretty damn good.

Asshole(s) of the Day: Tim McLelland, umpire. He waits a few seconds before making a call on pitches and it’s infuriating. The game isn’t about the damn umps. They’re supposed to be invisible. He’s basically saying “wait for me… and now watch me!”. Fuck umpires. A day ago my team got hurt by a bad call, but that’s fine. We beat ourselves over it. On the major league level there are a few umpires who truly suck and make it harder to fully enjoy the experience.

True Trivia: I still can’t believe I got married and had kids. Those are two things I thought I’d never do. Or be pretty good at. That said, I really love being alone.

What Did I Learn Today: If someone was willing to hire me, I might go back into the real world.

Link of the Day: Sample Saturdays. John Mak shows the origins of your favorite hip hop samples. Great stuff.

Looking ahead to tomorrow: The wife and daughter go out of town. The son… doesn’t.

Earlier this year word swept the internet that the Criterion Collection was in the process of shifting its streaming product from Netflix Instant to Hulu+.  The news was met with varying opinions.  But regardless of what you think of it, it’s happening (happened?) and if you own an XBOX 360 and wanna see for yourself how it’s all gonna work, then now’s the time to do it, as the XBOX Live Service and Hulu+ are giving XBL Gold Members a week-long free trial of the service.

As you can see in the picture above (that’s my TV, y’all!), the channel is live and active and while they’re still far from having the promised 800-title Complete Criterion Library there are already several (understatement) movies to choose from and more being added all the time.  At any rate, one of the biggest points of contention with fans was the ad-supported nature of Hulu+ and after a quick little spin around the service, I don’t see that being a problem, at least on the Criterion side of things.  I pulled up Hausu and let it play while I was doing other things and, other than a roughly 3-second bump at the top of the movie (3, not 30), there was no commercial interruption or graphical shenanigans (in the form of a Hulu corner bug) at all.  I also watched an episode of 30Rock and there were indeed a few spots sprinkled in, so take that for what it’s worth.

The rest of the service I felt was severely lacking in terms of choice, so what it will probably come down to is whether or not you want to pay the $8 per month for a Criterion Streaming Channel.  And if that’s a question you’re not entirely sure how to answer at the moment, then take this week and decide.  If nothing else you’ll have a free week of streaming Criterion movies in HD.

So it looks like Tarantino’s finished his next script.

It was reported awhile back that he was going to tackle a Spaghetti Western next, and since then a few things have bubbled up in the form of names (Christoph Waltz, Keith Carradine, Franco Nero?) and at one point Uma Thurman had referred to it as “a Southern,” but that was really all there was as QT was still writing it.  But now it’s done and the title page of that script has shown up on the internet via the twitter feed of @Agent Trainee (I saw it last night on SlashFilm’s Facebook Feed but at this point practically every film site on the net could be cited as a source).

Django Unchained.  Django is a fairly popular character and even if you’ve never seen or heard of the film, chances are you’re aware of the name.  And if you haven’t seen Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti western (I haven’t seen it top to bottom but I’ve seen enough pieces of it to know it’s amazing) about a coffin-dragging gunslinger who takes on everybody from the KKK to Mexican bandits, it’s on Instant, if that’s an option for you.

At any rate, when this turned up last night and swept the internet, there was the understandable cautious optimism: “Sure, it sounds awesome and sure it’s reminiscent of the hand-written cover page for Basterds, but…is it real?”

Turns out the answer is yes.  Yes indeed it is.  SlashFilm reports (via Indiewire), that QT’s agency has confirmed the title.  And not only THAT but Anne Thompson over at Indiewire has also claimed to have read the script and describes it thusly (spoiler warning?):

Django is a freed slave, who, under the tutelage of a German bounty hunter (played by Christopher Waltz the evil Nazi officer in Inglorious Basterds) becomes a bad-ass bounty hunter himself, and after assisting Waltz in taking down some bad guys for profit, is helped by Waltz in tracking down his slave wife and liberating her from an evil plantation owner. And that doesn’t even half begin to cover it! This film deals with racism as I’ve rarely seen it handled in a Hollywood film. While it’s 100 percent pure popcorn and revenge flick, it is pure genius in the way it takes on the evil slave owning south. Think of what he did with the Nazis in Inglorious and you’ll get a sense of what he’s doing with slave owners and slave overseers in this one.

And there ya go.  Sounds amazing and more Christoph Waltz is always welcome and with QT having said this about the racism angle “I want to explore something that really hasn’t been done. I want to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to” I think it’s fair to expect something amazing.  As always, we’ll keep you posted.

Dwayne Johnson’s played a lot of roles – his most famous, of course, being The Rock for the WWE.  Then he shed that moniker to star in The Rundown, where his status as an up-and-coming action star was all but cemented.  Then, somewhere along the line, he tripped and fell into revolting kid’s shit.  Doing a few guest spots on some Disney Channel shows (seeing him in an episode of Hannah Montana kinda killed me a little inside), and leading a few kids’ movies (none of the three of which I’ve seen), but then he came back with the forgotten-but-not-hated Faster and this weekend sees him getting some good looks in Fast Five.  So of course it makes perfect sense that his next role will be as Country and Western Legend Charley Pride in Craig Brewer’s upcoming biopic.

Wait.  What?

/Film is reporting on an interview that Charley Pride gave to the Telegraph Journal, in which Pride says that The Rock will indeed be playing the role, as opposed to Terrence Howard, who had been previously attached:

“…But then the ball got fumbled. New management took over the studio that was ready to begin site work on it, and a decision was made to put all their resources behind thrillers – fast actioners. They felt that was where the big box office money was then… Now it’s back on track again but with action and comedy star Dwayne Johnson portraying me in the title role.”

Pride goes onto talk about how he wasn’t sure what to think of the idea but after spending the day with Johnson has since come around to it.  Personally, I like it.  I’ve been a fan of Johnson’s since he was just Rocky Maivia and it was still called the WWF, so I’m excited to see him in anything that isn’t LCD-kids’ stuff.  And even though he’s no classically trained vocalist, the man CAN sing, as has been evidenced in the rings and backstages of almost every WWF/E event he was a part of.  Plus it’s always fun when an actor tries to challenge themselves and a purely dramatic role with no reliance on action whatsoever is exactly the kind of challenege Johnson should be looking for.  There’s still no title for the film and no details on production, but we’ll keep you posted.

I can’t believe I’m writing this article. When I saw The Fast and the Furious, I was so upset that I promised I would never see that film again, nor would I bother with any of its sequels. Yet for the past couple of days, some people whose opinions I occasionally pretend to respect have come forward with recommendations for the franchise’s latest entry. “I hated the other films,” they all said, “but I loved this one!”

Now, having sated my curiosity, I’m put in the unthinkable position of joining the chorus. Impossible as it may seem, Fast Five is really fucking good.

There are a lot of ways in which this film is superior to the first, such as the difference in management. TFatF was directed by Rob Cohen — he of xXx, Stealth and the third Mummy film — who could charitably be called a hack. Fast Five and its past few prequels have been directed by Justin Lin and I won’t deny that I’ve made a few jokes about him for it. Imagine how stupid I felt upon discovering that he also directed a few episodes of the TV show Community, including the infamous “Paintball episode,” which I prefer to call “the most amazing half-hour of television I’ve ever seen in my life.” Cohen may be able to make money by filming half-assed, brain-dead “action” films, but with this film and his work on Community, Lin has proven that he can make money by filming awesome brain-dead action films. Mark my words, folks: Justin Lin is one to keep an eye on.

The second big change is that now, the franchise is dealing in a whole ‘nother genre. The first film was supposedly about street racing, yet the screenplay struggled in finding a reason for us to care. The vehicular action was limited almost entirely to the third act and even then, the film was about a crew of gearheads who violently rob innocent truckers for no good reason. Worse still, we were expected to sympathize with the thieves! The action was boring as all heck because we had no one to root for.

The latest movie solves this problem by ditching street races pretty much entirely and becoming a straight-up heist flick. In this film, our band of robbers — made of characters from all the previous films — are trying to get rich so they can retire from their illegal misadventures. They plan to do this by robbing a crime kingpin in Rio out of every cent he’s got. The plot is paper-thin, but it’s enough. We’ve got a clear set of protagonists, we’ve got a douchebag villain and we’ve got a reason to cheer for the former over the latter, which is far, far more than the first film ever gave us.

It also helps that our leading actors are employed very well. Vin Diesel, for example, plays the de facto leader, which means that he gets far more screen time and dialogue than most of his co-stars. Since Diesel has always been the strongest actor in this cast, giving most of the heavy lifting to him was a very smart move. By contrast, Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster still can’t act, but that doesn’t cause too much damage since neither of them are pushed too far out of their comfort zones.

Unfortunately, there are some characters in the cast that I found borderline intolerable. Tyrese Gibson plays one such character, though his impossible stupidity is slightly redeemed by the occasional humorous moment. That’s more than I can say for Tego Calderon and Don Omar, both of whom play characters in constant and desperate need of a ball gag. The good news is that there are so many characters in this crew and they’re all doing so much that the annoying is spread mercifully thin.

As for the villain… well, what about him? He’s comically evil, he owns the entire corrupt police force, moving right along.

So we’ve got our good thieves, we’ve got our bad crooks, and then we’ve got The Rock. Dwayne Johnson enters the franchise as elite US federal agent Luke Hobbs, a character who deserves his own spin-off film. There’s no denying that the character is horribly written, but Johnson wisely compensates for this with a metric fuckton of American testosterone. This is a character who’s constantly uttering one-liners and an actor who is superb at making one-liners sound badass. Best of all, Hobbs is presented as a man who’s extremely tough and great at his job, yet the film knows better than to make him look like a villain for it. The only reason Hobbs is an antagonist is because we’re looking at this film from the wrong side of the law. Also, Dwayne Johnson does throw down with Vin Diesel for a very lengthy fight scene and it is glorious.

But enough of the characters, what about the babes and the action? Well, to my surprise and gratification, the sex appeal in this film is very carefully used. Jordana Brewster’s character, for example, is quite well-attached to Walker’s character — not to mention pregnant with his child — throughout the story, so she doesn’t have too many opportunities to strut her stuff. To the movie’s credit, the pregnancy matter is very smartly utilized. The characters only mention it in a couple of scenes and we don’t get one of those uber-cliche scenes in which she has to be lectured out of the action for the baby’s sake. Instead, she gladly stays back at the HQ without a word about the subject, advising the team from a computer, so the character is still useful.

Getting back to the matter of eye candy, Michelle Rodriguez didn’t return for this movie, so Diesel’s character gets a new love interest. And she’s also the last honest cop in Rio. Needless to say, she doesn’t show a lot of skin while wearing a police uniform. Gal Godot, on the other hand, gets an amazing bikini scene in which she uses her sexuality to get something needed for the heist. Wonderful.

Aside from that, there are a few shots of scantily-clad women during the street racing scenes. In typical TFatF fashion, however, these shots are too quick to really do anything. The usual blatant misogyny is otherwise thankfully absent, however.

Yes, despite the new heist genre, this film does have a few street racing scenes. The twist is that all but one of them take place offscreen. Though this might seem like a rip-off, skipping over races with foregone conclusions did nothing but save us time, something that Rob Cohen would’ve done well to think of when he was making the first film. Having said that, the film does show us one street race, and it’s actually a lot of fun. The outcome is uncertain, the visuals are solid, the automotive choreography is easy to follow and the whole thing is exciting enough without any gimmicky CGI.

This brings me to my favorite part of the film: The Action. One of my biggest complaints against the first film was in its pacing, having gone through the entire second act without a decent action scene. Not here.

Though the movie does have its quieter moments, the pacing in general is very good. The heist format helps a lot in this regard, as our characters spend most of the running time performing various tasks to set up the job. In addition, we’ve got exhausting foot chases, spectacular gunfights and of course, car chases. There are several inventive set pieces on wheels in this film, every one a million times more spectacular and destructive than anything seen in the first movie. That film might have had a few cars totaled, but this film generates more scrap metal than a graveyard on Cybertron. Yes, the proceedings are loaded with stunts that defy physics, engineering, anatomy and common sense, but they’re all filmed, edited and sound-designed in such amazing fashion that I couldn’t help but watch in admiration.

Fast Five is everything that this franchise should have been from the very start. It’s a brainless action film with several plot holes and implausibilities, but the script is still clever enough to allow for surprises. The dialogue is loaded with clunkers, but the actors are good enough to try and embrace the cheesiness. Most importantly, the cars are beautifully filmed and used for action that’s jaw-droppingly good.

Basically put, this movie is FUN. It’s a great big barrel of fun. The tedium of the first film is absolutely nowhere to be found here. To that end, even if you’d written the franchise off completely, I highly recommend giving this film a try.

Old Cherry Blossom Road & Creed, OK (Carnivale, S2 eps. 4 & 5)

Grandma Scudder: “There are no accidents.”

Welcome back to Carnivale, the kinkiest, spookiest and most baffling television show since Twin Peaks. We’re knee-deep in Season Two. If you’d like to catch up you can click on my name above and find archived columns for everything that’s come before. And if you’d like to follow me on Twitter you can do so by clicking this here link thingy.

Both of this week’s episodes make it feel like Ben’s stumbled into a pair of gruesome fairy tales in which boys and girls are lured to the homes of witches and the bedsides of wolves and find themselves stuffed in ovens or the bellies of cross-dressing animals only to emerge from the danger shaken, but wiser and physically unharmed. Both episodes feature what I’d call “fairy tale logic,” which is to say that things happen without any attempt at real explanation for what is happening, why its happening, or how it happens, yet manage to make a certain amount of sense regardless. The filthy home of Ben’s family neatly contrasts with the impeccable furnishings in Evander Geddes’ house, creating mirrored images. Ben’s put in what seems like mortal danger with both, only to survive pretty much totally inexplicably. There’s a fair amount of the inexplicable in Old Cherry Blossom Road and Creed, OK. What’s with the black wedding dress-shrouded Apollonia, and just what is it about Ruthie’s resurrection that lets her see Sofie’s mom as often as she does? Where is Evander Geddes’ workshop? Is it a space like the “baggage trailer” from Season 1? Is it just exceptionally well-hidden? Why doesn’t Grandma turn Ben into a pincushion? Why doesn’t Geddes kill Ben? Your guess is as good as mine.

In both episodes it feels as though the show is reaching for the same sort of free-floating, abstract dread pioneered by David Lynch in Twin Peaks (several shots of the stairway in Scudder’s old home instantly evoke similar shots of the Palmer family’s staircase and the unseen amorphous evil that seemed to reside at the top of them) and both episodes largely succeed in achieving something close to the humming, atmospheric unease that Peaks generated so unsettlingly. Old Cherry Blossom Road’s opening moments are incredibly Lynchian and admirably disturbing. No special effects, no spooky visions; just the sight of an immobilized Norman Balthus lying in bed and staring at a stain on the ceiling while the sounds of increasingly-unhinged sex, mixed with the growling of some terrible beast, fills his darkened room. This is the sort of horror I like best, and that tends to work best on me as a viewer – the sort that springs from what’s not seen, and that relies less on gore or shock than on the difficult trick of making you feel the same way that you might feel walking a deserted highway late at night, hearing the sound of someone’s footsteps growing louder and faster behind you. Dread, for lack of a better word.

There are several moments here that are inspired and Lynchian in their nonsensical, dreamlike fairy tale logic – the suddenly animate death mask that Ben finds in the house on Old Cherry Blossom Rd., the sight of dozens upon dozens of those masks lining the shelves in Geddes’ workshop, the bizarre way in which Justin placing Ben’s mask to his face enables him to see through Ben’s eyes, the continued reappearance of Apollonia in her dark shroud – but some of the strongest Lynch-like moments in these episodes come courtesy of the character actors playing Grandma Scudder, Evander Geddes and dear, sweet, certifiably-insane Celeste the maid. Each of these actors taps into something genuinely unsettling, and while some of the credit must go to the show’s writers, just as much credit needs to go to these performers. Well known character actor Dakin Matthews plays Geddes, the man who made Scudder’s death mask and the latest in a long and lengthening line of homicidal maniacs with doilies in their homes. Less well known character actress Ellen Geer plays Grandma Scudder (aka “The Crone”), the eyeless, racist, impressively murderous matriarch of the skeeziest backwoods clan since Deliverance. And Eliza Pryor Nagel plays Celeste, the victim of Justin’s savage sexual appetites, offering up a sad and scary look at a girl driven into madness and/or damnation that reminded me, very briefly, of Sheryl Lee’s Laura Palmer. If it ain’t a filicidal klanmother with no eyes looking to stab her grandson it’s an infanticidal maker of death masks looking to add his interesting face to his fetish gallery. With tea. Carnivale’s universe is chockablock with these walking freakshows, and once again Carnivale goes the extra mile. Not contented to let Geddes be JUST be a guy who drugs strangers and kills them to make his masks the show lets us know that he’s primarily interested in children now, children who died “as close to the womb as possible.” I give the show credit for so consistently revolting me.

Most of both episodes consist of the same rinse-wash-repeat pattern that Carnivale’s established for Ben over the course of the show: Ben travels to some unfamiliar-and-ooky-spooky place in search of answers about who he is and runs into sinister people who aren’t much help at all really. We spend half of Creed, OK in Geddes’ house only to learn something we already knew for Pete’s sake. There’s no real plot reason for Ben to be there at all. Even the proudly-Lynchian moment where Justin receives Ben’s death mask from Geddes and gets a brief glimpse of his opposite isn’t necessary at all – Justin’s already seen Ben, and he’s already having visions of the carnival (though I enjoyed the literal “mirroring” that this scene gives us, even using a literal, cracked, mirror to hammer home the whole “mirroring” idea for us). But both episodes are nicely rendered miniature horror shows in and of themselves that manage to capture the Lynchian unease that I enjoy so much, and so I didn’t really mind another trip to this particular well even if neither episode offers much more to us beyond that. I’m just hoping the heavy-atmosphere-for-the-sake-of-atmosphere that returns to the show in these two hours doesn’t overwhelm the momentum Carnivale had started to build.

There’s no question that Carnivale is the most graphic and willfully-repellant television show I’ve ever seen. There’s a real willingness – an eagerness, even – to wallow in real ugliness, a willingness that goes beyond the physical to the verbal as well. Thanks to Carnivale I now know a totally new derogatory term for women (“split-tail”), one of the uglier euphemisms I’ve heard in some time. But this being Carnivale, the show manages to top itself by teaching us the colorful meaning behind the seemingly-innocuous phrase ‘lunch counter.’ Good Lord.

Both these episodes also share a relative lack of the stuff I enjoy digging deeper into – historical allusions, Philosophical and religious references. The major exceptions to this lie in the show’s continuous flirtation with Fatalism (nicely summarized by the quote from Grandma Scudder at the top of the column), as well as in the subtly hinted-at pattern of mothers killing their own children. We learn here that Ben’s grandmother slaughtered her husband and her other children in the wake of Henry Scudder’s birth and if you’re like me you might notice the way that act mirrors the act of Apollonia attempting to kill Sofie. You might take it further, noting that we still don’t know Iris and Justin’s full back stories but do know that they were being hunted down by someone who wanted to murder them. Who arranged to have them killed? Was it their mother? Did Ben Hawkins’ mother ever try to kill him? There’s no evidence that she did, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that she tried to smother him in his crib. At the least, we know that she was afraid of Ben.

As far as the show’s Fatalism goes, well, both episodes feature Ben getting into what seem to be deadly situations only to be spared a deadly fate for no real reason except, well, Fate. Grandma Scudder clearly tries to stab Ben with a knife (and that knife is going to have major significance, I just know it) but doesn’t seem to be physically capable of doing so. It’s as though a Higher Power stops her arm from bringing the blade down. And Geddes heavily implies that he gets rid of the people whose death masks he casts, yet Ben wakes from the experience entirely unharmed. The continual sense that someone/something (God? Satan? Fate itself?) is moving these people around like chess pieces continues unabated. In addition to the above something like a recurring theme begins to suggest itself with the introduction of Grandma Scudder – namely, the theme of sightless people (Lodz, Grandma Scudder) “seeing” more clearly than those around them.

Portions of both episodes suffer from what’s probably Carnivale’s biggest continuing problem outside of its first season inertia – when the focus comes off of Ben and Justin the show falters somewhat. Some of this is entirely subjective. If you’ve been enjoying Stumpy and Rita Sue’s ongoing marital problems then seeing those problems continue here should bring you similar enjoyment. Speaking for myself, I’m flat-out bored by them. Don’t get me wrong – both actors are unreservedly excellent in their roles, and the boredom I feel doesn’t keep me from enjoying their character work (Toby Huss is particularly fun to watch) but there’s something downright…pedestrian about their troubles in comparison to everything else that’s happening around them, and as good as these actors are they can’t overcome that basic deficiency. Your mileage may, and probably will, vary.

But while Rita Sue and Stumpy’s issues may bore me as often as not, they don’t piss me off. The character of “Burley” on the other hand? He pisses me off.

For one, he’s not really a character. He’s a two-dimensional jackass that the show hauls out for one episode’s worth of jackass-y comments and threatening glares, then drops again like a hot rock as soon as his “usefulness” (so to speak) is through. Burley exists less as a human being than as a human-shaped plot device intended to create drama among the other characters. This works, serviceably enough, when he’s confined to making grumpy comments about Sofie’s presence among the Rousties. It quickly grows ridiculous as “Burley” spreads his mustachioed menace over a wider area. I don’t buy into any of the confrontations/conversations he has with the cooch clan, and I somewhat resent the way he up and disappears as soon as the episode’s over (though this exchange is admittedly priceless – Rita Sue: “Thought maybe it was a rhetorical question.” Burley: “There’s nuthin’ retardicle about it!”). Carnivale has made a habit of shaping smaller side-characters and side-stories that end up going nowhere fast and Burley’s episode-length hissyfit represents that tactic’s nadir. Remember the gecko man? Where’d he go? Remember the hints and teases that Sofie might be pregnant? Where’d that go? What about the conjoined twins who were all over Season 1? Where’d they go? Remember that teasing hint regarding Jonesy’s back story that we got? The one where some unidentified guy capped his knee with a bat for an unidentified reason? What happened to that? Hell, remember when Samson seemed to have an inner life that didn’t revolve around Management? A life that involved dropping in to visit hookers and managing the carnival and generally being a much more interesting, multifaceted character? Where’d THAT go?

In creating these characters/situations and then dropping them Carnivale does itself a disservice.

But let’s not end on a down-note. Let’s end by talking about all the stuff I found intriguing, but couldn’t work into the flow of the column above. This’ll probably end up being the form that these columns take from here on out, since I intend to try and tackle two episodes at a time until we reach the series end. As always, I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch of stuff so I invite you to chime in and tell me about it:

• Sofie’s storyline continues to get more interesting to me. She glimpses her mother at the end of Creed, OK and learns that “You were always the one who read the cards.” She reads those cards for Ben during the episode and during that reading we see both her and Ben standing in Trinity, NM sharing a kiss as the End Of The World seems to arrive around them. Clearly Sofie has a large and growing role to play in the shape of things to come, and I’m genuinely interested to see what that role might be.

• Evander Geddes: “The form of perfection that is the avatar is the sum of individual imperfections. My objective, you see, is to capture the soul.”

Am I wrong, or does Geddes mention “avatar” as he chatters to Ben in his workshop? Is soul another word for avatar? Did this man know Scudder’s nature? Does he know Ben’s?

Iris: “I will not be sacrificed.”

Iris is the character I least understand on this show (which is saying something) mean, I get that she and Justin have the ookiest co-dependency since Jame Gumm met skin. I get that family will do practically anything for each other. But I guess I just font identify with unconflicted sociopaths that easily.

And yet, I like what they’re doing with the character At this point. I like the way Amy Madigan makes her request into a taunt and a plea at the same time. I like not being sure whether she’s still serious or whether this is a survival tactic – a reverse psychology designed to let her brother know that he can trust her with anything, because she will do anything for him, and so keeping herself safe. The events of Creed, OK make it seem as though Iris’ fate is sealed, as Tommy Dolan takes down her confession but I can’t help feeling that Justin is going to save Iris from justice at the last possible moment, in what would arguably be a sinister, mirrored reversal of God staying Abraham’s hand just as Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac.

• And speaking of Justin, his sermon in Old Cherry Blossom Road contains a reference to a Bible story that’s one of my personal favorites: Jesus throwing the “moneychangers” out of the temple. Its one of my favorite stories because of the firm, clear way in which the figure of Christ is shown rejecting the mingling of religion and commerce. As metaphor it speaks directly to our modern age, in which capitalism and Christianity have become so inextricably mingled that it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The “Christian industry” is enormous, and geared toward selling people a panoply of items that have no real connection to concepts of faith, worship or spiritual reflection. This story works well with the open contempt Justin has shown for those in positions of power, but there’s a sinister undercurrent to his usage of it. The story of Jesus driving out the moneychangers has been used, at various points in history, to justify and/or spark hatred of the Jewish people. In the last column I wrote about Justin’s resemblance to Father Coughlin, an influential anti-Semitic radio preacher. That resemblance makes me think his reference to “moneychangers” points again to ideas of White/Christian Power and Anti-Semitism. I’m very curious to see if the show follows that path.

(I wish I had a decent caption for this screen cap. Help me come up with one!)

All screencaps courtesy of Magic-hours.

Action Comics #900 (DC Comics, $5.99)
By Devon Sanders

One of the greatest Superman stories ever told was railroaded by the appearance of Superman. Over the last year, under the stewardship of writer Paul Cornell, Superman’s archnemisis, Lex Luthor has been Action Comics‘ lead and redfined what many of us would consider “villainy.” Lex has out-tought telepathic gorillas brandishing over-sized spoons, matched wits with The Joker and Brainiac and literally confronted Death, walking away from it on his own terms. All done with nary an appearance from The Man Of Steel. It has been… refreshing, to say the least. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Superman but to watch Lex Luthor get the space to… well, BE Lex Luthor is a true and wondrous thing. Like being there when David finally understood Goliath. Like all good things…

Lex Luthor has achieved near omnipotence and is ready to usher himself and mankind into an age of wonder and discovery and all that stands in his way is Superman. Or, is he? The war between man and Superman is nearly won until Superman opens his mind to Lex, revealing a secret that could shatter all he believes in and more.

Writer Paul Cornell (Knight And Squire) over the Lex Luthor “Black Ring” arc has crafted one of the best explorations of motive in all of comics. Cornell’s Lex has been a revelation, proving why this man, this man of ambition, should not just be Superman’s antagonist but the hero of this particular Action Comics story. This whole arc has been incredible with the exception of, unfortunately, issue 900. You are given the showdown between Lex and Superman but it feels more like an eventuality than an event. Mostly due to the shoehorning in of “The Reign of Doomsdays” happening in the auxiliary Superman titles. Art chores are more-than-ably handled by Pete Woods, beautifully rendering the Superman/Lex confrontation while Jesus Merino draws the action-packed (no pun intended) Doomsday sequences.

Issue 900 being the celebratory thing it is also features an untold tale of Krypton by Lost writer and creator Damon Lindelof featuring the superb art of Ryan Sook while the Superman: Secret Origin team of writer Geoff Johns and Gary Frank contributes a fun, short tale of Superman, Lois and The Legion of Superheroes.

Zatanna writer Paul Dini chimes in with an exploration of what it is to be human featuring art by RB Silva of Jimmy Olsen fame while Batman Begins and The Dark Knight screenwriter David Goyer somewhat controversially addresses what “Truth, Justice and The American Way” has come to mean to Superman and more importantly, to the citizens of the world. (Enjoyment of this story hinges on the understanding of the differences between the words “renounce” and “denounce.”)

Overall, Action Comics #900 is a celebration of everything that ultimately makes Superman the icon that he is today. Its only fault is that Lex, in the end, had to be sacrificed in order to do so.

Rating:

Out of a Possible 5 Stars

Black Dynamite: Slave Island One-Shot (APE Entertainment/ARS Nova, $5.95)
Planet of the Apes #1 (Boom Studios, $3.99)
by Graig Kent

The mediums of comic books and movies have, over the past few years, entered into a somewhat symbiotic relationship with one another.  Comic book adaptations have been fueling the silver screen on an increasingly frequent basis, with writers, producers, directors, and actors all frequenting the comic shop for inspiration as well as turning to the graphic novel as proof of concept on their original story ideas or screenplays.  Meanwhile, comics have been increasingly reliant upon adaptations and extensions of cinema, with more than a few publishers not named DC or Marvel depending on the brand recognition of everything from Army of Darkness to the Terminator to sell comics.

I’ve long believed that there was no problem with this, having enjoyed plenty of Star Wars, Aliens, and Predator comics (amongst others) over my many comics reading years.  So many of these film properties have built up a devoted following, meaning comics can tap into a market that craves, if not outright demands more material.  Obviously getting another film made and made well is very, very difficult and a comic book less so, so it’s actually a pretty economical way to help build, or at least maintain a fanbase.  The problem of late, however, seems to be that most newer movie tie-in comics are released before a film’s release or to coincide with it (see recent Your Highness, Machete or Let Me In) thus pushed out into the market based not on demand but speculation, and the quality generally reflecting such.

That’s just one reason it’s refreshing to see the Black Dynamite: Slave Island one-shot, a comic book tie-in for a recent film that a) has already proven itself to be a cult classic and b) has a fan base that is salivating for new material.

If you haven’t seen Black Dynamite – Michael Jai White, Scott Sanders and Byron Minns’ loving tribute and deft satire of 70’s blaxploitation and kung-fu cinema – you are missing out on easily the funniest film of the past decade.  Independently produced and a festival hit, it had a limited theatrical run but nevertheless it had found, and continues to find its audience.  The film expertly recreates the aesthetic of the 70’s, visually and tonally, and derives much of its comedy in replicating the gaffes and awkwardness of the cheaply produced films of the era.  This stylized world is built around a single character in Black Dynamite, the baddest-assed mofo around, brought to life in a revelatory performance by White, who is as equally with an action persona as he is comedic one.  The character is infused with an ever-present-ness,  the sense that he’s been around for some time doing his thing, that he has countless untold stories from his past, and just as many yet to be told in his future.  In this manner, the events of Slave Island can take place on either side of the film chronologically, it owes no continuity to the film or the character.

The story of Slave Island, is a simple one: off the coast there’s an “resort” island where slaves are kept by the thousands as servants for the white men and women visiting from the South.  Back in the city, Black Dynamite comes across an escaped slave, so he’s naturally got to be the man to go to the island and “burn that motherfucker to the ground”.  Black Dynamite ventures out with no plan but to emancipate, but instead becomes enslaved himself.  Of course, this is Black Dynamite we’re talking about and he fucks and fights his way out of his situation and saves the day.   It’s equally distasteful and absurd premise that certainly puts the ‘sploitation back in Blaxploitation, but made palatable by the sheer fact you know Black Dynamite is going to reap some holy hell on those racist bastards.

Where many comic book continuations of movies fail is they cannot negotiate the feel of the film with the demands of the comic format.  Where Slave Island gets it right is its tone.  It doesn’t try to recreate the movie, nor does it attempt to crib catchphrases in an attempt to force the connection.  Instead it takes its inspiration thematically.  Just as the film paid homage by faithfully recreating the feel 70’s genre films, so too does Slave Island succeed at recreating the feel of a 70’s action comic, starting with Jun Lofamia, a 74-year-old Filipino artist with a smattering of U.S. comic book credits across horror and suspense titles from the 70’s.  Lofamia’s style has that Gene Colan feel, as if sketched out and inked over without any desire for intense precision, yet still refined in technique and innately readable.  Lofamia is backed up by JM Ringuet, the artist from Jonathan Hickman’s Transhuman, here working miracles in achieving the muddy color of 70’s comics without having to resort to old four-color techniques (no doubt a digital wash was also added to give the pages a textured look of old paper stock).  Slave Island, from the Marvel/Power Man inspired cover on through definitely looks the part.

Brian Ash, from a story by White, Sanders and Minns, also makes it read the part.  Ash gets in Black Dynamite’s head with some patented overwrought ’70’s-style narration (naturally pushed to humorous extremes), moves the story forward through use of ridiculous coincidences (though not much more ridiculous than those which propelled most stories back then), and effectively adopts that ill-conceived tone of “message” comics from the era in its attempt at dealing seriously (but not really) with slavery.  While it doesn’t maintain the same level of humor as the film (there’s really not any way to replicate the performances, the editing/framing gags, or the incredible soundtrack that contributed to the movie’s comedic success in the comic book experience), there are still more than a few big laughs, the biggest of which, actually, come from outside the story in a fresh parody of the old Charles Atlas ad.  Ultimately Slave Island‘s greatest success is that doesn’t so much read like a movie tie-in, nor does it even read like a one-shot comic, it actually reads more like a random issue of an ongoing Black Dynamite comic book series, the thought of which only serves to make me desire more.

The Planet of the Apes franchise obviously has been around a lot longer than Black Dynamite with its own devoted core of followers, and has over its 40+ years seen comics made from a number of different publishers, sometimes working with brand new continuity, sometimes with the continuity of the Tim Burton remake, and sometimes, as with this new series from Boom Studios, working with the original series continuity.

With a new Apes movie coming later this year, itself working in original series continuity, now does seem to be the right time to launch a new series, even if it’s not a direct tie-in, which, wisely, it’s not.  Instead, this Planet of the Apes negotiates its own path, in a similar manner to the Star Wars or Aliens comics that focus on characters in time periods outside of the films.  The only crossover character is the Lawgiver, the storyteller from the framing sequence of Battle for the Planet of the Apes, who is assassinated on the second page of this book, setting into motion the events of the premiere story arc “The Long War”.

Set 1200 years before the first Planet of the Apes film, we’re introduced to civilization as it stands.  The apes are in control of a floundering industrial society, and humans are left to wallow in ghettos.  Genetically the apes grow stronger with each generation and humanity quite the opposite.  With ape society’s figurehead, the Lawgiver, now dead, unrest between the humans and apes threatens to rise once again, with the lawgiver’s “granddaughters” – by birth the chimp Narise and by adoption the human Sullivan – at the forefront of the conflict, each capable of escalating or subduing the impending conflict.

Writer Daryl Gregory does a formidable job of building a brand new, unseen Ape civilization that never existed in the films, while at the same time adopting and building upon aspects of the culture of the ape and human societies we see in the various movies.  That he pulls it all together so organically is a rather impressive feat, and in the early goings of this series it’s already a rich fantasy environment that fans and even non-fans of the Ape series can get into.

Beyond Gregory’s superb handling of character, society and ape culture, there’ s Carlos Magno’s richly detailed, beautifully constructed art. Magno’s been around the mainstream as a fill-in artist for a few years, but this series will be where people sit up and take notice.  His style is reminiscent of other fantasy greats like Michael Kaluta or Travis Charest, so exquisitely rendered, each page is a marvel to look at.  From costuming to architecture Magno goes toe to toe with Gregory in truly building the world of this book as something unique and captivating.  In some respects the thought and depth both these creators have put into the series feels almost too good for just another movie tie-in, so if there’s any let down here, it is in its somewhat formulaic story, which doesn’t quite live up to all the marvels that surround it, and yet is just as easily overlooked because of them.

Here we have two fine, if not downright fantastic, comic book interpretations of cinematic franchises, each building beyond the films that inspired them, adapted harmoniously into a new medium without sacrificing or corrupting what made the properties special to begin with.

Black Dynamite: Slave Island – Rating:

Out of a Possible 5 Stars

Out of a Possible 5 Stars

The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde #1 of 4 (Dark Horse, $3.50)
By Jeb D.

When fresh new talent applies itself to taking a fresh look at the familiar, you always hope for a result that’s equally fresh. I’d say that The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde is about 40% successful in that department: for every new idea presented, they’ve borrowed an old one, and both the scripting and the art are derivative, but in the way of the promising newcomer rather than anything suggesting laziness or cynicism, so that’s a plus.

Inspector Thomas Adye is writer Cole Haddon’s best idea for the series: much of the story is told in his internal voice, and he’s a nice variation on the usual Victorian Sherlock Holmes knockoff: he has the great detective’s belief in ratiocination, and the power of logic, but lacks his arrogance–in fact, his confidence in his own abilities is constantly shaken by the indifference of his contemporaries or superiors to his intellectual approach to crime-solving. He’s not the first Holmes manqué to face these challenges, but Haddon gives him a clear and compelling voice, taking us inside the character, rather than leaving it to a Watson (or Emma Bishop) to provide us with insight.

Adye is investigating the Jack The Ripper murders, and Haddon has set himself a difficult task here: you can’t assume that every reader knows enough about the Ripper murders to simply jump into the story, but an awful lot of us do, so it’s easy to get a little impatient with the setup as we see the familiar atrocities played out yet again.

Running up against a wall (literally: this Ripper has left behind clues suggesting nearly superhuman abilities), Adye is directed to a man the world believes to be dead: Henry Jekyll, languishing the past five years in a secret high-security prison for the crimes of Edward Hyde, is presumed to be a man with sufficient experience of the nature of evil to provide insight.

If that begins to sound a bit too close to Silence of the Lambs, well, Haddon doesn’t disappoint… or, rather, he does: the smug, chatty, self-satisfied voice he gives to the imprisoned Jekyll is pure Hannibal Lecter, with its creepy terms of endearment and hints of dark knowledge (though I don’t know that either Lecter or Jekyll would have told the detective that he’s being “uptight”). He doesn’t help his case (so to speak) by sprinkling the book with allusions to other characters of the era (Dr. Moreau shows up at a dinner party), thus forcing the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comparisons that were probably inevitable anyway.

And while artist M.S. Corley does a capable job (Jekyll’s prison is an appropriately creepy setting), just like Haddon, he’s up against the LOEG gorilla in the room; for better or worse, he seems to have taken it as a template, with the style of the art resembling a less vigorous, even stiffer (if you can imagine such a thing) Kevin O’Neill.

I like the idea that a couple of relative newcomers are ambitious enough to take on a high-concept idea like this, rather than tread ground already covered. And I concede that it’s possible that something more interesting may come of this series before it’s over. But the first issue just has too many derivative elements to allow me to give it a strong recommendation.

Rating:

Out of a Possible 5 Stars

The Mighty Thor #1 (Marvel, $3.99)
By Jeb D.

If you follow the comic book sales charts, you know two things: first, that release of a new movie will give a major bump to sales of collected editions (Sin City, Watchmen, etc.); and second, that there is little or no evidence that it does anything for the ongoing floppy titles.

So while it was predictable that Marvel would jump on the upcoming release of the big-screen version of Thor to launch a new book, I’m a little puzzled what they expect to get out of it (beyond the usual ka-ching! of a new #1 issue): they restarted the series just a few years back, and since the movie is simply called Thor, why would you want to replace a comic bearing that title with one called The Mighty Thor, which sounds like the tie-in for a new cartoon series?

Ah, well, the mysteries of marketing. Anyway, what this issue does is more or less set the current scene for those who haven’t been following the Marvel U (Odin’s back, Loki’s a kid, Sif is hot), but it’s saved from general irrelevance by pairing creators from some of the Thunder God’s best recent comics: writer Matt Fraction (Thor:  Ages of Thunder, Thor: Reign of Blood, Thor: Man of War, etc.) and artist Oliver Coipel (Straczynski’s 2007 Thor series).

It’s a beautifully structured comic, with Fraction managing to address questions of mortality and immortality, sow seeds of disquiet among the gods, re-introduce the Warriors Three, give us a spectacular fight against a big ol’ monster (with Asgardian scuba gear, no less!) and ground everything in the wonderfully convoluted world of Marvel’s version of Asgardian lore. He shows great empathy for the humans trying to reconcile their ideas of faith with the presence of gods in their midst, and he gets Thor and Sif naked, so you can see this is one jam-packed issue.

And Coipel continues to set the current standard for illustrating Thor and his adventures.  I was never wild about the costume redesign, but that aside, he has the story’s massive scale down pat, while never losing sight of the smaller moments; more than any of his predecessors on the title, he reminds me of John Buscema, in his clean, unfussy lines, and his ability to mix the epic and the down-to-earth.

The only slight sticking point for me is the principal storyline: Galactus is back. And the Silver Surfer. Mind you, these guys are right up Coipel’s alley, and they’ve never looked better, but if there is anything more played out in the Marvel U than Norrin Radd’s moping search for dead worlds for that lazy purple-shorts-wearing sonofabitch to eat, I can’t imagine what it would be (actually, I can, but this is bad enough). I trust Fraction, I assume he’s got something up his sleeve here, so I’m looking forward to seeing where the story goes. But as a standalone comic, this is a case of subtraction by addition: in an issue already stuffed with great moments and bits of insight, the appearance of these two just feels tired, and drops my recommendation down a notch.

Rating:

Out of a Possible 5 Stars

Danger Girl and the Army of Darkness #1 of 4 (Dynamite, $3.99)
By Jeb D.

The comic companies continue to struggle with a business model that tries to balance the floppy series with the trade collection, and this comic is a perfect example of the challenges that can pose.

My assumption is that your expectations of a comic where Abbey Chase meets Ash are manageably moderate: both characters are good for some cheesy fun, action, wisecracks, and the like. But what about a comic that goes on for twenty pages before the two meet up at the very end?

Now, that’s not a criticism of the storytelling by Andy Hartnell. He sets Abby’s story up well, and gives her a MacGuffin that dovetails nicely with the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness series. And structurally, the buildup of the story to Ash’s appearance works on its own modest terms. If you were reading this in collected form, it would feel lightweight, but certainly well-paced.

But there’s the complication: is it worth your four bucks to get one-quarter of a Danger Girl/Army of Darkness story with no Ash? Particularly one where J. Scott Campell is replaced by Chris Bolson on art, whose eyes for both action and for pulchritude are markedly less interesting than Campbell’s (but, then, whose aren’t)?

It’s a tough call. I could see this book being a fair amount of fun to read when it’s complete. But given the economic realities, it’s getting harder and harder to recommend even well-made comics that do little more than provide an introduction to the main story.

Rating:

Out of a Possible 5 Stars

Oh, the cozy amber-tinted memories of youth. A simpler time of simpler tastes. As the cynical, crushing weight of adulthood often sends us nostalgically yearning to revisit the things we once held dear, we tend to find that those special things are not quite how we left them. Like a favorite climbing tree’s branches that we once had to leap for, now boringly coming up waist-high, the films we adored as children and tweens typically do not measure up the same now. Sometimes old favorites are best left to our memory. Yet now and then they miraculously hold up, or even prove to have hidden subtext we never realized. They say you can’t go home again, but I think it is high time that I tried.

The Artifact: Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985)

What Is It: Theatrical feature film.

The Memory: As I mentioned in the previous Childhood’s End, The Land Before Time, I don’t think a greater universal truth has ever been so succinctly expressed as the one in this graph:

Since revisting Land Before Time, the dinosaur joys of my youth have been on my brain. I’ve thought about the bizarre Jim Henson Studios Honeymooners sitcom riff, Dinosaurs. I’ve thought about Claymation god Will Vinton’s short Dinosaur. I’ve thought about Jurrasic Park. I’ve even thought about the schlockriffic Carnosaur. But these are all things I’ve come into contact with again since those fuzzy-memory days of yore. But there is one dino film that has haunted the recesses my mind for two decades now…

Motherfuckin’ Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend.

My memories of this film are beyond fuzzy. They are just flashes of images. I see a full-grown Brontosaurus rampaging through a village. I see a Brontosaurus walking across a river. I see the titular baby Brontosaurus. Most of all though I see the VHS cover for the movie (above) which drew me to the film as a lad. Could this glorious image be true? A movie about people petting a tiny Brontosaurus?!?! I remember that the film is about a couple who discover the dinosaurs in the jungle. If I close my eyes and try to envision the actors who play the couple, my brain feeds me Jeff Bridges and Linda Hamilton, which I know isn’t right. That’s just a weird mash-up of the couples from King Kong (1976) and King Kong Lives. Oddly enough, I can’t really remember if I liked the film or not. I mainly remember being irritated with how long it takes until we finally see the dinosaurs in the film. But damn, that VHS cover never left my memory.

How Long Has It Been: Over 20 years.

The Reality: Before we even get into the film itself — for all these years I had been thinking the film was simply called Baby. That is not a great name for a dinosaur movie, which is probably why they tacked on the Secret of the Lost Legend. But that just makes things worse. It’s a terrible title for anything. For one thing, “lost legend” doesn’t make tons of sense as a combination of words. Then add “secret” to the mix and you’ve got one heinously ambiguous sentence right there. Might as well have gone for broke and called it Baby: Secret Forgotten Mystery of the Fabled Lost Legendary Legend.

Okay. This movie. So the two stars of the film are golden boy William Katt and personality disorder poster child Sean Young. The story is such: Sean Young is a noob paleontologist working in the jungles of war-torn Africa under the tutelage of the always amazing Patrick McGoohan. Katt is her husband, a sports writer, tagging along for support. The film opens with McGoohan chasing a man through a parade in a crowded city street, eventually catching and killing the chump. The reason for this murder we can infer is because McGoohan wanted the folder of photographs the guy had, in particular an out-of-focus shot of what looks like a Brontosaurus (or as scientists want us to call it, an Apatosaurus). Katt and Young are all set to return to America, where Katt has just been assigned the sport’s desk for a newspaper, when the Red Cross shows up trying to figure out what sort of animal a group of villagers ate, as they are now all sick and dying. A paleontologist seems unlikely to be of any help but Young becomes intrigued when the Red Cross presents her with a bone that matches that of a bone she had just dug up and believed belonged to a Brontosaurus (though McGoohan lied to her and said it was a giraffe vertebra). Long story short, Katt and Young find a mama, papa, and baby Brontosaurus living in the jungle. Eventually McGoohan shows up, captures mama, kills papa, and begins looking for baby, while Katt and Young try to protect the little fella.

This movie is so fucking weird. And not in a Lynchian way or anything particularly exciting like that, but rather in a head-scratching why’d-they-make-it-like-this way. I have no idea what kind of movie director Bill L. Norton was trying to make here. Most blatantly it seems like a straight up kids film. I mean, it’s called Baby and it’s about a baby dinosaur and they chose to advertise it with a photo of Young and Katt petting a baby dinosaur like a dog. Kids movie. And at times it can’t be considered anything other than a kids movie. There are lots of scenes of Baby frolicking innocently in the jungle, playing with butterflies, etc, and a silly scene of Katt trying to put a tracking device on it while they are swimming. But the movie is also wildly inappropriate for children.

The film at times has a very overt Romancing the Stone vibe, particularly Katt and Young’s wacky interactions with an African pilot played by Phantom Menace‘s Hugh Quarshie. These section could easily make it an older-child safe family adventure film, but it often strays way too far into adult territory — such as this exchange between Katt and Quarshie that comes when Katt has been complaining about Young, Katt: “What would you do?” Quarshie: “If it were my wife, I’d whip the bitch.” My emblematic of this conflict is a lengthy scene in which Katt and Young are trying to have sex, but Baby keeps cockblocking them. The level of sexy times here (Young almost topless) is not very kid friendly, but the running gag of Baby interrupting them is so cutesy stupid that only children could conceivably find it funny. “Who is this scene aimed at?” was all I could think while watching it.

But okay, fine, it’s a family adventure film that isn’t super appropriate for children. This was the 1980’s. Par for the course. But then there is the adult thriller aspects of the film. I mean, we open with a murder taking place in a crowded African street. It’s like the opening to a spy movie. And McGoohan murders another guy later on (actually one of the movie’s cooler scenes). And lots of fools get killed with machine guns in the climax. But whatever. Kids like machine guns, I suppose. Worst of all, though, the movie deals very intimately with Africans too, both tribesmen living in the jungle and machine gun toting military lunatics. Sometimes in a racist sort of way, but more often than not in a fairly realistic way. No kid wants to see that shit!

But, even with all this, Baby could have been an outside-the-box classic if the movie were actually any good. Alas.

In my memory, we didn’t get to see the dinosaurs until like 2/3 into the movie. But we actually get to them 1/3 into the movie. You would assume that a movie about dinosaurs would get better once the creatures show up, but now, decades later, the pre-dinosaur stuff was actually my favorite aspect of the film. It is once we reach the dinosaurs the movie shits the bed and becomes a boring slog. The dinosaur FX are actually pretty great at times, and it took me a moment to figure out how they were pulling it off (puppets on miniature sets for the adults, no stop motion), but every scene featuring the prehistoric beasties is a lifeless chore.

It is strange that Norton went on to direct episodes for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, because based on Baby I would say Norton has no grasp of the fantastical. He does some nice work with the various human interactions. McGoohan in particular is unsinkable, giving a fucking great and typically steely-eyed performance; I really liked his interactions with his effeminate worry-wart assistant. But whenever Norton has to deal with the dinosaur stuff the film becomes staid and inert. The first time Katt and Young encounter a dinosaur they are once again trying to fuck when they hear strange noises in the jungle and think they feel an earthquake. Then a dinosaur comes by and knocks over their tent and they see its backside disappearing into the trees. This sounds like a standard, suspenseful moment, but it plays like Jurassic Park dumbed down 100 times. Nothing about it feels scary or dangerous because Katt and Young barely seem to care. Even when they finally see the dinosaur it’s more like, “Huh. That’s odd.” This gets compounded by the first legit spotting of a dinosaur the following day, eating in and chilling in a pond. There is no sense of wonder here whatsoever. Even the score seems unimpressed by a living breathing dinosaur. Then things just keep downward spiraling. The movie has up until now treated everything very realistically. But Katt and Young befriend the dinosaur family within hours. As stupid as this is, it is made all the more insulting by the fact that they act like they’re slowly winning the dinosaurs’ trust, like Jane Goodall would. After giving the dinosaurs food once they are totes besties with the Brontosaurus family, now and forever.

I mentioned when talking about The Land Before Time that I think there is a difference between being cute and being cutesy. Cuteness just happens. A picture of a kitten is cute. Cutesy is when someone is trying to be cute. You talking baby talk to a kitten is cutesy. Baby isn’t cute. It is cutesy. Part of the problem is that Norton doesn’t sell it. But I think the bigger problem is that Baby just isn’t cute. While the Baby practical FX are quite good, the thing is kinda creepy looking too, with off-putting squinty yellow eyes. And the closer we get to the puppet, the less effective and believable it is. And it is mostly in close-ups that we’re supposed to find it cute. Just doesn’t work.

The movie does feature an African tribesman finding a machine gun, and despite never having handled a gun before, he immediately turns into a killing machine, winning numerous face-offs with trained soldiers. Unfortunately this delicious idiocy is too little and too late for Baby.

Paradise Lost or Magic Reborn: Paradise lost. If you have fond memories of this, leave it alone. Unless you really need some fresh McGoohan in your life (which is respectable).

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Previous Ruins Explored
The Ewok Adventure | The Care Bears Movie
Bedknobs and Broomsticks | The Land Before Time