Gang-Banging the FF

I did not start reading comics until late 1976, that is, until after I had read Faulkner and Orwell and Dickens and Twain. Even then, my preference was for Howard the Duck, Warlock, Doctor Strange and Spider-Man. I did not become an instant fan of The Fantastic Four. By that time it hadn't been "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine" for more than a hundred issues, and it wasn't until I had the chance to read the first seventy or so issues that I understood what all the fuss was about.

But I'm not here to write about Stan and Jack's greatest creation. I'm here to ask a question of the people who made Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and that question is, "What does it feel like to fuck the Fantastic Four?"

I can ask that question because I watched the movie last night, on a station called FX, just to be able to say that I had sat through it, just to know that my instincts about it were right, just to give myself the moral right to dump on what I imagine is the worst comic-book movie adaptation of all time (but I haven't seen the first Fantastic Four movie, so I could be wrong).

If you look back on the sorry list of funnybook movies, including dreck like Conan the Barbarian and The Spirit, calling this one the worst is saying a lot! There are some really stinking bad films based on comic book characters out there. Few of them have pissed me off as much as this pile of cow manure.

What's right with it? OK, the Silver Surfer is a well-realized special effect. Michael Chiklis's performance (but not his make-up) as Ben Grimm is acceptable (but not great). That's as far as it goes.

What's wrong with it? Everything else. Everything. Everything. I'm so glad I didn't pay any money to see it.

Let's start with the casting. It's inept, all the way down the line. No one looks like the characters they are supposed to be playing, and they certainly don't act like them. Jessica Alba as Sue Storm? She's a Latino fer crine out loud! Sue Storm is supposed to be whiter than snow. Nothing about her is right. Not her face. Not her hair. Not her body. Not her imperceptible degree of talent.

Iouwnn Griffgdthkdth or whatever the hell his name is as Reed Richards? He's about twenty years too young for the part, and plays Reed like a Frat House boy. Even the streaks they put in his hair are wrong.

That Nobody playing the Torch? Don't even get me started.

But the worst, the nadir, is the absolute clown they have playing Victor Von Doom. Even his voice is wrong.

Oh my, and then there's the script. They are adapting, in this film, what is quite possibly the Holy Grail of comic book stories. If The Fantastic Four were Jack and Stan's greatest creation, then the Galactus Trilogy as it has come to be known is the best of the best. All the filmmakers had to do was follow the story, perhaps making a few minor adjustments to account for the absence of a character called The Watcher.

But no. They turned it into a military hunt for the Silver Surfer, and they turned Galactus into a cloud.

I would have thought that Star Trek: The Motion Picture would have taught Hollywood a very basic lesson: that clouds do not make particularly menacing villains. For one thing, they do not have brains and cannot speak.

Finally, whose idea was it to let Tim Story into the Director's Union, let alone allow him anywhere near the First Family of Comics? He doesn't have a clue about how to develop a story, let alone how to present characters and make us love them. He doesn't even know how to frame a shot. He should have the camera dropped on his fingers.

Why did I keep watching? Because, as this train wreck of a movie unfolded, I was savoring the pleasure that I would get today from throwing a pie in its face and, in the words of John Cleese, farting in its general direction.

And now, to end on a positive note:

As ineffably minor as was Roger Corman's 1994 version of The Fantastic Four (that it was shot in a month for under a million dollars, and was never intended to be released, should tell you something: it was made only so that the film company could retain the rights for another few years), it looks like Shakespeare compared to the picture I saw last night. And Rebecca Staab is still the perfect actress for Sue Storm.

-- Freder.

The Real, Original Rescuers

I don't want to write about moving today, although it is much on my mind, a weight that never seems to get any lighter.

Instead I will write about Miss Bianca and Bernard the Brave. Not the Disneyfied version of the movies (although the first one was okay despite its departures), but the source material, the original books by British author Margery Sharp.

Regrettably, the Miss Bianca series is completely out of print. This is a crime. Although I cannot speak for the later books in the series (my family stopped at four for some strange reason, and until later years I never knew that more existed), the first three are among the books that I most fondly remember.

They are Gothic Victorian Romantic Adventure stories -- with mice. When Disney made their version, it was Americanized and transplanted to the Louisiana Bayou, but the books are ornately European and much richer in texture. As illustrated by the great Garth Williams, the books are filled with what Williams himself referred to as "a soft furry love."

But they are also filled with darkness and wonderful villains. In The Rescuers, a young girl is forced into servitude by The Grand Duchess, who with her faithful valet lives in a decaying old mansion attended by clockwork handmaidens.

I have to stop. I may revisit this post later on. I'm not doing it justice. Just too tired. Suffice to say that you should seek out The Rescuers, Miss Bianca and The Turret, and devour them by candlelight at night.

Footsteps in the Snow

This morning I almost jumped out of my skin when I saw through the back bathroom window that someone had been prowling around outside the house. I could see their footprints in the deep snow. They walked all the way around into the back yard, staying close to the house, looked into all of the windows, and spent some time standing in the back corner, out of sight from the road. They apparently approached or departed across the back field. There seems to have been more than one of them, and they spent a lot of time giving the place a good looking-over.

My best guess is that they came during the day while I was at work, and I wasn't able to see the footprints in the dark. But it's possible that they came at night, and looked in the windows while I was there. Either way, this is not a joke anymore. I am scared witless.

The state police have already demonstrated that they won't do anything, and since there doesn't seem to have been any actual attempt at a break-in, I have no reason to believe that this would make any difference.

They were pretty brazen about it. Perhaps this weekend I will follow the tracks to see where they end up.

The Peter Pan Syndrome

Jason Isaacs as Hook in P.J. Hogan's delightful film version of Peter Pan

There are rights and wrongs in art as in life. Here are two wrongs having to do with J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, before I move on to the rights.

J.M. Barrie gave a remarkable gift. For nearly one hundred years, his royalties from Peter Pan have gone to benefit the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.

Now that the copyright for Peter Pan has lapsed and the character is in the public domain, the moral right of the Great Ormond Street Hospital is under attack by none other than the Walt Disney Company. In a move that can only be described as a crass attempt to glom the copyright of Peter Pan for themselves, their book publishing arm Hyperion has issued several new novels about the character co-authored by the otherwise respectable Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson.

It seems strange to be working in a bookstore and to ask you all not to read or support a book, but that is exactly what I am doing. By publishing these unauthorized rogue “prequels” to Peter Pan, the Disney Company is literally stealing from sick children. So much for the vaunted “family values” of the suited corporate criminals hiding in the shadow of Mickey Mouse.

In an effort to hang onto their bequest, the Great Ormond Street Hospital has authorized an official sequel of their own, Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean. If you must have new stories featuring Peter Pan, please support (and encourage your children to support) the official novel, which promises to take the Barrie bequest well into the new century.

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And now, on to the travesty that is Hook. Anti-intellectual, wallowing in stupidity, this shocking rape of J.M. Barrie twists and contorts his play into a contemporary parable about finding one's "Inner Child." Despite Hoffman (who is fine), this is typical Spielberg soft-headed manipulation. Stay away -- stay away!

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On the other hand, Finding Neverland is more of a right than a wrong. It's merely an incredibly efficient machine for making people cry. The audience I saw it with all blubbered unashamedly. For my part, I am entranced by the movie's portrayal of the original Victorian-era stage production of Peter Pan.

*

But the real reason I'm yammering at you today is to encourage everyone to check out P.J. Hogan's little-known and under-appreciated 2003 version of Peter Pan. This is, by far, the best, most faithful film adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play. Somehow it manages to balance a modern approach and very showy computer work with respect for the source material. A terrific cast all up and down the line is highlighted by Rachel Hurd Wood in her first-ever acting job as Wendy, and Jason Isaacs following in the tradition of the stage play by taking the roles of both Mr. Darling and Captain Jas. Hook, and doing a smashing job at both. The delightful Richard Briers co-stars as Smee, and, in a major milestone that finally allows some of the play's subtext to come to light, Peter himself is at last played by a boy, Jeremy Sumpter.

This changes everything, and allows the play to breathe deeply. For the first time, Peter Pan becomes what it really was all along: a Romance. It's made quite clear that Wendy is on the verge of becoming a young woman, and her feelings for Peter are colored by frustration at his refusal to grow up with her. Meanwhile, Isaacs's Hook turns out to be something of an embittered Romantic, a Poe in Pirate Drag whose motivations in hating Peter go far deeper than just the loss of his hand. He's jealous, and choked with regrets so powerfully strong that he actually distills poison from his own tears (this is a detail right out of Barrie). In fact, he is able to manipulate Wendy because he understands her.

The one real liberty that's taken with the play happens at the end, when Hook discovers the power of flight and the final swordfight between him and Peter takes spectacularly to the air. Happy thoughts, to him, involve murder and lawyers, so, with the requisite dose of Fairy Dust, he soars quite well -- until Peter, in a very nice twist, realizes Hook's dark secret and turns it, fatally, against him.

Goodbye to All That

Last night I said a temporary goodbye to Farscape with the final installment of The Peacekeeper Wars, the big, loud, messy, sprawling mini-series that winds up all the loose threads (and gives them a pounding for good measure) left hanging when the series was canceled.

No doubt the Sci-Fi network wanted something more actionful and less cerebral than the original series, and that is what Brian Henson (Jim's kid), Rockne O'Bannon and David Kemper served up. Spiny spaceships breathe fire and guns blaze at every turn. Blam! Boom! Enough already. Farscape was many things, but it was never boring, and the mini-series teeters on the edge of that precipice just for being so packed with running, punching and shooting.

The time could have been used much better and more imaginatively. The plot elements that need to be covered were originally meant to play out across the entire fifth season -- having to compress it all into just three hours puts a strain on the proceedings.

And yet, it's still Farscape, warts and all. One of the things I always liked about the series is that they clearly subscribe to Lester Dent's theories of Pulp Fiction. No matter how bad you think it is now for our heroes, don't worry, it's about to get much worse. "Make sure the hero gets it in the neck at every turn," quoth Dent, the man behind Kenneth Robeson and the creator of Doc Savage.On Farscape, the crew of Moya doesn't just get it in the neck -- they get full-body Trouble by the wagonload.

There's something soothing about this, in a perverse way. It's the same draw that a good Soap Opera has: the troubles that the characters experience make what you're going through seem petty by comparison.

The Peacekeeper Wars continues that trend with things like John and Aeryn birthing a child under heavy gunfire, and an alarming number of Major Series Characters who don't make it to the end.

For all the sound and fury that precedes it, the final third is actually near-perfect. Everything that the series has been hanging itself upon is contained in John Crichton's head, and we finally get to see what that looks like. It doesn't disappoint. Even Scorpius, who has spent three seasons doing every dirty thing in the villain's playbook to get that information, is suitably impressed.

And the ending is wonderful. All this time, we've been asking the Dorothy in Oz question: "Will John ever get Home?" It turns out to be the wrong question entirely. Home is not the place you go to. Home is where you make it.

Now I have to find something else to fill my Monday nights for a while. With all the packing I still have ahead of me, I've promised myself not to buy anything, not even a single DVD, until after I am moved. So it'll have to be a re-run. Y'know, I kind of have a hankering to spend some time with my old friends John Steed and Mrs. Peel. It's been years.


-- Freder

Some days it pours!

My car is about as reliable as Professor Fate's, here: from The Great Race.

Yesterday ended so well. I spent an hour on the phone lining up homeowner's insurance (by combining it with my auto insurance I save $$$!), talked with the current owner of the house (he said the loan officer had called him to say she anticipated being able to close in three weeks), had a halfway decent dinner, drank less than usual, and got to bed on time with the anticipation of being at the new house early to sit in on the home inspection.

But today went, ehm, differently than planned.

I was supposed to be at the inspection at 9:00 AM. Actually, I was going to get there half an hour early and take some snaps of the interior.

I waded through another one of the torrential downpours we've been getting (sure hope we get out of this weather pattern before it turns really cold!), got in my car, turned the key -- and nothing happened. We've all had these moments, I know. I'm just saying. Why do these things always happen when you have to be somewhere unusual and the weather is hideous?

There was no electrical power at all -- couldn't even unlock the doors by the switch.

I swam back through the growing typhoon and called the home inspector. After all, I had the keys and was supposed to let him in. No answer. Left a message. Then called Triple A.

This was a little bit worrisome because I had it in my head that we'd canceled Triple A on all the vehicles after my mother died. Fortunately for me, it turned out I'm still a member.

Long story short: I got hold of the inspector, he swung by to pick up the keys, and in due time the mechanic came, did a battery test (it passed) and started the car. All's well that ends well, right? I can even make most of the inspection, right?

If you believe that, you haven't been paying attention!

I was crossing the river into W_________ when the car suddenly died. We're talking D-E-A-D dead. I'm shooting along the bridge at about forty miles an hour with no power steering or brakes, nothing. The window immediately started to fog up so I couldn't see where I was going. Couldn't open the windows to let in air.

I coasted along as far as the car would take me, then turned onto the shoulder. Actually, I was pretty lucky, ending up at the bottom of the off-ramp, just a couple of hundred yards from a credit union. This was vital, because I do not own a cell phone. I don't like the telephone at the best of times, why would I want to carry one of the bloody things wherever I go?

To call for help, obviously.

It was another forty minute wait at the credit union, and when the tow truck pulled in, it was driven by the same guy who started the car back home!

Towed it to the dealership, they gave me a ride to work, where I arrived soaking wet but grateful. After all, it could have been so much worse. Actually, I had just one moment of real despair during the whole experience, while I was cooling my heels at the credit union. It struck me that I didn't have anyone to call.

Oh, and the house? Seems to have passed the inspection with flying colors. I'll let you know about the car!

Gorilla My Dreams

It's been a less-than-thrilling Halloween season for one reason or another. I couldn't decorate the yard early on because of the Big Clean-Out, and now with six days to go, there doesn't seem much point. I haven't been able to pig out on Halloween DVDs because I've felt it more important to spend my evenings working on making the house as comfortable as I can. (I've made some progress on that front, and am spending more time in the living room with the quats, listening to music and working on a scrapbook of the photos I took before the house was taken apart. This would not have been possible before). I haven't been able to read anything because I fall asleep after a sentence or two. And now my DVD player has died -- with one of my discs stuck inside. Anyone know how to pry open the jaws of a dead DVD player?

I did manage to squeeze in Fox's 1942 Dr. Renault's Secret last night. At just over an hour, there isn't much to squeeze. It's a creditable little B-picture that does what it sets out to do, though hamstrung a bit by its deep resemblance to the much more accomplished and more chilling Island of Lost Souls. J. Carroll Naish plays the secret of the  film's title, which makes him both one of the picture's strongest elements and one of its disappointments.

He excelled at playing sympathetic monsters (his hunchback in House of Frankenstein is another great example), and he clearly studied monkey mannerisms for this role. Which makes the secret much too obvious if you're at all familiar with this type of story. It's so obvious that I was hoping there would be an additional wrinkle. If I had been writing this thing, it would have involved the Bad Doctor's daughter. She's the hook that gets the hero involved in the story -- they are engaged to be married.

But -- there's no evidence that she actually has a mother. So I was really hoping that she was going to be the secret of the film's title, another of George Zucco's experiments, and rather a more successful one. I imagine a closing scene involving her and the hero on their wedding night, and a revelation that sends Mister Hero screaming out into the dark. But then I'm sick like that.

It wasn't until a year later that Universal made a girl into the monster for Captive Wild Woman -- another B picture that turns out to be better than it has any right to be. I mean, with a title like that one expects a rank exploitation movie. Instead, what you get is a bit of funhouse frippery that just wants you to think it's an exploitation movie. Oh, we do get to see John Carradine chowing down on the draperies. In fact, Captive Wild Woman may be the picture that inspired Woody Allen to cast him in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

I just popped over to Wikipedia to make sure I was spelling Carradine's name correctly. He seems to have died exactly the same way my mother did.

That's neither here nor there. I have to get cracking! It will be a movie a night, every night, in order to get through all the "scary" stuff I have lined up by Halloween. Two more Abbott and Costellos, three more obscure chillers from Fox, and Something Wicked This Way Comes on Halloween night.

Where has the month gone? Never mind that, where has the year gone? Now, that's scary!

-- Freder.

The Somnambulist

The "pop culture blather" aspect of this blog has not happened lately -- and not only because I have so much else to write about.

I can't seem to stay awake for anything!

For three nights in a row I've tried to watch Fox's 1932 Chandu the Magician, featuring Bela Lugosi. It's a good movie. The parts of it directed by William Cameron Menzies are great. The parts of it directed by the French guy -- not so much. All three nights, I've conked out on it.

It took me two nights to get through Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. It's a cute, fun movie. I'm still not sure how it came out.

My days have been so full in so many ways that I'm just too pooped to stay awake for anything. It doesn't help that since the house was taken apart, my kitties have been so emotionally needy that I get three (and sometimes four) piling onto me as soon as I sit down. There's nothing that brings on sleep faster than being blanketed by pussy cats.

About the only thing I've been able to stay awake for is my nightly episode of Dark Shadows -- and that only because it's short. Rather than continue on with the Leviathan storyline from later in the series run, which I find extremely dull, I decided to circle back and pick it up from the arrival of Barnabus Collins. This must have been arresting stuff when it first aired and you didn't already know that a hand was going to come out of that coffin... Jonathin Frid benefits from the fact that they prepared for Barnabus's arrival well before he actually appears for the first time.

The last movie I was able to get through in one sitting was The Witches. I always thought of this as a Jim Henson production -- had forgotten it was directed by Nick Roeg. Yet, if you've seen Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell To Earth, it's obvious that Roeg's fingerprints are all over this.

The Witches is just a great lot of fun from beginning to end.  It's scary and funny and fanciful... and Angelica Huston creates a marvelous villainess, whose obvious sexual pleasure in turning boys into mice adds an uncomfortable Freudian element to the thing.

Tonight -- I'm going to get through Chandu. Really and for true! Of course it's shopping night so I will be running late all the way...

And I promise that my viewing fare will get more dignified once October is behind us.

-- Freder

An oldie but not a goodie

1942's Night Monster from Universal Studios commits the one deadly sin that no movie of its type can afford: it is dead boring! It's got a great cast and the usual state-of-the-art in creepy sets and design, but the problem can be summed up in one credit: "Produced and Directed by Ford Beebe."

Beebe was at best a journeyman B-movie director, professional but uninspired. Of the three Flash Gordon serials, Beebe directed the second, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars, and it's the worst of the lot.

In Night Monster, he directs as if he's deliberately trying to make the most un-thrilling thriller of all time. Now, perhaps he had the Hayes office looking over his shoulder; in that case, I'm being (slightly) unfair. But, for goodness sake, until the final scene absolutely everything that's even remotely scary happens off-screen, sometimes with the characters pointing to it and hollering "Look!"

I wish that I could! It's true that you don't want to show the monster in detail right up front and spoil your whole game, but in this thing all you ever see is people looking at the ground and saying, "Look at the size of that footprint!"

Bela Lugosi gets top billing for playing a butler, and not even a very sinister one at that. Irene Hervey, way ahead of her time, plays a lady psychologist, but is really just so much window-dressing. Ralph Morgan has the juicy part, or the part that would have been juicy with a more flamboyant director, and he does his best -- but the man isn't allowed even a single close-up!


It took me two nights to get through this thing because I kept falling asleep on it! If only they could bottle it, it would be a great alternative to Sominex. The best and funniest line in the picture comes at the very end, but you'll most likely miss it.

In other pop-culturey activities, I have finally duped every serial in my collection from VHS onto DVD. Towards the end I was getting into some pretty weak stuff, including G-Men Vs. The Black Dragon, a wartime story with Rod Cameron in the lead, and, most laughably, somebody named Nino Pipitone as Haruchi, the leader of a Japanese spy ring. Have you ever heard someone with a heavy Italian accent try to put on a fake Japanese accent? It's quite chucklesome.

-- Freder.

Weekend Piracy!

It’s hard to believe that I’ve gone through two whole spindles of DVD-Rs and have started on a third. That represents over a hundred VHS tapes that I can now get rid of, literally yards of shelf space cleared -- and I get to watch it all again (for several years I did not own a working VCR, so the stuff was just sitting there, taking up space).

What’s been going through the pipeline? Mostly serials, including THE RETURN OF CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (with Bela Lugosi gloriously miscast in the title role, and prominently featuring the giant wall from KING KONG), MANHUNT OF MYSTERY ISLAND (with Roy Barcroft and Linda Sterling), HAUNTED HARBOR (with Kane Richmond and Kay Aldridge -- BTW, you may not recognize these names, but in the world of serials these are the big stars!) and even KING OF THE TEXAS RANGERS (Neil Hamilton, who played Commissioner Gordon on the TV series BATMAN, plays the Big Bad Villain in this one).

But I’ve also duped a lot of animation (some early MIGHTY MOUSE), a handful of Charlie Chaplin shorts, and some features including GALAXY EXPRESS 999, a double bill of early John Wayne programmers, and Bergman’s THE MAGICIAN -- my favorite of the whole Bergman catalog, still not available on DVD. Go figure.

Where things are available on DVD, I’ve also been trading up, and giving too much money to Amazon. A couple of W.C. Fields pictures are in that category, along with Paul Newman in HARPER (a mostly bang-on adaptation of Ross MacDonald’s hardboiled mystery THE MOVING TARGET), some Universal horror flicks and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (you see, I am getting ready fo Halloween!).

The sad part of all this is, I am trying to find homes for all this stuff, and guess what? No one wants VHS anymore. My father has been taking some, but his tastes and mine don’t always run in the same direction. My old friend H______ has said that he will take at least some of it, but when I tried to set up a lunch with him communications fell silent. I have bags of these things that need to go away now. Eventually, I’ll dump them on Goodwill, if some takers don’t come along soon.

How ‘bout it? Anyone out there in blogland want some free VHS?

I Am Self-Programming -- Like my Hero, here:

I have to agree with Wayne Pygram, the actor who portrayed him, that Scorpius was somewhat emasculated in the fourth and final season of Farscape. This observation brought to you  by the fact that I watch almost no broadcast TV, and am my own CEO for Programming in the Duck House, and Farscape is my Monday night fare.After three seasons engaging in the kind of villainy that makes Dracula look like a piker, Scorpy was ousted from his job and, like Lani Tupu's Crais before him, joined the crew of Moya. Presumably this was to give him closer proximity to work his deviltry -- instead it had the unwelcome effect of making him seem, well, domesticated. Even chummy. A very sad fate for any villain with a sense of pride in himself.

Scorpy is the very model of a self-made man, a half-breed at war with his own body. There's something poetic in the way that he defeats his inner villain on a daily basis just so that he can act like his own brand of Nasty Business. Villains are always best when they have a little bit of hero in them that they choose to ignore. Scorpius doesn't have Doctor Doom's sense of nobless oblige, and he certainly wouldn't visit hell once a year to wrestle the Devil for his mother's soul -- but there's something to admire in his battle of bloodlines.