Good afterevenmorn!
Well, it turns out that a new version of the film The Crow was released last week. Touted not as a remake of the 1994 gothic masterpiece, but a re-adaptation of the original graphic novel (I have my doubts), it nevertheless garnered quite negative reviews on release. As of the writing of this, it has a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes.
This was… predictable.
She’ll get you, my pretty!
The marketing blitz for the upcoming two-part film version of the 2003 stage version of Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked (itself a “reimagining” of L. Frank Baum’s seminal 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) has begun. Years ago, I succumbed to hype exhaustion and saw the musical; I found it mildly diverting, which hardly seemed adequate, considering the superlatives the enterprise was swathed in.
As for the movie, which stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba (Maguire’s name, not Baum’s, though it’s supposedly constructed out of his initials – LFB) and Ariana Grande as Glinda, so far all we have to judge it by is the trailer, and from those carefully culled three-and-a-half minutes it looks like all the stops have been pulled out in terms of lavish production values (though in a time when spectacle can be generated on a laptop, one wonders if that means anything anymore). As for the frantic media bludgeoning we’re about to experience, it’s hard to blame the producers for the incipient panic evident in such all-out campaigns; it’s not their fault that movies just don’t mean as much to people as they once did.
Nevertheless, I’m sure that when Wicked is released in November, it will be a smashing financial success and may even be an artistic one; certainly, a lot of talented people are giving it their all. Whatever the size of the film’s box office or cultural footprint, however, I suspect that not many people will still be watching it in 2109, eighty-five years from now — not coincidentally, the same gap separating 2024 from the 1939 that gave us one of the most enduring and beloved of all films, the MGM Wizard of Oz, a flawlessly-cast classic that starred Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, and Frank Morgan.
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Bug Buster (DMG Entertainment, 1998), Mesa of Lost Women (Howco Productions,
1953), and Earth vs. the Spider (American International Pictures, 1958)
Not until the last five minutes, then we get MOTHER BUG (Doug Jones)
A couple of unconvincing enhancements, but for the most part, practical and sticky.
I started out with a bit of optimism due to the interesting cast including George Takei, James Doohan, Randy Quaid, Meredith Salanger, and a very young Katherine Heigl. Unfortunately, the script was so poor and the direction so pedestrian, that it turned into a bit of a slog.
Historical adventure and fantasy films tend to be straightforward genre pictures long on plot and action and short on deep themes and introspection, which is okay, you can’t have everything.
Or can you? Some ambitious filmmakers want it all, and are willing to risk losing an audience who expects simple action and adventure by giving them ideas to think about or visuals that are striking but hard to parse. Films with such vaulting ambitions often fall into the category of Interesting Failures, and even if they somehow pull it off, in theaters they rarely make it out of the arthouse and into wide release. That’s the case with our subjects this time around, three unique movies too unusual to find a broad global audience. But perhaps one or more of them will resonate with you.
Speaking of Caroline Munro (as I was in my last post Lovely Ladies And Pleistocene Behemoths: A Visit To The Hollow Earth With Edgar Rice Burroughs)… here’s an amusing bit of trivia regarding Space 1999.
In Season 2, Episode 20, “The Seance Spectre,” some members of the crew go mad due to being away from nature for so long, hurtling through space on Moonbase Alpha. Well, the episode was all about the hallucinations suffered by these people and their drastic actions taken. All of it was resolved, following a lot of action and conflict.
The funny bit was at the very end, the epilogue, if you would, in which Dr. Russell prescribes a method to prevent further hallucinations: The patients have to watch long hours of nature films until it psychologically becomes “boring” to them. At the command center, Tony and Allen were using this same theory in a different manner: They stood there staring at a photo of none other than Caroline Munro!
Alien: Romulus (20th Century Studios, August 16, 2024)
To begin, I’d like to review two important facts. First, with the 2019 acquisition of Fox, Disney became the owners of the long-running Alien sci-fi franchise. Second, in 2012 Ridley Scott, who created the original masterpiece that was Alien (1979), decided to leap back in after five other directors had a go at some portion of the story. This effectively scuttled the planned Alien movie we all deserved, which would have been a sequel to Aliens (1986) directed by Neill Blomkamp and would have ignored the movies which followed Aliens. This story would have reunited Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Hicks (Michael Biehn), and probably would have been awesome.
Instead, what we got was Sigourney Weaver permanently bowing out from the franchise, and two prequels from Scott, which were anything but awesome. Though nostalgia and eternal optimism caused die-hard fans to make Prometheus (2012) a technical box office hit ($130M budget against a $403M take), we’d learned our lesson by the time Alien: Covenant came around in 2017. It was considered a disappointment by Hollywood standards, bringing in less than half the ticket sales of its predecessor. Personally, I wished Scott would have kept his hands to himself.
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Ice Spiders (Syfy Channel, 2007), Tail Sting (Shoreline Entertainment,
2001), and Big Bad Bugs (SuperNova Films, 2012)
Very large spiders! About the size of a skidoo.
Yes. Mid-2000s quality too.
Big bug movie watching fatigue is a real thing. Don’t get me wrong, I could watch monster movies until the camel spiders come home, but sitting through the same old tired format is draining me faster than a Dalmatian-sized black widow.
The original design submitted by Diving Faces (aka Jonny Campbell)
During 2020 when I was looking to fill quite a lot of downtime, I discovered the Lego Ideas website. Though I have never been a Lego builder or collector, I am still endlessly fascinated by the incredible creations true aficionados come up with. At Lego Ideas, hardcore Lego builders create and showcase unique designs. There are regular “challenges” creators can enter, but the big prize goes to those ideas submitted to the new products challenge. In the end, the creation in that category, with the most community votes, becomes a new Lego set produced for sale.
In May 2022, a Lego master builder going by the handle “Diving Faces” submitted a build depicting the final scene in the movie Jaws. In that scene it’s the shark against the three heroes, Quint (Robert Shaw), Brody (Roy Scheider) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), in Quint’s boat the Orca. “Diving Faces,” recently unmasked as Lego-master Jonny Campbell, created a 14-inch-high replica of the boat, as well as the iconic shark, all with Legos.
It was during the silent movie era, which lasted from 1894 to 1929, that Bram Stoker penned his most famous work, Dracula (1897). However, it wasn’t Stoker who decided to bring his vampire to the silver screen, but instead, German filmmaker F.W. Murnau ultimately plagiarized Dracula for his 1922 film Nosferatu, kicking off one of the first high-profile copyright cases in history.
Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker’s widow, was living in London when she received the program of the Berlin premiere of Nosferatu that proclaimed the film was “adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” She realized Nosferatu was violating Stoker’s copyright and therefore costing her royalties. As his widow, Florence was entirely reliant on Stoker’s legacy, so she decided to act.
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Caroline Munro, and a pair of Pleistocene behemoths, in At the Earth’s Core
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with “hollow earth” stories, a style of fantasy fiction that presents ancient, lost societies of people (and/or humanoids) living deep under the earth, where Jurassic and Pleistocene behemoths — as well as uncategorized horrors — struggle to survive in the subterranean jungles of a sunless world.
My favorite of this genre is the Pellucidar series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which began in 1914 when At the Earth’s Core was serialized in All-Story Weekly, before the novel was published in book format.