This week we’ll run down some of my recent obsessions.
I like to listen to this one when I’m writing, and the video is excellent, too:
And I just got this fellow’s most recent album—you may remember him from the goth interlude. It’s been ten years since I saw him live, but even after being updated this is a classic… if lyrically NSFW.
How about some electroswing?
I couldn’t find an official video for this next one, nor am I sure footage from the Thin Man movies entirely goes with the song.
Eh, who am I kidding? The Thin Man goes with everything.
And finally, the last song that lodged in my head for days on end. You’re welcome!
Next time: More Highlander, either the third movie first sequel that actually exists or some more audio. What fun!
So what did I learn by writing 17,000+ words about Highlander over a timespan similar to the one needed to produce an entire new human being? Let’s take a look.
0. A few hard skills.
I learned how to make screenshots and audio files just to liven things up here on Mondays. As a completely different movie put it, “Education is never a waste.”
1. Things I thought were my fault perhaps aren’t.
I’ve been known to have a little more affection for villains than heroes, but digging in and taking the movie a piece at a time has only strengthened my impression that Connor is…not that great. Reactive, self-pitying and frequently dull, with worse people skills after centuries of practice than even I, a crazed grammar nerd who writes about Highlander as a hobby, would have, the Highlander can be really difficult to like. I’d hoped to appreciate Connor more by the end of this project, but I ended up with a more detailed version of the same opinion. His heart’s in the right place in a “doesn’t want to destroy humanity” sort of way, and he is occasionally amusing, but that’s it. Connor MacLeod is possibly the most low-energy franchise character in movie history—a kind of achievement in itself, I guess.
2. Things I didn’t come up with a good in-world answer for, but really wanted to:
Why didn’t the Kurgan hang around after mortally wounding Connor in 1536? (I realize the correct answer is “because we have a lot more movie to go,” but even so.) Personally, I would’ve waited until Connor’s idiot kinfolk put him in that yoke, then popped up from behind that rock and SLICE!—problem solved. Given that the Highlander is in restraints, you’d even have time to say “There can be only one!” first, which seems to be really, really important to him.
Why didn’t Connor point out that the Toledo Salamanca wasn’t Fasil’s murder weapon? It’s not like a good “And where’s the blood again?” could have made the cops look more incompetent (and baffled!).
Why does Connor wear sneakers even though we never seen him get above a fast trot, even when the Kurgan is chasing him down an alley? And why does no one mention that it’s an odd look for a wealthy antique dealer? (If you’re going to argue that it’s practical, go back to the beginning of the movie and watch Fasil backflipping in dress shoes for a while, then get back to me.)
What does Kastagir see in him?
Brenda and Connor hooking up. I can conceive of a series of events that starts with Connor’s confession/stabbing himself and ends with those two going to bed, but I’m still at a loss as to how that first event leads immediately to Brenda wanting to jump his bones. His old, socially awkward bones.
What’s Rachel’s deal? The first few times I saw this, I could’ve sworn the movie implied Connor and Rachel were romantically involved at some point; once I sat down to blog about it, I could never figure out what gave me that impression in the first place, other than that she is blonde and I have read too many old British stories in which some guy wants to marry his ward.
3. Why don’t immortals all run around in thick metal collars? Especially the one who could pull off the look. Speaking of which…
4. The Kurgan isn’t quite as fearsome as advertised, taken incident by incident.
*Sigh*…
He still might be okay as a proofreading client, though, since he is careless only about the chief focus of his entire existence. If you want me, I’ll be watching that Amélie clip up there a few more times.
5. My conviction that if this series of posts is ever widely read, I’ll go down in history as “that heartless jerk who hates Ramirez—my god, woman, don’t you like fun?” hasn’t budged a bit.
I am patient zero for Connery Guilt.
6: A list of things I kind of compared the movie to over time: Folk songs, The Incredibles (“monologuing!”), Death Wish and Police Squad! (at the same time), Black Adder, the farmers’ market in the next town, Jeepers Creepers and Iron John (also at the same time), Dracula, a song by Heart, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Zorro movies, various religious writings, The Secret of NIMH, Bugs Bunny cartoons, Santa Barbara, and, more often than I’d like to admit, Spaceballs.
7. …And none of that matters.
In a way, I slowly failed over the last nine months, because what I wanted most was to understand the hold Highlander has over me and its fans in general. Certainly there’s a lot to dissect there, and a lot of rampant silliness, but I’m no closer to putting my finger on the mystique of the movie than I was at the beginning. In fact, it’s worse now: I’ve watched Highlander once a week for most of a year, and there were very few weeks I wanted to give it a miss, and very few in which I didn’t sit down and watch the whole thing, even if I was only writing about half of Connor and Brenda’s awful date. It’s the most staggering case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts I’ve ever encountered—maybe in any medium.
My main conclusion? Writing this has been kind of fun. I also think my headphones + Highlander habit became a full-fledged hobby the day I was watching Connor ride into battle to the tune of Shirley Bassey’s “History Repeating.”
Also, from my compatriot:
Next time: A musical interlude.
Next time on TCBOM!: I plan to continue There Can Be Only Monday! for a few more weeks as I take a look at some of the sequels (not that one) and the TV series that started it all for me.
An article on io9 about the rebooted Beauty and the Beast series inspired me to give the original another look.
Why Found-Again? I was 13 when the series began and immediately fell in love with the entire idea; I’ve never had many nightmares about things I watch on TV, but I can still remember a very detailed, happy dream about spending time in Beauty & The Beast‘s subterranean tunnels. I even had a poster of Vincent on my closet, next to INXS and Morrissey and REM and the rest of my musical interests. But the series eventually got…not great (I was about to write “strange.” Hah!) and like a lot of viewers, I drifted away. Now that it’s on Netflix, I took a peek at season 1.
The Premise: (Don’t laugh.) When a case of mistaken identity ends with lawyer Katherine Chandler left for dead, she’s taken in by a secret quasi-medieval society of people who live beneath New York City. Most are the ordinary lost souls of any large city, but one—lion-faced Vincent (Ron Perlman)—becomes her true love and her protector. In between times when Vincent is shredding bad guys by tooth and claw (offscreen), they read and quote a lot of poetry.
Given that I’ve been writing about Highlander for months now, I’m surprised it took me so long to realize this was another supernaturally inflected “gritty New York” show, and years before urban fantasy became popular as a book genre. But this is one of the few series in which, for me, the crime-show aspects take a distinct back seat to the romance. I gravitate to art whose central theme is “the weird are deserving of love,” I suppose, and Beauty and the Beast is certainly not the least of these.
The Verdict: This is the part where I would ordinarily say my opinion is mixed; it’s not. Instead I find myself having two divergent opinions at the same time, able to see the flaws in the story and the cheesiness of the characters even as my inner teenager revels in the poetry-reciting, face-ripping hero who lives in a modern-day fairy fortress. The result, honestly, is that I feel a little weird rewatching it: I like it but don’t feel entirely comfortable liking it.
Hey, I said don’t laugh.
Might go well with: Champagne, sonnets, the Cocteau movie based on the original tale…and I only just realized this is the second Friday in a row in which Gummi rats wouldn’t be out of place.
Last time: Brenda saved herself and Connor. Remind me again why this movie isn’t called The Resourceful Forensic Weapons Specialist With Questionable Taste In Boyfriends?
36. A happy ending?
We’re at the epilogue, with Brenda and Connor lolling about on a hill in the highlands in very preppy sweaters. It’s also the wrap-up, in which we find out how Connor experiences what I assume is near-infinite influence.
This, like so many other things about our hero, could be summed up as “…eh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” The exact quote is “…It’s like a whirlwind in my head, but if I concentrate, I know what people are thinking all over the world. Presidents, diplomats, scientists…I can help them understand each other.” This seems like a slipshod method when you’re the supreme being of this particular film; then again, my relative position on a Connor-to-Kurgan leadership continuum is pretty well established by now, so I would think that.
Brenda doesn’t seem to mind Connor’s plan to treat the whole world as his personal pinball machine to nudge (“Tilt! Oh, damn, global war. I guess they understood each other but just didn’t agree.”), or mind that his biggest goal is to be just a regular guy, as able to be killed by random acts of god (er…whom he may be, I guess) as any other man who has the weight of an impending action-movie franchise looming overhead. Though if he can make himself a regular guy, would that mean abandoning his new special powers? We never get to find out.
And then, as if to bang the drum of anticlimax with greater force, we get a Ramirez montage. (It had never really dawned on me until writing about the church scene that Connor and the Kurgan are, in part, having an argument about a guy who’s been dead for 400 years. Everyone is really hung up on Ramirez.) Is there some reason Connor can’t bring the guy back from the dead at this point, other than having to explain that he willed all Ramirez’s clothes to a nice lady in New York?
The montage version of Ramirez says the Highlander has “power beyond imagination.” I have to assume they’re not talking about my imagination. Connor and Brenda wouldn’t have needed a plane to get to Scotland, for one thing.
At any rate, they’re happy for the moment, kissing on a hillside as the end-of-movie music swells.
Next time: It turns out I didn’t see nearly as much of Disney’s The Black Hole as a kid as I’d thought, so I’m still on the hunt for Friday.
We lost one of the greats with the passing of Sir Christopher Lee last week. Since most of the things I own featuring Lee are much beloved and rewatched—The Last Unicorn, The Wicker Man, even Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow—I’m going to turn to the one that isn’t.
Why Found-Again? I’m not sure why Satanic Rites of Dracula is the only Hammer Dracula film I own, mind you; a list of my favorites could easily consist of the words “any I’ve seen except this one, really.” (After Taste the Blood of Dracula, it’s all downhill for me.) Though it’s been sitting on my shelf for years, I still have vivid memories of buying this DVD at Wal-Mart for 88 cents, watching it, and deciding I’d paid too much.
The Premise: If you’ve ever seen a Hammer Dracula film, you know the drill: a bunch of mortals end up raising one of the better-known vampires from whatever fate befell him in the previous Hammer Dracula film. At least in this case it’s deliberate, and done before the movie starts.
Dracula is kind of a corporate overlord this time, which may explain why he’s trying to destroy the world through germ warfare (a super-strain of good old bubonic plague) instead of confining his depredations to filmily clad women and their would-be rescuers. The women are there, of course; they’re just not the focus. This time, the Count is thinking big.
I’ve read that this is a sequel of sorts to Dracula AD 1972, but music notwithstanding, Satanic Rites lacks a lot of the fun counterculture vibe of its predecessor. (It also lacks Stephanie Beacham, a favorite of mine ever since she was on the ill-fated Dynasty spinoff The Colbys in the ’80s.)
The Verdict: You’d think mixing a Pendergast-novel-style thriller with vampires and Christopher Lee would be right up my alley, but no. Intellectually, there’s nothing wrong with Dracula being in a modern setting, but I’ve never quite been able to get over it, or over Peter Cushing’s psychiatrist van Helsing expounding on Dracula’s death wish. Lee as always knocks it out of the park, as does most of the cast—including Cushing, Joanna Lumley, and character actor Freddie Jones, who appears in my movie collection even more often than Christopher Lee. It seems odd to say that never has a movie that opens with a black-magic ceremony so disappointed me, but…
And, of course, this is the one where Dracula gets defeated by a hawthorn bush. As Opus the Penguin once said, I can’t support that.
Bonus Points For: The Freddie Jones character has his own institute, complete with a plaque: “The Keeley Foundation for Science.” What science? Evil, nihilistic science! I guess that wouldn’t all fit on the sign, though.
Might go well with: Bloody Marys, Gummi rats, English food, The Day of the Jackal.
Next time: The very, very end of Highlander. Not quite the end of me writing about it, though.
Last time: Rachel inherits the earth treasure cave; Connor sets out to save Brenda and more or less ends up in a time-appropriate music video.
35. In which I get out my Team Kurgan pennant. The guy needs all the help he can get.
This is it, my 1.2 readers: the final duel that decides the fate of humanity. I’m thinking the movie title kind of gives away the result here, but onward!
First things first: for this section I am dipping my toe into audio and trying to produce a few amusing things. If you’ve ever wondered what someone who’d watch Highlander constantly for a most of a year sounds like, wonder no more. We have soundbites from my living room!
(I’d also like to offer special thanks to the other voice, my friend V., at this point no stranger to the Connor Sucks Chorus.)
Connor and the Kurgan have fallen through the skylight into a room with a nice bank of windows we should all get a good look at while we still can.
The Kurgan is having a lovely time kicking Connor’s ass while Brenda attempts to get in through a locked door. Has someone learned his lesson about villain monologues of any length? He has not.
Just when the movie gets my hopes up, Brenda runs in to attack the bad guy with a metal pipe. Why does nobody (including me the first time I watched the film) ever seem to notice Brenda winning the movie? Is it sexism? Does the title/whole Highlander concept carry so much weight that the story naturally bends around a MacLeod? Some combination of these things?
At any rate, Connor gets his groove sword back…somehow…and proceeds to rout the Kurgan.
And, light shining on his stubble, the Highlander moves in for the kill.
Kurgan, we hardly knew ye. Of course, by the end, you hardly knew ye, too.
The final Quickening seems to be extremely painful, and not just if you happen to be a window: Connor is lifted in the air, attacked by strange spirits, yells a lot, and allegedly receives infinite knowledge before the power drops him to the hard floor, where I’m guessing at least some of it leaks back out.
Next time: I celebrate the life of Christopher Lee by rewatching one of my least favorite Hammer Draculas.
Next time on TCBOM!: Praying to a new god. Well, not really, it’s just Connor talking.
Why Found-Again? I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve owned this for quite some time; it forms one half of my only non-Vincent-Price horror twofer with Pet Sematary 2 (and I still wonder if that’s because someone thought the blonde housekeeper in the latter was Penelope Ann Miller, who stars in The Relic).
I remembered it as being not bad, despite the absence of the original book’s main character—Aloysius X.L. “Men Want To Be Him, This Writer Wants To Pre-Order Every Book About Him, Preferably NOW” Pendergast—and a few other point-of-view characters from the novel. In fairness, unkillable ex-special-ops genius gazillionaire Pendergast could easily become the least believable thing in even a horror movie.
The Premise: Something is killing people at the natural history museum where Margo Green (Miller) is a postdoc. It’s up to Margo and police lieutenant D’Agosta (Tom Sizemore) to unravel the mystery of the creature—both its origins in a failed expedition and what to do about it now—and when the security system malfunctions at a museum gala, hundreds of people are trapped with a hungry monster.
Considering how many cheap tricks the movie starts with—a garden-variety jungle scene, a cat scare, making D’Agosta superstitious because the museum is having a Superstition exhibit, get it?—and the number of characters cut in the adaptation, The Relic is surprisingly faithful to the source material. I’d even argue that it ends up further humanizing some of the characters that remain, especially the museum official played by Linda Hunt (though that could be because Linda Hunt is always terrific). The transition from murder investigation to full-on monster-based chaos is especially good, as a perfect storm of technical glitches and human panic starts what the creature wants to finish. And the end is tense (and fiery, which differs from the book, but by that time, who cares?).
The Verdict: Mixed, in that one minute I was writing down all the things I liked about it and the next I just wanted to take a break and finish watching tomorrow. It does lag a bit before the exhibit opening, but all in all, I think The Relic is underrated—even without you-know-who.
I’d also like to note, even though there are now websites for this sort of thing, that one fewer dog dies in this movie than in the book. When was the last time a movie did that?
Might go well with: Salad, kebabs, and if you enjoy fire on film, the first Hellboy movie. (Note: I think nearly everything in life goes well with the first Hellboy movie.)
Next time: The final fight in Highlander is upon us. There may even be audio.
Last time: VenomThe Green Goblin The Kurgan nabbed Brenda and proceeded to act like, oh, I don’t know, a guy who can be easily defeated with just a little bit of forethought and sane swordsmanship? Just spitballing here.
34. Rachel gets promoted! And we find ourselves in Santa Barbara, sort of.
You’d think a transportational rampage like the one in the last section should make the news even in Highlander’s New York, but the Kurgan calls Connor to mention that he’s kidnapped Brenda anyway, leaving a sinister message on what looks to be a solid acre of answering machine.
I’m not sure why, but I love old technology in movies and TV. If I’m watching something from the ’90s, I coo over every appearance of a pager; I can’t let a typewriter sit on anybody’s desk on the big or small screen without mentioning it —and rating it for beauty; and old televisions frequently bring a smile to my face. I mention this to explain that Connor’s answering machine makes me very happy. It’s probably big even for 1985, which suggests that maybe he’s an early adopter, something that seems kind of, well, lively for the Mopelander.
Connor tells a horrified Rachel that he’s leaving for good, no matter what happens (“Russell Nash dies tonight”): she’s the antique store’s new owner. He repeats the “it’s a kind of magic” line from their very first meeting, then sets off for the final fight. Somewhere offscreen, I presume Rachel waits until he’s gone to make the “cha-ching!” motion with her arm and pop the cork on some champagne, maybe have some friends over: “I thought he’d never quit! It’s not as if he ever sells anything, but he’s finally got a girlfriend…yes, I guess that stabbing-yourself thing finally worked on someone. Who knew? More wine?”
Meanwhile, Connor finds Brenda attached to a big neon sign, and I take a minute to remind myself that resemblances to other movies aren’t really Highlander’s fault. From a movie-magic standpoint, it’s the perfect place to start your final encounter: fog, metal, a catwalk to scramble around on—at one point Connor even slides down a cable like a fairly tame Errol Flynn. But there’s so much here to hate. The gratuitous water spill, Brenda screaming randomly, neon letters falling because the Kurgan has lost his damn mind…
So if you’re like me and get a little bored by the roof action in this fight, have a look at the soap-opera death it always reminds me of:
The final indignity before they fall through the skylight and the duel begins in earnest? After her neon letter gets knocked over, Brenda rescues herself. Say it with me: Connor sucks.
Next time: I wish I knew.
Next time on TCBOM!: The final indignity conflict. I’m going to try to work out some audio commentary for this one.
Today I return to the Showtime anthology series that gave us Valerie On The Stairs for another episode.
Why Found-Again? I’m not sure why, but when I first delved into the Masters of Horror series, I saw that Cigarette Burns was about the search for a lost, possibly cursed old movie and immediately thought that meant a very old movie. My attention to the story never quite recovered from the fact that I’d been thinking Häxanor Nosferatuwhen I should’ve been thinking Rosemary’s Baby, and I wondered whether my opinion would be improved by actually, you know, knowing what it’s about this time around.
The Premise: Having a captive angel in your mansion is possibly the worst of all conceivable bad ideas. (A rich man also hires a film buff to track down an evil movie that caused its first and only audience to go mad and kill each other, but if you have to have a single takeaway, à la the end of the old He-Man cartoons, it’s up there in the first sentence.)
The chances of me ever watching The Walking Dead are nil, but even I shouted “Daryl!” when I saw that Norman Reedus plays our ill-fated protagonist, Kirby Sweetman, who is despairing over his wife’s suicide and the imminent failure of his business even before getting sent on a wild angel goose chase. Add in Udo Kier as the rich man and a small role played by Christopher “Vince from Eureka’s Café Diem” Gauthier, and things are set to get interesting.
There’s always something seductive, I think, about movies/TV that explore the power (in this case quite literally) of movies/TV; bit by bit, we are drawn with Kirby into a dark chain of mystery and the unspeakable, all centered around what watching movies can do to people. And in the world of this movie, it can do quite a lot.
The problem—I’m sure none of you saw this coming—is that this one is waaaaaaay too gory for me, even by the standards of other Masters of Horror installments and even though I’ve been around the deserted, spooky block enough times to know what “John Carpenter’s” means in front of a title.
The Verdict: This really did repay rewatching: it’s an interesting and atmospheric story that never lets up on the creeping dread except when it’s time to let the dread stop creeping and run. For people with stronger stomachs than mine, which is nearly everyone, I recommend it. (So. Much. Eyeball violence…)
Might go well with: Nothing. Definitely not popcorn. Or sausage.
Last time: Connor replaced charm with stabbing and got the girl anyway.
33. There’s only one thing I want to know.
We’re now at the part of the movie where the villain, in classic form, leverages the hero. Or to put it another way, we are now at the part of the movie from which the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies have drained all my goodwill, because I just can’t take another love interest getting captured and tied to a building, not even for the damn Kurgan. (This is, of course, a classic movie problem: I remember finally watching Halloween sometime in the ’90s and realizing it felt cliché because it had set the standard for every slasher film that followed. The difference, I suppose, is that I’m far too squeamish to watch a slasher on the big screen but somehow found myself at every Spider-Man installment.)
The first thing I despise about this is that, presumably due to time constraints, Brenda turns into your standard-issue damsel in distress when the Kurgan comes after her: she screams; she fails to do any damage to him at all, even with that gun she had ready on her abortive date with Connor and an apartment literally bristling with swords; and when he puts her in the car and goes crazy, driving all over the place, she eventually faints.
I assume the crazy-driving portion of our program is to further show that the villain is losing his grip, both ascending (he finally kills people, if I had to guess) and descending (you have a shot at ruling the world and are running down pedestrians for fun? Really?) in villainy. I suspect one of the things I dislike about this scene—and the end of the movie in general— is the way it implies that Connor couldn’t defeat the Kurgan if the latter was still operating at 16th-century levels of sanity. It cheapens everybody, and it seems to go on forever.
And so I sit and watch this and keep wondering…
Where is that police helicopter?
You know, the one from way back that had so much time to burn that it was cruising around breaking up one-on-one fights in alleys? A guy going around running people over on the sidewalk seems like a great time to use it, but I guess the NYPD finally bought a camera that week instead of chopper fuel. In fact, we won’t be seeing the cops again for the rest of the movie, even though they were watching both Connor and Brenda and, one assumes, looking for the Kurgan.
I’m also going to commit a bit of heresy here, both against the movie and against my pledge to take it as it comes: I prefer the version of this scene that happens in the third Highlander movie. Yes, the one with Mario van Peebles as the barbarian. The terror-by-transportation thing is so much better when the villain has illusion powers.
At any rate, Brenda is absconded with. It’s on.
Next time: Ewwwwwww.
Next time on TCBOM!: The final fight begins, but not before I natter on about minutiae.