Synopsis: You know those horror movies in which a group of people are stranded at the house of a delusional madman and forced to compete in strange ways for survival? Turns out Jonny Quest did one too, and Race Bannon is in the sights of Snoopy’s old foe, a WWI flying ace. Not a Peanuts/JQ crossover, sadly, but there is a wiener dog.
Our rogues’ gallery. Why the condors in this one look accurate down to their tonsures and the dachshund looks like Clifford’s little brother is just one of those Questy mysteries.
Tip 46: There is such a thing as being too calm sometimes.
“ANOTHER”?!
Spoiler alert: the Quests aren’t all gonna fall out of the air and die, but no thanks to Mr. Roger Bannon.
Next time: Up in the air for now, no pun intended.
Next time on TQfM!: Guten tag, Herr Thinly Veiled Villain!
I’m not all the way through revisiting season 1 yet, but I just couldn’t resist.
Why Found-Again? Like Highlander: The Series, this was much beloved by some of my roommates during the ’90s. Because it had only been a few years since I was my college’s biggest Vampire Files fan, it always bugged me at the time that I hated Forever Knight. It’s a classic example of a potential Found-Again show, and only availability prevented me from doing this one earlier.
The Premise: Nick Knight (Geraint Wyn Davies) is a 700+-year-old vampire. Nick would like to stop being a vampire; as a policeman, he’d rather be a good guy (and he can never be as cool a bad guy as his sire LaCroix (Nigel Bennett), anyway—my opinion, not his). Among his colleagues, only medical examiner Natalie (Catherine Disher) knows his secret; she’s trying, through a regimen of garlic pills and blood abstinence, to make Nick human again—and, as the shameless opening-credits monologue says, “end his forever (K)night.”
Good luck, lady.
Seriously, someone hop into the comments and help me, because I don’t know how to like Nick Knight. I think I am the ideal audience for a vampire cop show; my expectations are appropriately lowered from having disliked it the first time; and I can’t fault their casting, because every time I see Geraint Wyn Davies as Nick, I feel like he wandered out of a medieval movie, which should be a plus.
Now imagine a casting director yelling “That guy! That’s our Mordred!”
Instead, it just makes me wonder why Nick has had centuries to perfect his people skills, yet is still kind of a doucherocket. I even hate his name: Nick was a Crusader, so he used to be a knight, and he’s only out at night, get it? It’s as if I went out, got nosferatued, and started my new unlife by calling myself J. A. Wordwhacker. Forever Wordwhacker.
If you want to be a vampire, it turns out there’s an app for that.
Let’s also talk about how 1) Nick doesn’t need a slightly dim, slightly sleazy cop sidekick, and 2) said sidekick doesn’t need to have a name that’s pronounced “Skanky.” (That Wordwhacker thing up there doesn’t sound so outlandish now, does it?) It’s a problem when someone saying a character’s name gently lifts you out of the story and back into the seventh grade, and the legitimate last-name spelling isn’t all that apparent when people are just saying “Skanky” on television.
It’s spelled Schanke, but I’m guessing no one ever asks.
The Verdict: I still don’t like Forever Knight, but I do have a better handle on why. Tortured soul? Multiple lost loves? Ostensibly the hero but really kind of snippy and condescending to the mortals? Nick Knight is Connor MacLeod from Highlander, but with fangs. (In fairness, Nick is probably a jerk because he is always hungry.) When I rule the universe, this will be a show in which Lacroix mind-whammies Natalie into curing all the other vampires so he can be the top pallid banana. Until then… well, until then, I even hate the graphic design.
No. No, no, no, NO.
Might go well with: I’ve always found that the best food for making fun of vampires is a bag of Bugles; use them for fake fangs. Otherwise, I’d go with Highlander: The Series and the Dark Shadows revival.
Synopsis: The Quests go to Thailand so Benton can develop drugs that facilitate long-distance space travel. They’re pursued by Zin, whose new plan involves a Race Bannon lookalike. Dr. Quest’s awesome project, some interesting animals and the presence of an honest-to-god adventuress brilliantly distract from one of my least favorite classic plots.
We’ve talked before about how luck is often better than skill. But there’s luck as normal people experience it, and then there’s this.
Tip 45: “Elephant stampede in your favor” is one of the best levels of luck.
Hadji can communicate with elephants, maybe—and nobody wants to study that any more than his levitation or his rope trick or anything else.
And once the bad guys are knocked out, we get one final look at the JQ monkey (and friend!) before getting the heck out of Thailand.
“And what became of the monk?”
Next time: A Found-Again post in which I explore the burning philosophical question, “Why, when I love vampire detectives, do I hate this vampire detective?”
Next time on TQFM!: Enemies in high places in “Shadow of the Condor.”
I decided to postpone the other stuff and stick with last week’s theme of British ghost story adaptations, so this Friday we turn to the BBC’s 2005 A View from A Hill.
Why Finally? Like “Mrs. Amworth” author E.F Benson, M.R. James was a British writer of classic ghost stories, the most well-known of which may be the gothic “Count Magnus.” (And like H.P. Lovecraft, James has inspired an excellent podcast. ) “A View from a Hill” is, hands down, my favorite James story… and, so far as I can tell, pretty much no one else’s. So it’s easy to imagine how happy I was when I saw this adaptation available on Amazon Prime.
The Premise: Archaeologist Dr. Fanshawe travels to Squire Richards’s country estate. When Fanshawe sets out to tour his surroundings, he takes a pair of handmade binoculars the squire inherited from a strange and sinister antiquary named Baxter. It turns out Baxter’s glasses can see into the past, letting Fanshawe see intact buildings instead of the ruins that surround him—but he’s looking through dead men’s eyes, and it comes at a price.
Not this Price. A different one.
I keep trying to articulate why this is my favorite James offering, and the closest I can come is that I sympathize with Fanshawe completely, unlike the legions of mad resurrectionists, seance-holders and ignorers of warning signs who usually populate ghost stories. The moment I read about those binoculars, I wanted them to be real, and mine, and damn the consequences. Quite aside from the spectral penalties for meddling in that which humankind was never etc., etc., this story has such a great main idea that I always get really excited about it. Necromantic augmented reality!
Like Pokemon Go, but for 16th-century English architecture.
The biggest difference from the 1925 original is the way the TV production treats class issues—which is to say that it does so at all. In the James story, Dr. Fanshawe and Squire Richards are friends; in this version Fanshawe has been hired to appraise the squire’s possessions, so he’s a social inferior, even though the squire is being forced to sell things to keep up his estate. Richards’s failing finances are a good expansion on the idea of decay that drives Baxter to his historical meddling in the first place, and it all adds a new underlying tension to the story.
The Verdict: For obvious reasons, I love this, especially the scenes of Fanshawe at the abbey. I have a few minor quibbles about this production, but most are because I really like that break-it-down-in-the-drawing-room, expository style of old ghost stories; I can hardly fault a TV production for taking a more visual approach to the scary parts. If you love the story as much as I do—alas, you probably don’t—you’ll really enjoy this. If instead you’re meeting “A View from a Hill” for the first time, this is still a great, creepy dramatization.
Might go well with: Whiskey, a bracing cup of tea, your favorite period drama, and, if the thought of academics on bicycles warms your heart, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House.” The central conceit also reminds me of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago books, so you might check those out as well.
Next time: We’re wrapping up “Double Danger” not with a bang, but with many bangs and a sort of trumpeting noise.
Looks like Monday was really Monday’s left-handed doppelganger, Tuesday…
(Episode: “Double Danger”)
Synopsis: The Quests go to Thailand so Benton can develop drugs that facilitate long-distance space travel. They’re pursued by Zin, whose new plan involves a Race Bannon lookalike. Dr. Quest’s awesome project, some interesting animals and the presence of an honest-to-god adventuress brilliantly distract from one of my least favorite classic plots.
One could draw a lot of lessons from this bit of the episode. There’s the benefit of cooperation with regard to, say, escape:
Hadji magicked the bullets out of the bad guy’s gun. Why isn’t the cartoon named after him?
One can argue that anyone who plans to blow up an ancient Buddha deserves no less than this:
In Evil Plotland, bench approaches YOU!
But when it comes right down to it and you’re about to be exploded…
Tip 44: Try to know someone with a helicopter.
Is there anything Jade can’t do? I’m going with “No.”
Next time: Either old and cheesy or…newer and still kind of cheesy.
Next time on TQfM!: Nature vs. torture and the end of this adventure.
Why Finally? As I told someone when I put this adaptation of the E.F. Benson vampire story in my Netflix queue: “God, I hope this doesn’t suck, ’cause I’m gonna watch it anyway.”
(For fellow spook-story fiends, I also wanted to note the 1975 British adaptation with Glynis Johns as the titular lady. That one is very close to the original story, even down to making us watch bored villagers play cards.)
The Premise (Original Story): Friendly, larger-than-life widow Mrs. Amworth livens up the town she moves to after the death of her husband, though a plague of anemia sets in following her arrival. It seems there may be a case of vampirism afoot, and only the narrator’s crank of a brother-in-law can save the day. That makes it sound silly, but it has some genuinely creepy moments, including a floating-outside-the-window scene à la ‘Salem’s Lot.
The Premise (Movie I Am Actually Watching): Elegant refugee from one of those fantastic ’20s-style Edward Gorey drawings Mrs. Claire Amworth moves to a small country village and falls in with the locals: washed-up photographer Jed, his reporter girlfriend Sarah, her editor Lee, and the town doctor. Oh, and the handyman Mrs. A. is draining of blood… From there, she cuts a bloody swath through a town which will surely soon be investing in a new “Population:____ ” sign.
Mrs Amworth ’07 is a little goofy, perhaps, but not unwatchably so. It suffers from the common ailments of low-budget horror: the video quality is a little off, the acting a little stiff, and the special effects not all they might be. One of the biggest changes from the original (other than some gore) is the depiction of small-town life. The Benson story gave us tea and card games; this gives us a whiff of sexual intrigue that hints at a more Twin Peaks version of village social dynamics, and I don’t object to that. I’d rather watch people make out than play whist if those are my options.
The Verdict: Pretty good. While I do try to find the best in everything I write up for Fridays, I’m surprised how much I liked this movie. It differs from the source material, but in a way consistent with updating an early 20th-century story into a horror film; I even enjoyed some of the soapier bits. And honestly, anyone who adapts a Benson story (or M.R. James or to some extent Lovecraft) gets 10 extra points of goodwill from me just for caring enough to do it.
Where this movie shines, though, is its heroine. This Mrs. Amworth takes Benson’s vampire, who was sort of a normal person plus 10% extra(vert) personality plus bloodlust, and adds to the character touches of the traditional movie vamp and callbacks to the time the original story is written. If your horror doesn’t have to be polished, there are worse ways to pass an afternoon.
Might go well with: Cheese and crackers; old British ghost stories. (If you’re very squeamish, you may want to do your eating in the first hour.)
Random Note: I love this movie for giving the world the line “What are you afraid of? Vampire fish?” Can a SyFy movie based on this be far behind?
Synopsis: The Quests go to Thailand so Benton can develop drugs that facilitate long-distance space travel. They’re pursued by Zin, whose new plan involves a Race Bannon lookalike. Dr. Quest’s awesome project, some interesting animals and the presence of an honest-to-god adventuress brilliantly distract from one of my least favorite classic plots.
Sometimes even the smartest and most capable of us gets stumped. A project hits a snag. Circumstances change. A member of your social circle has been replaced with an evil doppelganger. You know, those everyday nuisances.
Tip 43: A fresh pair of eyes can be a big help.
Meet Jade. She travels alone, scares leopards out of trees, and wears simply smashing pith-helmet-and-utility-snood headgear. She’s also macked on Race Bannon enough to accept no substitutes.
Next time: I still like vampires-even ones not named Vlad, Jerry or Jack.
Next time on TQfM!: We draw close to the end of the bunches-of-Bannons trouble.
The spirit of summer vacation appears to be strong with me this year. More “Double Danger” next Monday, and my thoughts on the 2007 modernized adaptation of Mrs. Amworth next Friday!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to chill with my pets.
Why Finally? Because this is the reason I’ve had trouble coming up with Friday posts lately. You’d think an ’80s kid like me would’ve seen enough After-School Specials to avoid these traps, but no: I am addicted to Criminal Minds.
The Premise: In no particular order: murder, kidnapping and murder, murder, murder, rape, rape + murder, child murder, murder, profiling. (More specifically: a team of FBI profilers, led by expert Jason Gideon and later by David Rossi, travel the US to catch the perpetrators of all that violence aforementioned.)
Did you see how the word “murder” began to not even look like a real word up there? That’s sort of what it’s like to watch this show sometimes.
Given my fondness for mystery and cop series and this show’s decade on the air, it’s odd that I hadn’t given Criminal Minds a try before this year. On the other hand, I’ve noticed that when I tell people what I’m watching, they make this…throat-noise, as if I’d announced some personal tragedy. I don’t blame them, either, at least for the first two seasons: the problem with Mandy Patinkin as Jason Gideon is that he’s way too good in the role. You feel every iota of Gideon’s pain, frustration, and building mental collapse—so much so that I began to think people who make it through seasons 1 and 2 should get achievement certificates.
That’s pretty much his happy face…one reason I took to calling Gideon “America’s Most Haunted.”
Edged in black, of course.
Criminal Minds can be super depressing. It’ll make you afraid to own a home, have a routine, play a sport, or make contact with other humans in any way. Most episodes aren’t even really mysteries in the usual sense of the term: the first suspect is often the right one, and the mystery is how to get one step ahead and maybe save one of the (many, many…and sometimes even many-er than that) victims.
But something happened around the middle of season 3: the characters started to work better as a team, and the show began to let us see more of them personally. Instead of relying solely on a few minutes with hacker Penelope Garcia to lighten the mood from SadCon 1, Criminal Minds started to level out a bit. Perhaps the people responsible for the show realized that creeping dread wasn’t what an audience should feel when approaching their TVs; I don’t know, but I am grateful.
The Verdict: It’s kind of the same verdict as my old Beauty and the Beast review: I like it—to the point I am ignoring my blogly duties—but don’t necessarily enjoy liking it. Fainthearted viewers might want to skip the Gideon years; fainthearted viewers might also look through some of the other reviews I’ve written to get an idea about what “too murdery” could possibly mean in the context of the things I watch.
Might go well with: You’ll probably want something significantly lighter as a palate cleanser—I’ve been alternating this with Kolchak: The Night Stalker because I have a weird idea of “light.” And honestly, food is going to be hit or miss with this one.
Synopsis: The Quests go to Thailand so Benton can develop drugs that facilitate long-distance space travel. They’re pursued by Zin, whose new plan involves a Race Bannon lookalike. Dr. Quest’s awesome project, some interesting animals and the presence of an honest-to-god adventuress brilliantly distract from one of my least favorite classic plots.
Tip 42: Globetrotting spy-entists with lookalike enemies posing as bodyguards: they’re just like us!
…In the sense that they take animal photos at every opportunity, anyway.
This show does a lot of things that make me stare like that too, lizard.—This nightmare scenario being a case in point.Cute and horrifying at the same time.
Imagine what they could do with iPhones. For that matter, why hasn’t Benton just gone ahead and invented them?
