Synopsis: You know those horror movies with people stranded at the house of a madman and forced to compete in strange ways for survival? Well, here’s the Quest version: Race Bannon is in the sights of Snoopy’s old foe, a WWI flying ace, and Bandit is in the sights of a horrific owl-eating condor. Not a Peanuts/JQ crossover, sadly, but there is a dachshund named Wili.
Even when you’re a fading imperialist unnaturally obsessed with your old war record, sometimes things just go right. A worthy opponent shows up, and you can pop him into an unarmed plane and some fetching leather togs and make one last shot at dogfighting glory faster than you can say “Where the heck is my lucky dachshund?” (only auf Deutsch). Things are looking decidedly…up?…but
Tip 51: Karma is indeed a bitch, or in this case a large raptor.
Live by the condor, maybe don’t shoot at the condor, okay?Race has been trying to accomplish this for almost five minutes of screen time at this point. Another win for mother nature.
All’s well that ends in a fiery but deserved plane crash.
Next time: I love my readers so much I rewatched Bordello of Blood.
Next time on TQfM!: New episode! “Skull and Double Crossbones” will get the Quests back to the ocean, and just in time for pirates.
Synopsis: You know those horror movies with people stranded at the house of a madman and forced to compete in strange ways for survival? Well, here’s the Quest version: Race Bannon is in the sights of Snoopy’s old foe, a WWI flying ace, and Bandit is in the sights of a horrific owl-eating condor. Not a Peanuts/JQ crossover, sadly, but there is a dachshund named Wili.
Tip 50: The right environment is important.
It can stray into superstition, but sometimes you just need your enemies to do a little cosplay for you.
Dashing! And creepy!
Of course, your enemies could also set the scene by stealing your good-luck wiener dog.
“Which Peanuts special was this again?”
Alternately, think of this as two scenes from The Quest For Monday!’s 50th Installment Gala.
Next time: We kick off a theme month! Watch this space on Wednesday…
Next time on TQfM!: Up in the air. Honest. That’s where our post is going.
Why Finally? A few weeks ago, we covered a vampire detective I didn’t like—and I have to say I enjoy (for a given value of that word) watching Forever Knight far more now that I go into it knowing I’m going to mock it. A very silly weight has been lifted.
My hunt is still on for that TV equivalent of The Vampire Files’ Jack Fleming, though, so I thought I’d check out Moonlight, which ran for one season in 2007.
The Premise: Mick St. John (Alex O’Loughlin) is a relatively recent vampire; he was a hard-boiled ’50s PI who fell in love and got vamped on his wedding night. This would make a great opportunity for a Moonlight/Highlander: End Game-based crossover where Mick and Duncan MacLeod’s ex bond in some kind of group therapy, but instead Mick is still being absurdly cute solving crimes.
Or, as in this scene, both.
One investigation brings him into contact with a reporter named Beth (Sophia Myles), whose life Mick saved from his ex when Beth was a child, and a relationship begins to bloom. Between fanged villains and Beth’s Lois Lane-like talent for finding trouble and running toward it at high speed, it’s a (un)life of adventure.
You know I love a good case-of-the-week show, but itturns out I still hate internecine vampire politics, so Moonlight occasionally became hard going. The series also plays around with the idea of a cure for vampirism, one of my pet peeves. (I don’t know why it should be, but from the Dark Shadows revival to the romance novels I read as a teenager, I’ve never really clicked with the concept.) Mick is a great character, but I didn’t really like Moonlight itself enough to stick with it.
The Verdict: I honestly wonder if this one might be me; perhaps I’m just in the wrong mood at this point in time. There were a lot of good moments in Moonlight, but they just didn’t add up quite right. I may revisit this in a year or two and see if I find it easier to get into.
Someday, though, it’ll happen: the thing I’m looking for will get made—heck, maybe someone will put the actual Vampire Files on a screen of some size—and when it does, I’ll be nodding and grinning and thinking “Perfect. A little bit X-Files, a little bit Remington Steele, and a little bit Moonlight.” But this show by itself doesn’t seem to be it.
To put it in perspective with other recent reviews here at the Omelet, while Mick is no Mildred Heavewater, neither is he a Nick Knight (thank god).
Might go well with: A nice glass of whatever you like to drink. May want to err on the side of intoxicant.
(Note: some of the roles were recast after the pilot, so the trailer differs from the actual show. On the other hand, the “absurdly cute” quotient is strong.)
[Okay, I admit it: the fact that part of the outside world seems to be putting on a remake of “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” with no sign of stopping threw a monkey wrench into the Omelet for a few weeks. (Hm, that metaphor went off the rails. As did that one, really.) Anyway, service is restored. Welcome back.]
(Episode: “Shadow of the Condor”)
Synopsis: You know those horror movies with people stranded at the house of a madman and forced to compete in strange ways for survival? Well, here’s the Questy version: Race Bannon is in the sights of Snoopy’s old foe, a WWI flying ace, and Bandit is in the sights of a horrific owl-eating condor. Not a Peanuts/JQ crossover, sadly, but there is a wiener dog named Wili.
Tip 49: As they say, “Location, location, location.”
…Preferably not THIS location!That’s better.
Next time: That review of 2007 TV series Moonlight really exists and will be coming out— as will a brief look at The Conjuring, as soon as I can bring myself to grab a screencap of Annabelle. (I wish I was kidding. Being a nervous/squeamish horror fan has its unique challenges.)
Synopsis: You know those horror movies with a group of people stranded at the house of a delusional madman and forced to compete in strange ways for survival? Well, Jonny Quest has one too; Race Bannon is in the sights of Snoopy’s old foe, a WWI flying ace, and Bandit is in the sights of a horrific owl-eating condor. Not a Peanuts/JQ crossover, sadly, but there is a wiener dog named Wili.
Tip 48: Refresh yourself.
Think of your typical day: pushing papers, fighting goblins, building killer robots, maybe even proofreading. Whatever it is, you’ll do it better if you’re well-rested.
I assume these are official Special Forces PJs…or maybe just some of that performance sleepwear I’ve been reading about.
Sweet dreams…
Never mind.
Next time: I plan to review 2007 TV series Moonlight, whether I manage to finish watching Season the Only by Friday or not.
Next time on TQfM!: It’s up in the air, literally.
It finally happened: Thanks to some plotting for October and December (which, surprise!, will look a lot like most people’s October in terms of Friday posts), I’ve kind of cordoned off my possibilities for slow viewing weeks. As a result, I am all out of Friday at the moment.
When TV shows hit this sort of obstacle, they often do a clip show, so I will too.
Apropos Of Our Cynical Omelet: Search Terms And Me
I love reading search-term posts on other sites, but having few readers means it’s taken almost two years to amass enough for one of my own. I also think it might be fun to grade the Omelet in terms of providing service, so let’s see what people have been looking for!
“Hellboy’s heroine”—This was my first-ever search term, and though I’ve since referred to the end of the Hellboy movie, all this person got was a photo of my 2014 Hellboy Halloween costume. I’m so sorry. Grade: D+
To make it up to you, here’s Liz……and just in case, here’s Kate Corrigan.
“Sean Connery and Carol Sopel”—Apparently these two were married. I didn’t know that before seeing someone look for it, and I can’t imagine the searcher felt edified by my bitching about Highlander and Darby O’Gill. Grade: F
“Highlander absorbance”—This is the search term I’m most proud of; when I first noticed the spelling of “absorbance” on Brenda’s printout in the movie, I couldn’t find any confirmation that it was correct. That was several years ago, however, and the internet is much improved. I’m oddly pleased to be a resource to the three other proofreading Highlander fans out there. Grade: A+
“Jay Sherman and his sister Margo”—I mentioned the sibling relationship in my Friday post on The Critic, but didn’t really get into it. Margo’s great, though. Grade: B-
“Count Blah”—I used the Count—a Greg the Bunny character veeeeerrrry loosely based on the other famous vampire puppet—as a sight gag in my review of Frankenstein. I should probably do a Found-Again post for Greg the Bunny one of these days. Grade: C
“Kurgan fanfic”—Dude, I have tried: not to write any, but to find some, especially when I was doing the There Can Be Only Monday! posts. After on-and-mostly-off searching since I first saw the movie in the early 2000s, I have found maybe five stories. Highlander’s villain is such a beloved bad guy…by me, for one…but apparently does not inspire people to churn out reams of prose. Grade: does effort count?
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.
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.
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.
