Tag: Movies

Holy…Ground?! I Just Watched Highlander II

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Like most people, I have a natural tendency to pick up speech patterns from things I watch on TV, and one of the phrases I regularly try to expunge from my vocabulary came from watching several hours of Archer in one go.

It’s hard to expunge “What the shit?!” from one’s speech, however, when what-the-shit-worthy things keep happening—and the latest of these was me sitting down to watch The Highlander Movie That Doesn’t Technically Exist.

Highlander II may be the most what-the-shit thing I’ve ever watched, and I include several Ken Russell films, Scream and Scream Again, and Transylvania 6-5000 on that list.

In fact, one could almost believe in time travel after watching Highlander II: it often feels like a weird melange of movies that came before and after it, including Dune (melange…heh), Dark City, Robocop, Soylent Green, Death Wish, The Fifth Element, the Tim Burton Batman movies, and just a touch of Stargate. The title cards so beloved by the people who make Highlander stuff inform us that the ozone layer went kaput in 1999, glossing over the implication that Connor managed to ruin the earth—okay, okay, or didn’t prevent its ruin— in only 14 years. Now, in 2024, the world is covered by a shield and everything looks very urban-apocalypse.

You know I’m going to say it.

HOW COULD THIS POSSIBLY BE WORSE IF THE KURGAN WON?? THE WHOLE DAMN MOVIE MATCHES HIS OUTFIT!

"…As it should."
“…As it should.”

This is also the movie in which it is revealed that immortals are actually aliens, because that always makes everything better and doesn’t at all stomp viciously on the historical-supernatural intersection that makes the whole Highlander idea interesting in the first place. It does provide a convenient explanation for bringing back Ramirez, though, who I don’t mind nearly as much in this film—he’s a lousy Mr. Miyagi, but “running around and getting things done” has always been Connery’s cinematic bread and butter, so he’s much better used here.

And our villain this time is the alien world’s ruler, Gen. Katana (really, people?),  played by Michael Ironside as…I guess as the kind of despot we were supposed to fear in the first movie. (Other immortals probably have to watch Extreme Prejudice as a PSA.) What the Kurgan—and Kane, and Slan—did for unwieldy cars, this guy does for subway trains, and therein lies one of the movie’s strengths: the action sequences are pretty good. I wish I hadn’t had to watch the rest of this to see Connor MacLeod on hover-skates, but I did, and it’s kind of fun.

This is probably the liveliest the Highlander has ever been onscreen, and a pity that it’s in service of this font of subsequent audience amnesia. I started watching Highlander II thinking perhaps the classic Roger Ebert review had been too harsh, since the late, great critic never seemed to have much affinity for any of the genres it could be said to occupy; I eventually concluded that if he had been versed in the Highlander franchise, Ebert might have been even harsher.

Oh, and in this film, rather than dying circa 1993 in a car crash, Brenda dies of solar radiation in 1999. What the shit?

 

Next time: Get out your Warren Zevon music.

 

 

 

 

Found-Again Friday: Bram Stoker’s Dracula—The Coppola Film

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Why Found-Again? When I said a few weeks ago I was adding the 2013 Dracula TV series to my Netflix queue, I didn’t wait around. (Capsule review: it’s not perfect, but I never in my life thought I’d sincerely utter the words “I want a Renfield,” either. Wow. Mad Science! Steampunk! Impalers and Van Helsings colluding together! Mass hysteria!)

That said, the show seems to owe a great debt to the 1992 film adaptation, especially in the turning of subtext into opulent text.

The Premise: You’re kidding, right? No? Okay: Slightly dim but decent Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves, hitting the first part of that description rather hard) unwittingly brokers one hell of a real estate deal when he sells an English abbey to Count Dracula (Gary Oldman), who in no time goes from elderly nobleman to hot young technophile thanks to the fine English climate and a constant supply of human blood. Sadly for Dracula but fortunately for Britain, he is eventually thwarted by Professor Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins)—though not before the Count and Mrs. Harker (Winona Ryder) have fallen in love.

If you enjoy the kind of excess this adaptation revels in, it’s quite good. That sounds pejorative, I suppose, but I don’t mean it that way: as a viewer of Dracula movies, there are times when I like to watch a rich, Victorian-Decadent riff on the legend of Vlad Tepes and Stoker’s book, and there are times when I’d just like to see a guy in a cape who owns a spooky castle. (There are also times I’d just like to see George Hamilton and Arte Johnson spoofing the whole enterprise, for that matter; I’m kind of omni-Dracula that way.) The beautiful visuals in Coppola’s film mitigate its cheese factor—the old Count’s double-bun hairdo, slutty Lucy, Van Helsing chewing more scenery than his nemesis ever did necks—and so does its all-star cast.

The Verdict: I was a purist teenager when I saw this in the theater, but I think the Dracula story may be one I’ve grown less cynical about as time goes by. As I said, it’s not always my cup of tea when I need a Count fix, but it’s a very worthy entry among its peers. And Tom Waits as Renfield is not to be missed.

Might go well with: Steak; wine; the Frank Langella Dracula movie from the ’70s. Oh, and garlic bread!

 

 

Next time: Mondays are going to be no less weird on this site. They might be a little less pretty, though.

 

Found-Again Friday: American Dreamer

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Why Found-Again? If you’re familiar with both American Dreamer and this site, you’ll have noticed that it hits all the benchmarks—mystery, romance, bookish heroine, interesting setting, spy crap—necessary to have been part of my formative movie-watching years. And it is so.

The Premise: Housewife Cathy Palmer is in a rut, so she enters (and wins) a writing contest sponsored by her favorite spy novels. After a blow to the head during a tour of Paris, Cathy thinks she is fictional superspy Rebecca Ryan, and it’s up to the books’ real author (Tom Conti) to stop her from running amok.

He fails miserably, of course, because she thinks he’s Rebecca’s sidekick: what self-respecting spy listens to her sidekick?

The movie’s opening homage to 1963’s Charade lets you know exactly what you’re in for. American Dreamer is a kind of movie that doesn’t seem to be made anymore, elegant and articulate and completely bonkers. “Someone gets hit on the head and thinks they’re a superhero” is a cartoon plot, not a movie where important things happen at the ambassador’s ball—and yet here we are. Supporting actors include the excellent Coral Browne and Giancarlo Giannini, and there are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments along with the beautiful shots of Paris.

The Verdict: I’d thought the passage of time might have made me too cynical for this movie. At its heart it’s a fairy tale, a seductive story that murmurs that, as George Eliot wrote,  “it is never too late to be who you might have been.” But who among us doesn’t need to hear that from time to time?

Might go well with: Champagne, French food, Hitchcock movies, Roger Moore Bond films.

The trailer gives away the bad guy (did all the trailers of my youth suck this much and I never noticed until 2015?), so have this instead:

 

Next time: More time with Duncan MacLeod of some clan or other.

Thoughts on Soylent Green

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Last weekend, I finally watched 1973’s Soylent Green. I have a rule that if I make repeated references to a film over time, I’ll make an effort to see the original film at some point (called, for obvious reasons, “The Deliverance Rule”); in the case of Soylent Green, however, I’d been putting it off for years.

I have a problem, you see: years of religious education as a youngster have given me a lasting aversion to apocalypses and dystopias. I’m probably the only person who felt sick after Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds movie because of the actual plot. The only exception is Hellboy, and as I read more of that, it seems less like an exception and more like long-form masochism on my part*. So I expected that Soylent Green would, at a minimum, ruin my day.

It didn’t come close.

If you’re not familiar with anything about the movie but the titular Soylent Green food substance being made of “Peeeeople!,” a brief rundown: in an environmentally depleted near future, Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) stumbles onto a secret when a member of the Soylent Company’s board is assassinated. Soylent makes nutrition squares that meet the food needs of most of the non-wealthy in this society: think Clif Bars without the cachet and tastiness. Along the way we see glimpses of $150 vegetables, apartments that come with supplied concubines, and suicide parlors—where Thorn’s roommate eventually checks in after learning the truth about Soylent Green. In the tradition of ’70s nihilistic movies of all stripes, Thorn is fatally wounded before he can broadcast the news of Soylent Green’s very special recipe.

I think there are several reasons the movie didn’t work for me, many of which aren’t really its fault:

  • Their near-future plot takes place in 2022, and we’re supposed to believe the planet has been screwed up for so long that Heston’s character can’t really remember real food. I’ve never been happier about the state of the earth in 2015 in my entire life as I was while watching Soylent Green.
  • The scene in which Thorn is running around the factory and discovering the truth is almost laughable: bodies are apparently being turned into food while still in bags. New Chewy Soylent Green, I guess?
  • There are two things TV and movies in the 1970s seemed sure were imminent: the unlocking of the mind’s psychic potential and the American adoption of the metric system. This would have been a better movie if they’d gone with that first one.
  • The look of the downtrodden citizenry in Soylent Green is heavily derivative of pictures of Soviet breadlines, which probably worked for the film’s viewers for a while, but which now suggests that anyone looking to get rich in 2022 might want to invest heavily in headscarf manufacture.
  • The movie steps on its own premise as far as I’m concerned, making a world so grim it’s hard to believe anybody would care that they’re eating people. Hey, at least someone’s recycling. (This may well be just me: in an ideal world, my mortal remains would be turned into a skeleton in someone’s science class, or they’d overturn the law about binding books in human skin and I’d have to finally finish a novel before making my will. I have a very flexible idea of respect for the dead, I guess.)

As a cultural artifact, Soylent Green is people!!!! interesting, but it’s so rare that I get to write about a movie and conclude that yes, in this day and age, it maybe is for the faint of heart.

 

*Don’t get me wrong: Hellboy is excellent, but I shouldn’t be reading it.

 

There Can (Still!) Be Only Monday! Talking About Highlander…A Lot, Part 38

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Today we’ll take a brief look at the third…I mean, clearly the second movie in the series, Highlander: The Final Dimension. (Doubtless you’re thinking, “‘Final’? This isn’t even the penultimate movie!” You’d be correct. The whole franchise seems to have a real problem with the concept of finality, as the recent talk of a reboot only confirms.)

For this one, I’ll borrow a bit of the format from my Friday posts.

Known to casual observers as: Highlander: the one in which Mario van Peebles plays the Kurgan, sort of, and there’s some kinda kung fu, I guess?

The Premise: Connor must defeat some long-trapped immortals after an archaeological dig accidentally sets them free; it turns out the Highlander’s not The One after all. (Is there any way to fit that into continuity unless Connor had a psychotic break at the end of the first movie? Somewhere, the Kurgan is laughing, admittedly through a neck stump.)

Complicating this good-vs.-evil plot are a number of human factors, including Connor’s adopted son (Brenda has apparently died in a car crash), a cop who seems to be the official NYPD holder of the grudge against “Russell Nash,” and a beautiful archaeologist who is, shall we say, interested in old bones.

Did I mention the bad guy has magical illusion powers he got from killing one of Connor’s mentors? That too.

As I poke around the internet, I get the distinct impression that most people regard all the Highlander sequels as crap. There’s a certain amount of truth to that—I can’t say this is a particularly great movie even by Highlander standards—but Final Dimension does present some interesting features. The villain, Kane, is a blatant Kurgan ripoff on a scale I couldn’t exceed even if I were doing it myself, but at least he and his men are seen actually destroying a village at one point, and Kane’s illusion power makes the “put someone Connor loves in a car and terrorize them by driving like a maniac” sequence superior to the one in the original film. It’s also nice to see the franchise acknowledging its debt to martial-arts movies with Connor’s training in the initial flashback sequence. It also shines new light on…

The Connor problem: When I watched this again after starting to write these posts, Netflix threw up the Beowulf movie with Christopher Lambert as a recommendation, and I watched it. I’d always assumed part of Connor’s apparent ennui was due to some flaw in Christopher Lambert’s performance; while he’s not quite a ball of fire in Beowulf, it became clear that the anhedonia is endemic to the Highlander.

(I’d also like to put in a small plug for the 1999 Beowulf. It’s definitely a—whimsical?—take on the legend, but it’s a quite bearable little action flick with steampunk and demon ladies and Oliver Cotton, who was a barbarian king in Robin of Sherwood, as another one. It grows on you.)

The Verdict: I hate to say too many bad things about Final Dimension, as the film does try to address both some things I complained about in the original Highlander and the paradox of its own existence. I will say it’s probably for diehard fans only.

And my god, they use “O Fortuna” in the trailer!

Next time: I say nice things about Christian Slater.

Next time on TCBOM!: Still working on that audio, so it’ll probably be the TV series.

Found-Again Friday: The Satanic Rites of Dracula

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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.

 

Found-Again Friday: The Relic (Movie)

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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.

Found-Again Friday: Bullshot

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Campion.

The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries.

Partners in Crime.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

If any or all of these are on your “fondly watched” list, you might enjoy Bullshot. Ostensibly a parody of the Bulldog Drummond movies of the 1930s, this movie doesn’t require knowledge of Drummond to be enjoyed—I’m proof of that. Any old tale of bored World War One veterans embarking on a life of solving mysteries will do, and there are plenty to choose from.

Why Found-Again? Like Kent Montana, Hugh “Bullshot” Crummond is far too silly a character to revisit on a regular basis: a former WWI flying ace with a background in marksmanship, science, fisticuffs, winning regattas all by himself, and pretty much anything else (except tarantulas!), Crummond and his faithful valet—pronounce the T, please— are on the case.

On someone’s case, anyway.

The Premise: When absentminded professor Rupert Fenton is kidnapped by nefarious foreigner Otto von Bruno for his new discovery, it’s up to Fenton’s daughter Rosemary to get to “the one man in England who can help us.” Is there any doubt who that is? And is there any doubt that von Bruno is already his nemesis?

This movie is, and I mean this in the best possible way, gleefully stupid: a broad comedy that is always great but could never be considered “good.” The cast is also fantastic, as leads Alan Shearman, Diz White and Ron House are joined by Billy Connolly and Mel “The Albino from Princess Bride” Smith, among others. It’s got adventure, slapstick, parody, romance of a sort, a touch of steampunk, and lines like “Is this seemly, Mrs Platt-Higgins? Playing popular music and your husband only ten years dead?” Good stuff.

The Verdict: In addition to the above, I’ve never regretted watching anything with Billy Connolly in it, even the final seasons of Head of the Class.

Well okay, those, but only those.

Might go well with: Stilton; tea; jazz.

 

Next time: The one question we should all be asking at this point in Highlander.

 

 

 

Apropos of Nothing: A Non-Exhaustive List of Things That Will Buy My Goodwill in Movies/TV/Books

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  • The dog doesn’t die. It barely matters what dog or why; I just assume that any canine on my screen or in the pages of the book I’m reading has a large target on its back, and I enjoy being wrong about this.
  • Mummies (animate, French-speaking mummies a plus, as I mentioned last Halloween).
  • The Loch Ness Monster. I have watched some incredible crap just to see a few seconds of CGI Nessie. The same could be said for dragons.
  • A small, informal list of actors I would follow to cinematic hell and back (in some cases literally: are we ever going to get a third Hellboy movie?). When I say informal, I mean even to me: until quite recently I thought Tim Curry was on it, yet my Wiseguy DVDs go unwatched.
  • Spy crap. Any spy crap, really.
  • Architecture. I didn’t like Numb3rs much at all, but stuck around far longer than I should have just to see the house.
  • “They’re romantically involved, and they solve crimes!”
  • Owls. There’s no good reason. I just like owls.
  • Homages to film noir. Oddly, I often enjoy these more than the bona fide noirs themselves.
  • Mythology/folklore: I was going to narrow this down to actual mythology/folklore, but the first season of Sleepy Hollow was so gut-bustingly funny in its zeal to make things up that I’m going to leave this a broad category.
  • Any included reference to 1) Sherlock Holmes, 2) The Pirates of Penzance, 3) poetry, preferably Victorian, or 4) art.

So there you have it, just as I realize this list could in most respects be retitled “My Love For Castle Explained, Plus Owls.”

Found-Again Friday: The Big Chill

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This week I didn’t finish reading that book I take a look at 1983’s The Big Chill, a movie I’ve sarcastically described as “Costner’s finest,” because his character is dead when the movie starts. It’s a sentiment that downplays my love of Bull Durham, Tin Cup and Silverado, but nonetheless has a bit of truth to it: 20+ years after I saw Dances With Wolves*, it’s starting to look like I’ll never forgive.

Why Found-Again? I’ve seen this movie many times: I’d love to tell you that it’s because even as a youngster I was interested in relationship dynamics, but no, it’s because I thought Jeff Goldblum was hot a good 7 years before most of the American public did. I do think it’s interesting that when I see him in interviews now,  he seems to most strongly resemble his character in The Big Chill, though.

The Premise: Following the suicide of their troubled friend, a group of college pals spends a few days together wondering what the hell happened to him—and to them—in the years since graduation.

Then they all have sex, more or less.

There are still lots of reasons to like this movie other than  Goldblum as the avatar of—well, of later, more universally beloved Goldblum: the soundtrack is amazing, it’s a really strong cast, and the Sam character’s TV-show opening credits are an excellent parody of the ’80s detective shows that haunt this Friday feature of mine. And I wasn’t kidding about the relationship dynamics: I remember having to watch this four or five times to really grasp who’d been feuding with whom, who’d hooked up with whom, and how it all led them to where they were as fully fledged adults.

The Verdict: Mixed. It’s definitely not a rewatch-till-you-drop movie, but watching it now I feel more sympathy for the characters and more admiration for the way the movie flows in general.

Might go well with: Cleaning up after dinner, wine, an identity crisis.

Here’s the trailer for the DVD edition I have:

And here’s one of the older ones, in case you thought I was exaggerating about the later Goldblum emphasis:

 

*The pathetic thing is that I didn’t even pay to see it: my friend and I sneaked into the theater when Warlock proved too intense for me, the Squeam Queen. The nicest thing I can say about Dances With Wolves is that no one gets their eyes ripped out by Julian Sands, but make no mistake, that is a nice thing.

Next time: Thank god someone in Highlander knows how to investigate—no, of course it’s not Moran. Also, how to catch a movie character up on the plot in 15 seconds (approx.).