Tag: Found-Again

Found-Again Friday: The Secret of Terror Castle: Three Investigators #1

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Why Found-Again? Like many bookish kids of a certain time period, I cut my teeth on Nancy Drew novels (I was hard on books, so if you could see them, you’d think I meant that literally) and the Hardy Boys, supplemented by the occasional T.A.C.K. puzzle-mystery collection. But my favorites were the Three Investigators mysteries, so this week I’m taking a look at the first book in that series.

Not the edition I used to have, but my library had the ones with these psychedelic covers. Mem'ries....
Not the edition I used to have, but my library had the ones with these psychedelic covers. Mem’ries….

The Premise: Inquisitive youngsters Pete, Bob and Jupiter (…yeah) start a detective agency by organizing Jupiter’s family junkyard into an office and a series of brilliant secret passages and by blackmailing Alfred Hitchcock—clearly the best way to do almost anything. For their first case, the three look into the mystery of a vanished old movie star and his spooky mansion. Along the way they have to cope with rivals from school, a menacing ex-manager, and mounting evidence that the darned house may actually be haunted.

I mean it in the best possible way when I say that this one’s a Scooby-Doo episode—a connection I never made when I was watching the Scooby Gang as a kid: maybe I thought everything was like that when I was eight. As explained Gothic goes, though, it’s quite atmospheric, with no amount of explanation quite able to quell the characters’ fright.

The thing about mystery novels for kids is that they center intelligence as the most important quality the character can have—at least, that’s my theory for why I loved these books so much and idolized two of the three main characters. I have clear memories of begging my father to help me move old farm equipment around to make secret passages like The Three Investigators (he refused, thus passively saving me from a series of encounters with various poisonous snakes).

The series is not without its own mysteries, though. Unlike Nancy Drew, who seems to be forever college-aged, I can’t quite figure out how old Bob, Pete and Jupe are supposed to be. They’re too young to drive, but their kid nemesis is not, which makes me think they can’t be younger than 12. And shouldn’t their kid nemesis be interested in girls by now?

The Verdict: This was a surprisingly fun reread, despite being written in what might be called Kids’ Adventurese, with the bowdlerized swearwords and the wholesome protagonists. I suspect a few more of these will be added to the Found-Again archive as time goes on: at the very least there’s still my favorite, The Singing Serpent, yet to go.

Might go well with: popcorn, a glass of milk, envy that you never owned a printing press when you were approximately twelve years old.

 

Next time: It’s Highlander: Endgame, and probably the end of me writing about Connor MacLeod for a while.

Found-Again Friday: Lois & Clark

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It appears to be my month for sitting down with things I remember as being feather-light entertainment.

Why Found-Again? I didn’t catch much of this show during its original run in the 1990s, and it’s been about 7 years since my last viewing—during which I horrified a friend by vocally cheering for one of the show’s recurring villains, to the surprise of no one who reads this site. (This is one of those actors-I-will-follow-to-the-gates-of-hell things: I’m pretty sure I will never not root for Lane Davies, who played Tempus on L&C and whom astute readers will note was Mason Capwell in that Santa Barbara video I linked for a Highlander post a while back.)

The Premise: Clark Kent/Superman gets a job as a reporter, falls for Lois Lane, pals around with Jimmy Olson, fights Lex Luthor and others—you know, the standard Superstuff.

Two things distinguish Lois & Clark from other takes on Superman, though, and the first is that this isn’t a take on Superman so much as on Clark Kent, that nice guy with the glasses who will get you the best Chinese takeout because he can secretly fly to China. These incidental uses of Clark’s powers form my favorite parts of the show: one episode’s opening sequence has him playing baseball by himself. Part of Clark’s charm may well stem from the second change: in this version, his adoptive parents are still alive and very much in evidence.

One thing I always forget about Lois & Clark is how gorgeous it is. Perhaps to offset the guy in the bright red-and-blue suit, the sets are saturated with color, and the offices of The Daily Planet are a mix of the stately old and—for the ’90s—shiny new. Pure dumb luck placed the show a a time, technologically, when every gadget shown would seem hopelessly outdated in a few years; by now, the effect is almost like steampunk (what would you call that: faxpunk? beeperpunk?). Rewatching offers a timely reminder that superheroes, even those who are a current focus of the dreaded gritty reboot, can work as fun.

The Verdict: I am baffled by how little nostalgia there seems to be for Lois & Clark. While it didn’t exactly break new ground and could be contrived from time to time, the show on the whole is as handsome and charming as its main character. It may have been cheese, but if so, it was the TV equivalent of Barely Buzzed.

Might go well with: Junk food—and now that I mention it, that’s some good cheese up there in the link.

…Oh, what the heck: Tempus!

 

Next time: I finish my overview of Highlander: the Series, with mention of Methos and a few other things.

 

 

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.

Found-Again Friday: My Own Worst Enemy, Season the Only

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Why Found-Again? Years ago, I had a bad habit of watching whatever came on TV after Heroes. This sometimes had unexpected results: I expected to like Journeyman and hated it with a burning loathing, but enjoyed My Own Worst Enemy even though star Christian Slater was never my cup of tea. A few weeks ago, I set out to discover whether that was just the rosy glow of being better than the Heroes seasons I would later refer to as Thomas Hardy’s Matt of the Parkmanvilles, or if the series had genuine merit.

The Premise: Generic businessman Henry suffers a neurological glitch that reveals his alter ego, superspy Edward, who has apparently been James Bonding all over the world for democracy for quite some time. The split personality, deliberately induced by the agency Henry/Edward works for (Henry works for the “legitimate” business upstairs, Edward gets his orders from the basement levels), is suddenly malfunctioning. With the help of a few trusted associates, Henry and Edward have to figure out how to coexist without endangering the world, their own survival, or Henry’s personal life.

I’d forgotten in the years since it went off the air that My Own Worst Enemy was the creation of Daniel “Carnivàle” Knauf. Given that the latter is one of my favorite TV shows, I hope that someday I’ll be able to say the phrase “…that Knauf series that was allowed to finish its complete run unhindered.” (A look at his IMDb entry doesn’t inspire hope, but did inspire me to add last year’s Dracula series to my Netflix queue. If all goes well, I’ll soon have three shows to whine and quote Macbeth’s “untimely ripp’d” line about.)

One impressive facet of the show was its star: Christian Slater, an actor to whom my lifelong response had been along the lines of “…Yep, that’s Christian Slater, all right,” did a great job playing two very different characters who didn’t like each other much. It’s clear for most of the series whether you’re looking at Edward or Henry at any given moment, and it gave me new respect for the actor, especially since he’s playing opposite Alfre Woodard, Madchen Amick, and James “The Reason I Watch Part Of LA Confidential Peeking Through My Fingers And Whimpering” Cromwell.

At the same time, the premise was showing definite signs of fatigue by the end of the series’ eight-episode run, even with the complications of finding out what happened to Edward’s parents and the vagaries of the disparate personalities’ love lives. The last episode did end on a heck of a cliffhanger, though, and with Cromwell as a possible villain, My Own Worst Enemy could still have been going places.

The Verdict: I’ve said before that my goodwill can be bought with spy crap, and My Own Worst Enemy is a fun take on the genre. I’m not sure the main idea could have been taken much farther, but it would have been nice to see the show get a chance to try.

The entire series is available on DVD quite cheaply from Amazon. These promos are kind of bad, though.

 

Might go well with: Burn Notice; Carnivàle; a home-cooked meal.

 

Next time: The other white meat MacLeod.

 

Found-Again (and Again) Friday: Musical Interlude 5

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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!

Found-Again Friday: The Original Beauty & The Beast TV Show

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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.

 

Next time: What’s it all about, Highlander?

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: Masters of Horror— Cigarette Burns

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“Some films are meant to be seen…”

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 Häxan or Nosferatu when 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.

Trailer is here.

 

Next time: The beginning of the end of Highlander, and yet another of my enduring film fascinations.

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.