Stargate

Stargate (1994)
Dir. by Roland Emmerich

Starring Kurt Russell, James Spader and Jaye Davidson

[content warning: Orientalism, transphobia, white savior narratives, depression, suicide, child death]

Plot:

Egyptologist and conspiracy-theorist Daniel Jackson is hired by the government to translate a series of hieroglyphs on a stone unearthed in Giza in the 20s.  When he succeeds, he learns that they are the code to activate a portal to the other side of the universe.  Traveling with a team of soldiers to investigate the destination planet, Jackson becomes entangled in a revolution by the humans living on that planet against their alien overlords, who have taken the guises of the Egyptian deities.

Nostalgia:

I’m almost positive that I saw this movie in the theaters.  I don’t actually remember having done so, but it’s exactly the sort of movie I would have gone to see. If it wasn’t in the theaters, I certainly saw it on Pay-Per-View the next year.  We taped it off of TV, and the Extended Cut DVD is one of the first I can remember buying when I was in college and got my first DVD player.  I had several friends who were obsessed with the TV show at the time, but I never really watched it while it was airing.  Saw the first couple of seasons on DVD about a decade ago now, and that’s about it.

Review:

How the hell did this movie start a franchise that’s lasted for 25 years?  There’s been three TV shows, two direct-to-DVD movies, and a web series, all stemming from this action B-movie from the guys who brought you Geostorm and The Day After Tomorrow.  What did this movie had that so many other mid-90s movies didn’t?

I think what it had going for it, more than anything else, was its setting and design.  This movie came out in 1994, at a time when CG was beginning to take over the film world.  Sci-fi movies were big, and there hadn’t been a big, traditional fantasy movie since NeverEnding Story II in 1990, four years earlier.  While this isn’t, strictly speaking, a fantasy movie, the ancient Egyptian trappings give it much more of a time-traveling fantasy feel than most of the other sci-fi movies of the time.  It was something different and unexpected. 

It also helps that the movie has two strong leads.  An almost unrecognizably young James Spader, of The Blacklist fame, plays Daniel Jackson as a nerdy scientist who’s incredibly competent in his field, but is completely out of his depth in most other situations.  As a very nerdy kid myself, who’d later be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, I saw a lot of myself in Jackson, and immediately emphasized with him.  Despite his social awkwardness, Spader manages to imbue Jackson with some of the quirky humor that he would later bring to Alan Shore on Boston Legal. In one of the more memorable scenes in the movie, Jackson, in an attempt to communicate to the planet’s citizens that the disgusting-looking food they’ve given him tastes like chicken, flaps his arms up and down and makes clucking noises repeatedly.  Everyone – slave and Earth soldier alike – just stares at him.  It’s equal parts endearing and cringe-inducing, but goes a long way to making Jackson an actual person instead of a character defined by his job or role in the film.

The same can be said for Kurt Russell as Col. O’Neil.  The role could have just been played as a hard-ass military commander, and that’s what he seems to be for the first couple of scenes.  However, he’s introduced in a depressive state, with his son having recently died in an accidental shooting.  As the movies goes on, Russell brings in not only the sadness that one might expect with such a background, but also the anger.  His Russell is bitter and self-destructive, but not in a way that he’s willing to take down the rest of his men with him.  While I enjoyed Richard Dean Anderson in the role in what I saw of the TV series, I think that his portrayal is barely the same character as what we see in the movie, rounding off all of the sharp edges of his personality and making him a more lighthearted individual.  It works for the show, but I don’t think it would have for the movie.

Now, the setting does bring up legitimate concerns about Orientalism. The movie essentially revolves around the (already existing at the time) conspiracy theory that all of the great works of ancient Egypt were completed with alien assistance.  Because, of course, a culture from that part of the world wouldn’t have been able to do it on their own.  No, the pyramids were just landing docks for alien spacecraft, and all of Egyptian culture is based on lies and manipulation.  And it takes the arrival of the strong, Western military power to free the backwards, tribal slaves from their oppressors *eyeroll* (though, in the movie’s defense, they were deliberately kept in that state by the aliens.  The script wisely incorporates two millennia of linguistic drift and doesn’t have them speaking an existing dialect, and you could posit that there would have been a corresponding 2000-year tech increase if not for alien intervention).

So yeah, the cultural politics of Stargate aren’t great.  Also complicating matters is the casting of Jaye Davidson as the villain Ra. He had just come off of his debut performance as a transgender woman in the movie The Crying Game, a performance for which he’d received a Best Supporting Actor nomination.  His role here is obviously playing up that association, deliberately going for a very young, androgynous look for the utterly evil alien.  That this movie came out the same year as Ace Ventura, a movie also inspired by The Crying Game for its negative portrayal of a transgender woman, makes me convinced that the filmmakers were going for the same thing.  It seems to have actually been enough to get Jaye Davidson to quit acting altogether after this movie.

  

Fortunately for the franchise, from what I remember the TV show’s more complicated mythology manages to help alleviate this problem somewhat, though there are definitely individual episodes that are still cringe-worthy in an early TNG way (I’m looking at you, “Emancipation”).  I’m not sure I could recommend it to anyone who hasn’t already seen it, especially if you’re sensitive to Orientalism or white savior narratives. I still enjoyed the movie, however, despite its more obvious flaws, though that enjoyment has drifted more into the “guilty pleasure” status over the years. 

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-One thing I definitely can’t fault the movie for is its score. I really like David Arnold’s music, especially the main title theme, which they’d use for the TV series as well.

-My roommate in college was from Colorado Springs, which is where the real complex that the Stargate team is fictionally located in resides.  He always got great amusement from the fact that in real-life there’s a zoo sitting on top of the mountain the Stargate’s inside of.

Demolition Man

Demolition Man (1993)
Dir. by Marco Brambilla

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock and Nigel Hawthorne

[content warning: political satire, actual murder]

Plot:

When LAPD Sergeant John “the Demolition Man” Spartan is framed for the murder of civilians while taking down crime kingpin Simon Phoenix, both he and Phoenix become some of the first inmates in the new cryogenic prison being tested.  Thirty years later, Phoenix escapes during a parole hearing, and begins to terrorize a future Los Angeles that is no longer used to violence of any kind.  The police, now only experienced in apprehending suspects who break curfew and tell dirty jokes, thaw Spartan out of cryo and reinstate him in an attempt to recapture the dangerous fugitive.

Nostalgia:

My first memories of this movie are actually of the aggressive marketing push for the movie conducted by Taco Bell, due to its prominent feature in the film.  I was only 11 at the time, and there was no way my parents were actually going to let me watch the movie itself.  I think I first saw it sometime in high school, and by the time I headed off to college it was one of my favorite action movies.  I don’t watch it quite as much anymore, but I still give it a spin in the DVD player every year or so.

Review:

This is a very bizarre film.  It’s one-half violent 90s sci-fi action movie, and one-half social satire dystopian comedy.  While the two halves don’t really fit all that well together on paper, I enjoy both of them equally, and the movie itself quite a bit.

While the movie isn’t a deliberate comedy (at least, no one in the movie is playing it like a comedy), the borderline-surreal environment that the reawakened Spartan finds himself in is more than sufficient for the film to have plenty of laughs to go with its action.  Most of these come from Spartan’s interplay with his new partner on the force, Sandra Bullock’s extremely enthusiastic Lenina Huxley.  A 20^th-century pop culture fanatic, she gloms on to Spartan like her own private Stan Lee, eager to show off her (frequently wrong) knowledge of 90s slang and action hero tropes. There’s also a lot of fish-out-of-water humor involving Spartan’s reactions to “modern” technology, most notably an extended reoccurring gag with a machine that dispenses fines for swearing, and the lack of toilet paper in the restrooms – two gags that naturally dovetail together in one of the movie’s more memorable scenes.

While Bullock and Stallone are both good in their roles, special attention has to be paid to Wesley Snipes as the villain.  When we first meet him, he’s a ruthless, self-assured drug kingpin, who takes pleasure in taunting Spartan before he gets captured.  Due to the machinations of the outwardly affable Dr. Cocteau, he emerges from cryo freeze as an over-the-top, almost cartoonish terrorist.  While Stallone mostly goes around with this bemused, “I can’t believe this shit” expression, Snipes’s Simon Phoenix is openly disdainful and sarcastic about the future, making his interactions with just about every part of this ridiculous dystopia a joy to watch.  It’s not quite to the level of Alan Rickman in Robin Hood, but he does begin to approach that level of scenery-chewing, which is just perfect for a movie with this satirical tone.

Phoenix's wardrobe is sponsored by Goodyear

Speaking of the dystopia, the movie takes multiple potshots at PC culture and over-regulation.  Pretty much everything that makes life enjoyable seems to have been regulated out of existence, leading to a famous, epic libertarian Denis Leary rant late in the film.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the movie went into production shortly after Bill Clinton took office.  However, even if the movie’s politics aren’t really modern any more, it has several points that still resonate today, especially when it comes to the government trying to decide what people can do with their bodies (both sex and pregnancy without a permit having been made illegal).  And the Taco Bell scene is still amazing.

I’m not sure what it says about the movie that what it’s probably most known for now is an extended product placement.  According to Huxley, all of the major franchises competed themselves into oblivion, leaving Taco Bell as the only restaurant in existence.  As a reward for saving his life, Dr. Cocteau invites Spartan to an upscale, fancy Taco Bell, with a valet and live music.  It’s such a memorable scene that Taco Bell actually recreated the restaurant from the movie as a pop-up at this year’s San Diego Comic Con to celebrate the movie’s 25^th anniversary.

I haven’t talked much about the action itself in the movie, and that’s because the action movie side of the film is mostly standard early-90s fair.  It’s well shot, for the most part, and decently choreographed, but there’s nothing truly inventive about any of it.  This movie doesn’t live on its violence, as much as it does the reactions of everyone else to the fights, from Huxley’s gleeful enthusiasm to a random cop who has to use a Youtube tutorial to figure out how to arrest Phoenix.

Even if I don’t really agree with all of the movie’s satirical targets, I find that there’s more than enough for me to still enjoy it, even in 2018.  It’s definitely a relic of its time, but that’s actually part of the point: Spartan is an 80s/90s era action hero in a modern world that’s moved beyond him.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-Seriously, I’ve seen multiple breakdowns and infographics trying to explain how the three seashells thing is supposed to work.  And I get it in theory.  My question is, what does the next person to come into the restroom do? Use the same seashells?

-Jack Black has a blink-and-you-miss-him role as one of the Scraps in the sewers, something I never caught in all of my times watching it until I had it pointed out to me.

-This movie accurately called Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career, a decade before he became Governor of California.  In fact, the movie has him becoming president due to a new Constitutional amendment being passed – an amendment which was actually proposed right after Schwarzenegger was elected.

-In a slightly creepier coincidence, the inmate immediately before Simon Phoenix on the parole hearing docket is listed as a “Peterson, Scott.” Many years after the movie’s release, a man named Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife, in a media circus trial that made the news nightly.

*Batteries Not Included

*Batteries Not Included (1987)
Dir. by Matthew Robbins

Starring Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Frank McRae and Elizabeth Pena

[content warning: mental illness, elder abuse]

Plot:

A crumbling New York City apartment building with only five residents is the lone holdout preventing the construction of a new commercial center.  Desperate to tear the building down, a corrupt executive hires a local gang member to terrorize the residents into leaving.  Meanwhile, a family of small alien robot creatures has decided to make the building their new home.

Nostalgia:

I don’t recall whether we had this on VHS, or if it’s something that we rented frequently – or even if it was just something that I watched on the Disney Channel.  But I watched it often enough as a kid that I had pretty strong memories of particular scenes.  I’m virtually positive that I haven’t seen it since the 1990s.

Review:

This movie is way more depressing than I remember it being.  My memories of it only really include the happy or funny bits: the scene where the “Fix-its” help to cook food in the diner, the “sex” scene between the two robots, the restored building at the end.  They didn’t include all of the fairly dark and disturbing scenes in between. 

For the first twenty minutes or so of the movie, it’s actually a drama about mental illness and gentrification.  Jessica Tandy heartbreakingly plays an elderly resident of the building with some form of dementia, who continually confuses Carlos, the gang member who’s harassing her fellow residents, with her deceased teenage son.  While she constant maintains a cheerful attitude, the same can’t be said for the remaining occupants: her husband who’s afraid that she’ll deteriorate even more rapidly if they move, a struggling artist who breaks up with his girlfriend, a pregnant single woman whose boyfriend is never there, and an ex-boxer who spends all of his time repairing the tiling in a building that’s about to be bulldozed anyway.  It’s certainly a warm and fuzzy way to start a family sci-fi film, isn’t it?

Things do pick up once the aliens finally arrive, however.  While the effects are showing their age a lot now (obvious matte lines are obvious), they were state of the art for the 80s, and the model and design work is still superb in my opinion.  Each of the Fix-Its is visually distinct, and has its own personality, and I like the touch that the three offspring Fix-Its have parts that are clearly scavenged from the things that the parents found in the building.  I found myself enjoying the movie a lot more once they’d finally shown up, though a little of the humor (especially when Carlos gets dragged into the rooftop shack they’ve taken over and emerges with a cartoon “electrocuted” look) was more over-the-top than I would have preferred.

While I didn’t know it while I was watching the movie, it makes sense in retrospect to learn that *Batteries Not Included was the first screenplay written by Brad Bird.  It’s got the same mix of humor, pathos, maturity and robots that made The Iron Giant such a cult classic a decade later.  The mix isn’t quite right here, but he’d definitely perfect it over time.

  

This review is a little shorter than some of my others, because it’s now been almost a month since I watched the movie.  The original version of the review was only half-finished when I lost the flash drive that it was on, and other delays have prevented me from getting it re-written in a timely manner.  While I have some misgivings about the way that Tandy’s character’s mental illness is used as a source of humor, the part itself is very well-acted, and the chemistry between her and Hume Cronyn (her real-life husband) comes through in every scene.  While I did enjoy the rewatch overall, I’m not sure if I’d really recommend it to anyone who didn’t have any nostalgia for it.

Nostalgia: B-
Rewatch: C+

Stray Thoughts:

-The setup for the location of this movie is almost exactly the same as the house in Up.  I’m not sure where they managed to find one building surrounded by empty lots like that, but it’s definitely a real location and not a backlot.

An American Tail

An American Tail (1986)
Dir. by Don Bluth

Starring Phillip Glasser, Nehemiah Persoff, John P. Finnegan and Dom DeLuise

[content warning: extensive talk of antisemitism, immigrant persecution, child labor, trauma-inducing images and a brief reference to the Irish-English conflict]

Plot:

After their home is burned in an anti-Jewish pogrom in the 1880s, a family of Russian mice emigrate to the United States. Separated from the rest of his family upon arrival, young Fievel Mousekewitz sets out on a quest to find them, and ends up inspiring the mice of New York City to fight back against the cats that are oppressing them.

Nostalgia:

As I said in my The Land Before Time review, I know that this was one of the first movies that my parents took me to see in the theater. However, I have absolutely no memory of doing so, and only remember it from the VHS copy that I grew up with. I did have a Fievel stuffed animal, however, that I retained for a very long time – probably at least middle school, if not high school.

Review:

What is it with Don Bluth and making incredibly dark movies, anyway? This is the second Bluth movie I’ve watched for this project, and I have strong memories of the other two big Bluth movies (The Secret of NIMH and All Dogs Go to Heaven). And from what I’ve seen and remember, all four have content that would be likely to give their target audience nightmares. It’s like each successive movie in his filmography was playing an escalating game of “hold my beer” with childhood trauma.

This movie begins with the destruction of the Mousekewitz family home in Russia by Cossacks, in a rather intense burst of sudden violence. While I was definitely too young to understand what was going on, I now find it pretty clear that this is supposed to be an anti-Semitic pogrom, especially given the family’s surname and nationality. Their religion is never brought up explicitly during the film, though there’s definite allusions to it in the ending (more on that later). While I think that there’s definitely a missed opportunity for more concrete representation here, I’m not sure how much of it really would have fit the narrative they devised, given how much of the movie focuses on a fairly young child trying to navigate a city on his own. 

Speaking of which, this movie really doesn’t shy away from the horrors that might happen to a lost kid in 1880s New York. Almost the first thing that happens to Fievel after he arrives is being sold into labor in a sweatshop by a businessman that pretends to be helping him find his family. He gets chased, nearly eaten, attacked by humans, and even after triumphing over the cats is left for dead and ends up crying alone in a puddle in the rain. Thanks, Bluth, for attempting to traumatize the parents this time as well as the kids.

But hey, at least there are songs in this one, to break the depressing mood and give some light to the movie, right? Yeah, about that… The songs are all pretty memorable, even if I only remembered the one distinctly going in. However, even the happy ones are quite dark when you look at them closer. The big rousing number at the beginning, “There Are No Cats in America”, in addition to being dramatic irony itself in that we the audience know that there are indeed cats there, is actually just a series of stories of loss and murder. The Italian mouse portrays cats as mob bosses who murder his mother (in what might be a Godfather IIreference), and the Irish mouse’s girlfriend is eaten by a calico – a cat whose colors could easily be described as “black and tan.”

And the actual plan that the mice enact to get rid of their cat oppressors is something right out of a horror movie. I only had vague memories of the movie’s ending, but I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a steampunk mecha-mouse version of the Golem of Prague! The fact that the “Great Mouse of Minsk” is clearly rotoscoped over actual photographs of a real-life version of the thing makes it even creepier and nightmare-inducing. Are we absolutely sure that Bluth wasn’t paid off by a cartel of unscrupulous child psychologists looking for extra business?

Despite all of that, however….I still actually enjoyed the movie! The animation itself is gorgeous, obvious rotoscoping aside, and all of the songs are quite memorable. I’m not sure I’m going to be showing it to my nieces like, ever, but as an adult I definitely appreciate the craft that went in to making it a lot more than I did as a child. Still not sure why I never had any nightmares about it, though.

Nostalgia: B
Rewatch: B+, extensive “WTH, Bluth!?” notwithstanding

Stray Thoughts:

-“Somewhere Out There” positively destroys me every time. I watched this on my laptop using a Buffalo Wild Wings’ public wifi, and I was sloppy-crying in the restaurant.

-Even though critics were mixed on the movie, it ended up becoming the highest-grossing non-Disney animated film in U.S. history up to that point. It actually beat the Disney movie released that year, The Great Mouse Detective, at the box office by quite a lot. Disney and Bluth would have a rivalry for several more movies, going head-to-head until The Little Mermaid started the Disney Renaissance and pretty much ended Bluth’s time as a major competitor.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Robert Picardo and John Glover

[content warning: potential transphobia, sexual assault]

Plot:

Several years, after the original Gremlins movie, Gizmo the Mogwai’s elderly caretaker dies and his shop is bulldozed to make way for a fancy commercial center. Taken to Clamp Tower in Manhattan by a research scientist, he is freed by his friend Daniel Peltzer, who is now working as an artist in the building. When an accident causes a new group of gremlins to be created, Daniel must try to convince his skeptical bosses that a horde of chaotic creatures is about to descend upon the highly automated “smart building.”

Nostalgia:

This is yet another of my family’s seemingly endless collection of movies taped off of basic cable during the early 90s. We only had this one, not the original, so I never ended up seeing it until much after this one, and was positively shocked at its very different tone. I do really like the original, and appreciate its status as a classic horror-comedy, but if pressed I’d have to say that I actually enjoy this one more.

Review:

This…is a very weird movie. Now, I’ve watched some weird movies for this blog so far. I’ve seen giant worms with tentacle tongues, 3000-year-old Chinese sorcerers, suburban serial killers and kung fu disco dancing street thugs. But this might be the most deliberately strange movie I’ve seen in a long time. And I still kind of love it for that.

The original Gremlins was a horror/comedy which expertly balanced both sides of the equation, and still has some genuinely frightening scenes. This movie, on the other hand, seems almost intended as a rickroll of the audiences who went into it expecting something like the first film (and in fact, it kinda was. More on that later). About 45 minutes into the movie, it takes an abrupt left turn and abandons all pretenses at being a horror film. Instead, it becomes, essentially, a live action cartoon, getting more and more ridiculous and over-the-top with every passing minute. While in the original the gremlins were actually quite dangerous, and were a threat to the lives of everyone in the town, here they instead seem to be displaced residents of Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Toontown. If left to their own devices, they’d cause just as much havoc against each other as they would against any of the humans. This feeling is reinforced by the opening of the film, where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck interrupt the credits to argue about who gets to sit on top of the 60th anniversary Warner Bros. logo. It sets the tone for the sheer wackiness that is about to ensue over the course of the film. 

Most of the chaos in the film can be laid at the feet of Christopher Lee’s character, a genetic researcher whose lab seems to be a subdivision of Acme Enterprises. Here, the gremlins go through a series of transformations that ups their variety a hundredfold over the first film, where there was little to differentiate the various individuals. Thanks to the lab’s experiments, we end up with gremlins that are bat-hybrids, part vegetable, made of electricity and, most memorably, one who is intelligent and erudite, like Marvel’s Beast, with the voice of Tony Randall. Even the new version of the original film’s villain, Spike, goes through a transformation, becoming what is essentially a D&D drider in the only real scary scene in the movie.

Once the movie passes the halfway point, many of the human characters disappear for long stretches of time, as the narrative stops to just allow the gremlins to run amok. Nowhere is this more evident than the famous fourth-wall breaking sequence. When originally projected in theaters (on film, of course – this was way before the era of digital projection), the movie suddenly stopped, as if the film had become jammed, and then tore visually on-screen. Before any audience member would have time to get up and complain, however, the shadows of two gremlins in the projection booth appeared, making increasingly elaborate shadow puppets in the light of the projector. The movie then moves to the lobby of the theater itself, where a parent is complaining to the manager about the film’s content. He sends an usher into the theater, who gets Hulk Hogan to stand up from the audience and intimidate the gremlins into restarting the movie. It’s up there with Ferris Bueller’s monologues for me in terms of fourth-wall-breaking stunts, and is the ultimate distillation of what Joe Dante was trying to do with the movie.

That being, of course, fucking with both the audience and studio’s expectations. He had initially been extremely resistant to the idea of doing a sequel to the original Gremlins, as he thought that it had a satisfying ending that didn’t justify a sequel. After trying and failing to get it up and running on their own, the studio went back to Dante and offered him triple the budget of the first film and complete creative control over the direction of the project. Still not wanting to make a sequel, but also not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, Dante instead decided to make a satire of the original movie, and of overblown Hollywood sequels in general. While I personally believe that he succeeded wildly, critics and audiences were much more split over the movie, and it ultimately lost money. 

This is an incredibly silly, over-the-top movie, even more so than I remember it being. However, it’s also a very refreshing departure from most Hollywood sequels, and I really enjoyed it.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-The movie was originally intended to have a much more villainous Ronald Clamp, which is why he’s portrayed as a combination of Ted Turner and Donald Trump. However, they found that John Glover’s performance was just so likeable that they rewrote the script to turn him into a more sympathetic character.

-When the movie was released on VHS, they replaced the fourth-wall breaking with a different scene involving the gremlins turning off the VCR and channel surfing until John Wayne scares them off. This was the version that I grew up watching, and I didn’t see the Hulk Hogan version until it was finally released on DVD. I now prefer the original, though.

-One of the transformations that I didn’t mention above is where one of the gremlins drinks a formula that makes them explicitly female, with long hair, pouty lips and noticeable breasts. While it’s never clear if the gremlins had any sexual dimorphism prior to this (they reproduce through parthenogenesis, after all), what is clear is that this trans gremlin seems to be uninterested in participating in any of the anarchy. She’s more interested in a romantic pursuit of Robert Picardo’s character, and becomes the only gremlin to survive the movie because of it. While the character is ultimately played for laughs, the laughs never come at the expense of the transition itself. Once she’s female, the movie just accepts that fact, and the humor seems to be more focused on Picardo’s character’s reactions to being romanced by a two-foot-tall lizard creature. While I don’t feel the need to knock the movie for trans representation in this instance, I do have to fault it for its use of sexual assault (specifically Gremlin-on-human) for humor. Yes, Picardo decides to go along with it in the end, but I detected a lot of overtones of Stockholm Syndrome involved.

-I now understand the gremlin repeating “Is it safe?” while he has Danny strapped to a dentist chair, a joke that always eluded me when I watched this in the 90s.

Highlander

We've had a lot of good posters so far.
This is not one of them.

Highlander (1986)
Dir. by Russell Mulcahy

Starring Christopher Lambert, Clancy Brown, Roxanne Hart and Sean Connery

[content warning: whitewashing]

Plot:

After recovering from being run through during a battle, Scottish clansman Connor MacLeod discovers that he is an Immortal, and can only be killed by having his head cut off. After receiving training from a fellow Immortal, he learns about the Gathering, a time in the future when all surviving Immortals will come together and duel until only one is left. Four hundred years later, the Gathering begins in New York City, and MacLeod must finally face off against the Kurgan, the Immortal who impaled him in his first battle centuries ago.

Nostalgia:

Probably my first exposure to the Highlander franchise was my father watching Highlander 2 on VHS when I was about 10 or so. I distinctly remember it because I liked the cool sword fights, but had absolutely no idea what was going on – a feeling that’s actually pretty common for that movie, as it turns out. I probably saw the original for the first time some time around 1994 or so, as I remember watching it on the tiny tube TV that I had in my bedroom, and that’s when I got it. I never did watch the TV show, but it was pretty popular among the Sci-Fi House denizens in college, judging by how often it was included in the weekly viewing lineup.

Review:

This is a case of a movie with a really great premise, in search of better filmmakers to produce it. The plot is made of pure B and cult movie gold: immortal warriors from various time periods and places hacking each other to bits in modern day New York. That it spawned three further theatrical releases, two direct-to-DVD entries and three TV series is testament to the awesomeness of the idea. It’s just a shame that the film is as messy and unfocused as it is.

French actor Christopher Lambert is simultaneously horrendously miscast and kind of perfect for the title role of Connor MacLeod. At no point did I ever buy him as Scottish, but I did buy him as someone who had lived in many different parts of the world, seen the horrors of war over and over, and would really just prefer to settle down and run his antique store in peace. In all of the scenes set in New York, he has this world-weary warrior vibe, like Hugh Jackman from Logan with a katana instead of claws. If the majority of the movie had been in present-day, I don’t think it would have been much of an issue.

Unfortunately, however, the first half of the movie is spent cutting back in forth, quite frequently, between Connor in the present and in 16th century Scotland. I found this story structure to be way more jarring than I remembered it to be. In fact, my memory of the movie seems to have recut the movie mostly in chronological order, with all of the Scottish sequences being together in a big chuck immediately after the initial fight in the parking lot. While the cutting back and forth prolongs the mystery of just what the heck is going on, it also makes it a lot harder to really get in a groove with the movie’s story-telling.

It also doesn’t help matters that the one major actor who actually has a Scottish accent, Sean Connery, was cast as MacLeod’s most definitely not Scottish mentor. Though MacLeod refers to him as a Spaniard, and he introduces himself with the rather awesome name of Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, Connery’s character claims to be a two thousand year old Immortal from ancient Egypt. I really wish they’d have left it with him being an actual Spaniard, as A) Connery’s accent is about equally Spanish as Lambert’s is Scottish, so at least it would be consistent, and B) then I wouldn’t have to complain once again about Hollywood whitewashing. I’m not 100% sure what an actual pre-Ptolemaic Egyptian would have looked like, but I’m pretty positive it’s nowhere near as white as Sean Connery is.

While most of the casting and behind-the-camera decisions were definitely a mixed bag, there was at least one certified home run: Clancy Brown, as the villainous Kurgan. I find him absolutely perfect in the role of an immortal mass murderer, both in his D&D bad guy armor when he first appears, and his more punk rock look in the modern setting. This was the first thing I ever saw the veteran character actor in, though I probably heard that distinctive voice in Gargoyles or other animated voice-over roles. I’ve had a bit of a soft spot for him ever since, even though he’s frequently typecast in Kurgan-esque parts.

Another thing that totally works, and which might actually be the best thing to come out of the movie, is the soundtrack by Queen. They wrote several songs specifically for the movie, including now-classics “Princes of the Universe” and “Who Wants to Live Forever.” The former is so associated with the franchise that it was also used as the theme song to the TV show spinoff, which I was surprised to learn ran a whopping six seasons and 119 episodes when I looked it up just now. “Who Wants to Live Forever” also takes on a special poignancy, knowing that Freddie Mercury would be diagnosed with AIDS less than a year later. 

Highlander is very much a mixed bag, an excellent premise surrounded by some shoddy casting and filmmaking. Though the franchise would continue for well over a decade after, it would eventually peter out in the mid 2000s. It’s definitely one that I could see being remade or rebooted successfully, especially given the current wave of 80s nostalgia.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C+

Stray Thoughts:

-I don’t know if it was just the transfer on the cheap 4-in-1 franchise DVD I borrowed from my brother, but the version I watched was extremely washed out and grainy, like it was on a VHS that had been copied a couple of times. I’m not going to dock it any points, though, as I don’t have a point of comparison to see if it was like that when it originally came out or not.

-The Kurgan assembles his sword like an assassin would a sniper rifle, by assembling it from multiple pieces. That includes the blade, which I’m pretty sure would break on impact if you tried something like that in real life.

-MacLeod’s sword is identified as both being a 1500-year-old katana, and being a Masamune (a detail I never caught before). Masamune was an actual Japanese swordsmith, renowned as the best ever, and many of his surviving blades are held as Japanese national treasures. However, he lived in the 13th and 14th centuries, a tad bit later than the sword was supposedly dated to.

Dragonslayer

Dragonslayer (1981)
Dir. by Matthew Robbins

Starring Peter MacNicol, Caitlin Clarke, Ralph Richardson and one impressive puppet

[content warning: human sacrifice, anti-religion]

Plot:

Tired of a twice-yearly lottery to select a virgin to sacrifice to the rampaging dragon Vermithrax, the citizens of Urland seek the aid of the wizard Ulrich. Before he can help, however, the king’s head knight insists on testing the wizard’s powers….by stabbing him in the chest. After the funeral, Ulrich’s apprentice, an inexperienced wizard-in-training named Galen, decides to attempt the mission himself, despite his lack of both magical and martial skills.

Nostalgia:

I caught bits and pieces of this movie on television at several points while I was a kid, but never managed to see the whole thing. That didn’t prevent me from constructing an entire head-canon narrative out of the disparate pieces, however, or from sharing this wholly imagined (and much more elaborate) version with my friends like it was something that actually existed. I was slightly embarrassed when I finally saw the entire movie from start to finish while in high school, and realized that it was pretty much nothing like the version I’d imagined (which, incidentally, bears more than a passing resemblance to the much later How to Train Your Dragon movies).

Review:

Prior to the late 1990s, Vermithrax Perjorative was the cinematic dragon. And while Draco from Dragonheart, and Smaug after him, may have replaced Vermithrax in the fantasy-filmgoing public’s minds, for many people (including Guillermo Del Toro and George R.R. Martin) Vermithrax remains definitive. She is the reason that this film lodged itself so firmly in my imagination as a kid, despite only having seen about 15 minutes of the movie. A quarter of the film’s budget went to her creation, and all of that money is up there on the screen.

I think Vermithrax is so effective in part because we don’t actually see her for a very long time. This movie is closely patterned after the Jaws style of monster movie, in that you only get brief glimpses and partial views of the creature until over halfway through the movie’s running time. They save the first full-body shot of the dragon for the climax, when Galen enters her lair to do battle solo, and comes face-to-face with the legendary creature. The audience sees the dragon for the first time at the same time that Galen does, maximizing the impact of the amazing special effects and allowing them to create two extended sequences of dragon action – one on the ground and one in mid-air – that might not have possible if they attempted to stretch their budget by showing more of the creature throughout the film.

I lead off with the dragon because Vermithrax is by far the best part of the movie, though Ralph Richardson is also a delight as the eccentric wizard Ulrich – a role which received top billing but which amounts to an extended cameo. The rest of the movie is, unfortunately, not as good. I wouldn’t say that I was ever outright bored by the plot leading up to the dragon fights, but the movie does seem to take forever to really get going. After the death of Ulrich in the first five minutes, the movie seems to take almost half an hour for Galen and the villagers to journey back home, a journey that despite a murder and a gender reveal is pretty uninteresting. Things pick up a bit when they introduce the asshole king, who throws Galen in a dungeon for trying to kill the dragon, confiscates his magic amulet to use in a lead-to-gold scheme, and lies to his daughter about removing her name from the biannual lottery to select a sacrifice.

I want to talk about that lottery for a bit, because that’s probably the most interesting part of the movie apart from the dragon. In many ways, Dragonslayer was intended as a subversion of the dominant tropes of fantasy films up to that point: the Arthurian idyll of knights in shining armor, veiled princesses in pointy hats, and honorable chivalry. In this, the king is a slimy asshole, and the knight openly takes pleasure in murdering innocents. When Galen attempts to use magic to bury the dragon in a landslide, the king imprisons him instead of rewarding him, giving a speech about how previous attempts to slay Vermithrax have only lead to more death and destruction in retribution. According to him, sacrificing two people to the dragon each year to keep it otherwise appeased is better than risking the lives of hundreds if it attacks the villages. And while the king is a jerkass, the jerkass has a point: when Vermithrax gets out from under the rubble, she does attack the villages, leading to an impromptu extra lottery in an attempt to placate her wrath.

In most fantasy that came before this (and, to be fair, in a lot of print and film fantasy that came after) the love interest would of course be the one selected in this lottery, leading Galen to attempt to rescue her. Valerian herself seems to expect it, and is quite surprised when another name is called instead. Her selection had actually been foreshadowed earlier, as Valerian spends the first part of the movie passing as male (the movie implies that this was done solely to avoid the lottery, and was not connected to her gender identity – not that anyone making the movie in 1981 was thinking about that at the time) before getting outed publicly once the dragon is assumed dead. But instead of Valerian, the princess’s name is called instead, her having rigged the lottery against herself to make up for all of the times that her name was secretly removed from the running. 

So instead of having to rescue Valerian despite the king attempting to kill her, Galen instead is sent by the king himself to stop his own ritual before his daughter can willingly go to her death. The vicious knight turns against the king, thinking that the sacrifice is the only way to save the citizens, and actually fights Galen not out of bloodlust, but out of a sense of duty to protect those who he’d previously expressed a desire to murder. And the princess, despite being cut loose by Galen and told to flee, walks into the dragon’s lair intentionally, determined to make the heroic sacrifice despite all of Galen’s efforts.

It's quite a bit darker than anything I can recall from fantasy movies prior to this, and in fact presages a bit the grimdark trend in fantasy literature, which would kick off in earnest with the publication of Glen Cook’s The Black Company a couple of years later. The sight of the princess’s body being gnawed on by hungry dragon babies is not something that I would expect from a PG Disney co-production (and in fact would help lead to the creation of Disney’s Touchstone Pictures banner for more mature live-action movies). This movie came out well before the PG-13 rating was created, but I can’t possibly see it being rated as anything less this days.

Dragonslayer is also interesting for a having a definite streak of anti-Christianity, something that I definitely wasn’t expecting and hadn’t remembered. Ian McDiarmid (of Emperor Palpatine fame) has a small role as a Christian missionary attempting to convert the villagers. When the dragon attacks the town, he tells them to have no fear, that the dragon is actually Satan, and that he will banish it back to Hell. His attempt to exorcise a fire-breathing dragon goes about as well as you’d expect. It’s implied several times throughout the film that the rise of Christianity is what is killing off magic, as both dragons and wizards are almost extinct, and the villager converts view the dragon’s death at the end as a wholly divine miracle, denying Galen and Ulrich any credit for their feat. The king is the one who takes public credit for the slaying, gently inserting his sword into the (rather disgusting) blown-up corpse. Galen and Valerian are left alive and together, but get no reward, no glory – again, in line with modern fantasy but very much a subversion of Arthurian tropes. 

Dragonslayer wasn’t a success at the box office, though it did get an Oscar nomination for its effects. Coming out only two weeks after Raiders of the Lost Ark (the movie it lost the Effects Oscar to) certainly didn’t help. Though it became a cult classic on home video, it seems to have been mostly forgotten with the rise of CG effects, which is a damn shame. Vermithrax could take Drogon in a fight any day of the week.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-I bought a quartz pendant that looked very much like the amulet that Galen uses the first time I went to the Renaissance Festival, and wore it every time I went from then on. I probably still have it somewhere, though I don’t think I’ve seen it since high school.

-Vermithrax Perjorative is actually a really good name for a dragon. It loosely translates to “the Thracian worm that makes things worse.” The Game of Thrones producers actually included Vermithrax in Viserys’s list of Targaryen dragons as a tip of the cap to Dragonslayer.

-Microsoft Word apparently recognizes the word “Targaryen” without triggering spellcheck.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Dir. by Mel Stuart

Starring Gene Wilder, Peter Ostrum and Jack Albertson

[content warning: racism, a seriously traumatizing boat ride]

Plot:

When eccentric and reclusive candy company magnate Willy Wonka announces a contest for a lifetime supply of chocolate, a worldwide hunt begins for five Golden Tickets. Poor paperboy Charlie Bucket lucks into the final Ticket, and together with the other four winners he joins Wonka on a surreal tour through the fantasy land that is his factory.

Nostalgia:

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this was the first live-action (as in, non-Disney animated) musical that I ever saw. I say this because, while I’m sure that I saw Wizard of Oz while I was young, I have absolutely no memory of watching it, whereas I do have very concrete memories of seeing Willy Wonka as early as age 7. I don’t think I’ve seen it since the (rather terrible) Tim Burton remake came out in 2005, but I still remember pretty much all of the plot and major scenes.

Review:

This…is a really weird movie. It’s divided into two halves, which bear almost no resemblance to each other at all. And almost everything that anyone remembers is from the last forty minutes or so of the movie. However, I feel like that’s actually a strength of the movie. It’s as eccentric as its title character, and as Charlie says in the movie “and that’s not bad!”

Speaking of Willy Wonka, this is perhaps the definitive Gene Wilder performance. Sure, his collaborations with Mel Brooks resulted in some of the greatest comedies of all time, but whenever I picture Wilder in my head, he’s wearing a purple velvet frock coat. He has the perfect mix of playfulness and deadpan snark to pull off the role. Despite the fact that he doesn’t actually appear until halfway through the movie, Wilder dominates the screen from the moment he enters it. In fact, that entrance – in which he hobbles out onto the red carpet with a cane, slowly walks towards the crowd, before falling down and turning it into an athletic tumble – was actually Wilder’s idea in the first place. Although Charlie Bucket is the main character, and the book was in fact named Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, I feel that the movie’s name change was justified.

Being a musical, it helps to have songs that are actually memorable. And this one definitely has more than its share. I remembered every song in it but one (“Cheer Up Charlie”), and that one came back to me in full at the first line. “The Candy Man” was the song that was the pop hit at the time, but it’s Wonka’s song, “Pure Imagination,” that’s stuck in popular culture through the decades. An instrumental version of the song was used for the trailer to Ready Player One, despite being nearly a decade older than every other pop culture reference in the film, because it fits so well with the movie’s plot of “Willy Wonka, but a video game designer.”

The film is, of course, a morality play, with each of Charlie’s companions representing a different negative personality trait. This was very obvious to me even as a kid. What was less obvious was that Charlie himself represents one: envy. He’s first introduced staring longingly through a candy store window at all of the other kids enjoying treats that he can’t afford. He gets mocked by his teacher for not participating in the Golden Ticket contest, even though his lack of participation is not by choice, but rather an economic necessity for his family. And when he initially believes that the contest is over, he sinks into a depression, having defined his worth by his ability to win the contest and now believing himself to be even more of a failure than before. Unlike the other children, however, Charlie is actually able to conquer this trait. It is his personal sacrifice at the end, returning the Gobstopper to Wonka even though he could sell it for a lot of money, which ultimately wins him the contest.

In fact, the entire movie contains a whole lot of what TV Tropes calls “parental bonus.” Pretty much everything Wonka says contains a reference to a famous work of literature, something that most definitely went completely over my head as a child. I also missed a whole lot of the social satire of the first half of the movie, especially the innuendo of the computer programmer telling his machine “exactly what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate” after it refuses to help him win the contest.

Finally, we have to bring up that boat sequence. Where the hell did that come from? I most definitely remembered it from way back. In fact, I’d be surprised if anyone who saw this as a child didn't. It might be the most inexplicably terrifying sequence in an otherwise perfectly fine children’s film ever made. And I love it. Wilder’s increasingly frantic monologue, which ends with him screaming at the audience in a tight close-up, is the best single distillation of Wilder’s film persona. That none of the other actors were told about it in advance, and therefore gave perfectly realistic reactions, just makes the scene better.

Roald Dahl himself reportedly hated the adaptation, though reports differ somewhat on the degree of this dislike. Most of the disagreement seems to have hinged on the producers re-writing the script behind his back, which I guess is a reasonable complaint. He also hated “Pure Imagination,” however, which makes me less inclined to sympathize with his side. The adaptation also cleared up some of the very unfortunate racial aspects of the book, as the Oompa Loompas were originally written as explicitly African, which would make the already patronizing tone of Wonka’s “rescue” of them even more uncomfortable.

This is one of the key movies from my early childhood, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t be objective about it even if I tried. I have a niece who will be turning three in a couple weeks, and I’m looking forward to introducing her to it. I might wait another year or two, though. I don’t think she’s quite ready for the boat scene yet.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A

Stray Thoughts:

-“Pure Imagination” wasn’t even nominated for the Best Song Oscar that year. While I don’t think it would have beaten the Shaft theme, which won, it’s certainly better than three of the other nominees, none of which I think I’d ever heard before.