John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

10 Years Ago: Star Trek Beyond (2016)

2026-07-22T06:00:00.001-04:00

The world needed a good Star Trek movie in 2016.

Why?

As a reminder of who we are, who we have been, and who, I hope, we can be again.

And because -- let’s face it -- 2016 wasn't a good year for humanity. Historic international alliances were in jeopardy because of the politics of fear and resentment, and major candidates for high office painted dystopian, apocalyptic pictures of our collective future based on the scapegoating of ethnic and religious minorities.

Instead of actively engaging with the world, we saw an administration-in-waiting putting forward major policies about retreat and retrenchment. They wanted to build walls to separate us from the rest of humanity, presumably to cower behind in terror. And they still do.

It was and remains a worrisome time to be alive, as the unity of Western society frays, and long-held values are threatened by surging nativism, racism, and demagoguery. We are told to fear and ban those who don’t share our “beliefs,” while those who make such recommendations trade on slander, conspiracy theories, logical fallacies, and division.

Who needs enemies from outside our borders when we have them inside our borders, inciting violence and hatred?

By contrast, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek has proven itself a beacon of light and optimism for sixty years now.

It is a vision of a future in which people of different cultures (and co-cultures) -- and different beliefs -- work together in unity, to push the boundaries of knowledge and friendship ever further.

It is a vision in which racism is conquered, and all life forms are considered worthy of respect, of appreciation.

It is a vision in which the unknown is only knowledge “temporarily hidden,” and fear and hatred are more dangerous forces than are alien beings, or other belief systems.

Consider: sixty ago, the makers of Star Trek put a white Caucasian male, a green-blooded Vulcan, an Asian man, a Russian, a Southern gentleman, a Scot, and an African woman together in the control room of a starship and showed us that this crew represented humanity’s best not in spite of their differences, but because of their differences

Captain Kirk, a bold leader, needed the advice of his logical alien friend, and of his cantankerous Southern medico too. But he could not take his starship anywhere without the Asian man and Russian man driving it, or the Scotsman keeping the whole thing from flying apart. And the African woman at the communications console was the ship’s voice to the universe at large, mellifluous and gentle.

The lesson of Star Trek was -- and remains -- that the future is ours for the taking if we can overcome the petty differences of the present.

We achieve that world by getting to know each other, and learning to respect and even love the differences we see in one other. When we don’t know others, we stereotype them, we discriminate against them. When we get to know others, we detect common ground, and we see ourselves mirrored back.

A hideous rock monster, upon further knowledge, is a mother protecting her young. (“The Devil in the Dark.”) A weird energy cloud is not a zoo-keeper or captor, but a companion, and friend, upon learning the facts (“Metamorphosis.”) A hideous monster in a giant spacecraft is actually a child-like being, prone to laughter, testing our resolve, and seeking friendship (“The Corbomite Maneuver.”)

Those are just three examples from Star Trek’s sixty year history in which hostility is reduced not by war or gunfire, but by attempts to understand and appreciate that which is different, or unknown, to us.

We needed a good Star Trek movie in 2016 to remind us. We needed Star Trek to remind us that we don’t have to wallow in petty resentment, and nay, that we musn’t do so, if we hope to achieve the egalitarian future Star Trek projects with such optimism and confidence.

Thankfully, Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond (2016) is not just a good Star Trek movie, it is the best of the Kelvin movies -- and perhaps the best motion picture in the franchise since the original series cast said goodbye in 1991’s The Undiscovered Country.

The purists and nitpickers will complain -- because they always do -- but Star Trek Beyond is a joyous, optimistic expression of Gene Roddenberry’s core ethos and belief system. The future need not be about war or bloodshed. It can be about friendship, loyalty, progress, and the better angels of human nature.

Star Trek Beyond occurs in a dangerous period for the Enterprise -- and the Federation -- as an unknown menace strikes unexpectedly from out of the dark, threatening the crew’s survival. This force hates everything the Federation stands for, and wants to take Earth and its people back to a previous age, to a time of victory and glory, but not, importantly, of inclusion or equality. This force thrives on fear and disunity.

Facing this threat, the Enterprise crew -- separated and endangered -- never forgets its unity of purpose, or ideals, and fights back to preserve progress.

Replete with many delightful and pertinent references to Treks past (particularly, Enterprise [2001-2005]), Star Trek Beyond doesn’t recycle old villains or ask us to relive old narratives.

Instead, it provides a fresh tale that plays right into the cultural dialogue of its epoch. It thus fulfills Star Trek’s highest aesthetic and moral purpose: it serves as a social commentary on who we are in the present of 2016.

And -- again optimistically -- it shows us that we draw strength from unity, not fear.

Perhaps the greatest quality about this movie is the manner in which it shows each crew member -- Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Scotty, and Chekov -- contributing to the well-being and safety of the crew, and indeed, the universe. Not since Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), have we had a Trek movie which highlights every member of the bridge crew so effectively, and with such delightful good humor.

Similarly, Star Trek Beyond’s commentary about “unity” in the face of backwards, divisive villains, not only reflects the specifics of the asymmetric warfare tactics of our current age, but finds literary and historic “symbols” to make its case about progress.

Sometimes, we get “lost,” the movie suggests, but we can find our way back…with a little help from our (pointy-eared) friends.

“Unity is not your strength. It is a weakness.”

Three years into the Enterprise’s five year mission, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) is tired, and uncertain about the future, feeling that every day is becoming “episodic.” As his birthday nears, he considers a vice admiral position in Starfleet, and turning the ship over to Commander Spock (Zachary Quinto).

Spock, upset to learn of the death of Ambassador Spock (Leonard Nimoy), is also reconsidering his options for the future.

The ship docks briefly at a new starbase on the frontier, Yorktown. Once there, Kirk learns from Commodore Paris (Shohreh Aghdashloo) that the Enterprise is needed to help a crew in distress.

That distress call, however, proves to be a lure to get the Enterprise into an uncharted nebula. Once inside, the ship comes under attack from a swarm of bee-like spacecraft, which cripple her. The enemy leader, Krall (Idris Elba), apparently seeks an artifact that Kirk has aboard the starship; an artifact that can be used as a weapon.

Krall captures most of the Enterprise crew, including Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Sulu (John Cho) and holds them captive on a nearby planet surface. Scotty, however, befriends an alien, Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), who has made herself a home out of a crashed Starfleet vessel over a century old, the U.S.S. Franklin.

As Kirk and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) attempt to locate the position of the missing crew-members, McCoy (Karl Urban) must tend to Spock, who has been badly wounded.

As Starfleet’s finest gather -- with no ship and no crew -- the Federation’s future itself is at stake from a monster who wants to see the progress of the last century torn down. He wants a return to the past he knows, and will stop at nothing, even mass-murder, to achieve that goal.

“This is where the frontier pushes back.”

One of the greatest lines in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country comes from the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner). He notes to Captain Kirk that “if there is to be a brave new world, our generation is going to have the hardest time living in it.”

His line suggest that progress is always jeopardized by an old guard; a generation, or establishment that wants to maintain the status quo. Even if that status quo is conflict and warfare.

In many ways, this is also the subject matter of Star Trek Beyond.

Krall is a man who was bred into war and conflict, and who fought the Romulans and the Xindi as a military officer. After those wars, he saw the emergence of a “brave new world” (like Gorkon’s) and couldn’t adjust to it.

Instead, he feared it.

The world he had served in was, specifically, human centric, but this new “Federation” is not. Instead, in the new order, humans are just one square in a quilt of many colors and designs. This fact is conveyed in beautiful visual terms through Beyond’s surfeit of aliens. It has been years since so many alien beings took center stage in a Star Trek film, and their make-up and designs here are fantastic.

But the message is that Krall wants things to go back to being the way they were when he was comfortable and at the top of the food chain; he wants to return to a “human” world, or one where humans are, at least, first in line.

We see a similar desire in 2016 America, as demographics change. There is a longing by some to “take America back” to a time when it was less diverse, less colorful, and more monolithic.

It is no accident, I submit, that the new starbase in the film is named Yorktown.

It is true, of course, that Yorktown was the original name of the starship Enterprise in pre-production of the original series in the 1960s.

But historically-speaking, Yorktown was the site of the last battle of the American Revolutionary War. It was there, in 1781, that the forces of the Colonies defeated the British, and finally, truly became something greater than a group of states. After Yorktown, those states -- which had declared their independence from England in 1776 -- truly became the United States of America. The war was, for all intents and purposes, over.

And yet those thirteen colonies, of course, still had big differences in terms of industry and agriculture, religious belief, and even geographical features. Beyond, by selecting the name Yorktown, celebrates the last battle for the birth of the United Sttates. And thus, we can speculate that this Yorktown is the place that expresses, in the final frontier, the ideals of the ethnically-diverse, still young United Federation of Planets.

We know it is vulnerable. Bones compares it, explicitly, to a glass snow-globe.

Glass snow-globes break.

By inference, we understand that this is a fragile time in the history of the Federation.

Pitched against the young Federation is a villain named Krall, who is essentially a 23^rd century equivalent to Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). But Krall is based more upon the literary figure, Kurtz than he is the historical one. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is described as a demi-god; as being more than a man. Given his abilities to regenerate (and absorb life), Krall could be given the same description.

In Conrad’s narrative, Kurtz is a man who goes to the Congo Free State and becomes a tyrant of sorts, using superior technology to control the natives. He is prone to exclamations of hate such as “Exterminate the Beasts!”

Krall -- also like his literary corollary -- travels to uncharted territory, harnesses unusual technology, and plans a campaign of extermination. He even gets, upon his demise, a kind of “the horror, the horror” moment, at least in visual terms.

But most importantly, Krall is a strong contrast to our Starfleet crew.

He is a twisted reflection of Kirk, at least on one level. Kirk fears getting “lost” as captain of a starship, engaging in an enterprise with no end, and with no relativistic direction. Krall is the embodiment of such a lost captain; one who goes up river, or into the nebula, and strikes out to make his own kingdom or fiefdom. He cannot live in modernity.

And Krall, again in keeping with his literary antecedent, views alien races (read: the natives) not as equals or as beings to respect, but as people to conquer; to destroy. Like the Enterprise crew, he is “of” civilization, and yet falls victim to ethnocentrism; the belief that other cultures are not as worthy as his own. This is especially ironic considering how he willingly and repeatedly sacrifices his human appearance for longevity.

Star Trek Beyond thus diagrams a pitched battle between the forces of egalitarian progress -- represented by the U.S.S. Enterprise crew -- and the regressive forces of nativism/racism/imperialism. This “war” is waged at the aforementioned Yorktown, a place that -- if it survives -- will be remembered, perhaps, as a true test of the Federation’s unity (just as the 1781 battle of Yorktown cemented the unity of the Colonies).

I find it fascinating how Star Trek Beyond’s screenplay suggests a knowledge of history and literature, and more than that, finds a way to give those influences valid context inside the Star Trek world.

It’s no accident, either, that the film picks and chooses its original series references carefully.

In my introduction, I noted the line about the unknown being something, simply, “temporarily hidden.”

That is an exact quote from Pine’s Kirk in Star Trek Beyond. It is also, importantly, a quote from Shatner’s Kirk in the original Trek episode, “The Corbomite Manuever.”

That episode concerns the Enterprise crew grappling with a fear of the unknown, until the light of understanding dawns. There is even a crewman in that installment, named Bailey, who becomes convulsed with fear…until steadied by Kirk. Star Trek Beyond chooses wisely indeed, this particular allusion, because the film concerns what happens when people are fearful. The “other” becomes someone not merely different…but terrifying…a force to be destroyed.

This is precisely how Krall sees the universe.

There are other original series references in Beyond that will draw positive reactions from longtime fans. These come from “Amok Time” (“in a pig’s eye!”), “Who Mourns for Adonais” (the giant green space hand quip), and “A Private Little War” (“Lucky his heart is where his liver should be, or he’d be dead right now.”) That last one, especially, plays into Beyond’s theme of being strong because of differences, not in spite of them. McCoy credits Spock’s survival to his Vulcan anatomy. Were he human, he would have been killed.

He is strong, literally, because of his differences from us.

The theme of “differences making one strong” weave in and out of the Beyond narrative at different points. Jaylah is a thickly-accented alien of unique appearance, for example. She could be treated as an enemy, but Scotty treats her as a friend, and her knowledge and abilities become part of the key to defeating Krall.

Strictly-speaking, Kirk doesn’t “need” Jaylah alive to defeat Krall at Yorktown. By that point, she has done all she can do, really. But Kirk treats her as a necessary member of the team, and risks his life to rescue her, in one of the film’s many dynamic action sequences.

Star Trek Beyond also references today’s post-War on Terror threats with Krall’s method of ambush. He launches an attack against the Enterprise with thousands of bee-like fighter crafts which carry quite a “sting.”

There is no typical ship-to-ship combat here (a nice way of keeping things fresh and inventive, certainly). Instead, the Enterprise is overwhelmed by a force of chaos the crew can hardly understand. Welcome to the world of modern, unconventional warfare. Two forces, with significantly different strategy and tactics, collide.

Historically-speaking, I couldn’t help but think of this ambush scene as being reflective of the U.S.S. Cole incident. That American Navy destroy was attacked by terrorist bombers in October of 2000.

But the situation is analogous A powerful force, representing a vast organization or nation-state, is suddenly and unexpectedly jeopardized by a small but zealous force of vicious fighters using the techniques of asymmetric warfare.

But Star Trek Beyond succeeds as Star Trek not only because of its social commentary and allusions to literature and history, but because writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung have absolutely captured the essence of the franchise’s diverse characters, and their relationships.

It is a pleasure to report that Pine, Quinto, Urban and all the others have become their characters in a dynamic way. In the original Star Trek, there was always this sense of esprit de corps -- of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants ingenuity in the face of danger and insurmountable odds.

This film nails that spirit like no film in the franchise since the aforementioned The Undiscovered Country. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura and the others live and breathe again, and showcase, for fans, the promise of Starfleet.

Even when the people around you are different in color, sex, or planet of origin, they are worthy of, loyalty, empathy, compassion, and, finally, love.

That pointy-eared hobgoblin who drives you crazy can be, simply, the best friend you’ll ever know.

Although I can’t believe this, there are those fans who complain of too much action in Star Trek Beyond. There is indeed, plenty of it, but what there is really a lot of here is, simply, characterization…of the crew as individuals, and the crew as teammates.

Again, not since Star Trek IV have we seen the crew on individual adventures, but working towards a task accomplishing “the needs of the many.”

And the message -- of all these unlike parts working together for the betterment of us all -- is transmitted, expertly, particularly in the film’s coda.

We hear the traditional Star Trek narration.

You know the words by heart: “Space, the final frontier…”

But for the first time, this over-50 year old narration is not spoken by merely the captain of a starship.

Instead, the entire command crew delivers it sequentially -- handing-off the words from Kirk to Spock to Bones, to Scotty, and so on -- thus proving again, that the diverse characters of Star Trek are joined in a noble purpose, for the sake of us all. They are united, not divided.

And in their unity they are indomitable.

I am thankful we got a great and timely Trek in Star Trek Beyond ten years ago.

20 Years Ago: Lady in the Water (2006)

2026-07-21T06:00:00.001-04:00

M. Night Shyamalan’s 2006 movie Lady in the Water (2006) is a cinematic bedtime story, and on that basis, I find that it succeeds quite admirably as a work of art. The film most decidedly isn’t a fantasy spectacular or epic like Fellowship of the Rings (2001). In terms of comparison it is merely a story that a parent might tell a child on one night, or on many successive nights.

So you don’t get armies or orcs or elves battling it out here, just a few mer-people and one very big, very bad wolf (called a “scrunt.”)

A modest bedtime story like this -- a tale shared between generations -- conforms to a specific and familiar structure, and indeed, Lady in the Water seems to determinedly ape that structure. In fact, the story is based on an original bedtime story that Shyamalan told his children.

In the first case, the film tells an adventurous story, featuring some fantasy and adventure elements (Story and the world of the Narfs).

Secondly, bedtime stories and Lady in the Water generally feature a fixed routine of cliffhangers or twists which build upon one another, and just as often deal reverses as victories.

In this case, that description means that the film hinges largely on the discovery of secret identities. Characters here must determine who among a small community is a healer, who is a guardian, who is a symbolist, and finally, what people form a group called a “guild.”

In many cases, the discoveries are wrong, dealing the characters grave and dangerous set-backs at the most inopportune of times.

Imagine watching or hearing the story of this film over several days and you start to sense how cleverly Lady in the Water functions as a bedtime story. You believe you have discovered the identity of the healer, so the plot moves forward. Then you discover you were wrong and back you go to rethink your assumptions. Each twist in this routine is a high point in a story meant to possess peaks and valleys. Remember Cole Sear’s sentiment in The Sixth Sense that a good bed-time story needs “twists and stuff.”

Well, that’s exactly how Lady in the Water plays.

And finally, Lady in the Water ends with the final quality of a bedtime story: sheer emotional exhaustion…since “sleep” afterwards is the overall goal of the narrative.

Accordingly, we are left, at film’s end, a pile of qyucweubf mush, having gone through all the ups and downs with the characters. We are worn out, spent, but satisfied with the nature of the happy ending.

And that happy ending, of course, is another key element of bedtime stories.

Don’t want the little ones having nightmares, do we?

In terms of our on-going Shyamalan Series, it is clear how, in significant fashion, Lady in the Water reflects the same concerns the director has obsessed upon in his other works. For example, this film is about a person (in this case, the character played by Shyamalan himself), discovering his purpose.

However, the tale has been “flipped” in a sense. Now, the story is also about the catalyst, Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), and her ability to show others (including Mr. Heep), their purpose in this life. She catalyzes the whole community, essentially, making every person recognize the potential within.

And much like Graham Hess, Malcolm, David or Elijah, Mr. Heep (Paul Giamatti) is burdened with a strange lassitude, a “soul sickness” in the film because he is not doing what he is meant to do. He has abandoned his destiny as a healer (after the deaths of his wife and child), and is “hiding” at the Cove apartment complex. Only his interface with the catalyst, Story, enables him to get back on track with his “correct” destiny. She shos him what he is meant to do.

Finally, Lady in the Water represents Shyamalan’s most caustic commentary on the nature of storytelling. In fact, he features a despicable character in the film, Farber (Bob Balaban) who is clearly supposed to represent a plague upon all storytellers: the critic.

In the film, Farber is a joyless, loveless, bloodless soul who takes pride in tearing to shreds artists and works of art. He believes he has seen it all, that there is nothing new under the sun, and that his wisdom is greater than that of the filmmakers he reviews. Farber is such a stick-in-the-mud he can’t even conceive of an occasion in which two “real” people would actually stand in the rain, facing each other, getting all wet.

So naturally, Shyamalan makes that set-up, that composition -- two people standing for a long duration in the pounding rain -- the final, valedictory image of his film.

He thus demonstrates how, in context -- and without a doubt -- that image can make total emotional sense.

If it is the last time you will ever see a person who has transformed your life, the pounding rain is not an obstacle. Shyamalan thus proves that it is the critics, not the storytellers, who are all wet.

I know and fully understand that Farber is Shyamalan’s revenge against my profession and its practitioners; those who he feels don’t understand his work and worse, actively resist his work. I don’t take the charge personally. I try not to be that kind of critic, but I can tell you this with certainty: there are folks out there who do take a challenge like this quite personally. They don’t see the put-down as playful, they see it as a declaration of war. So in this case, Shyamalan may have started a war that he can’t win, and the savage critical response to the film proves it. Thus, the over-the-top attack on critics in the film might qualify as self-destructive, from a certain viewpoint.

If you look at a sampling of reviews, you see Shyamalan widely referred to as arrogant, vain, and thin-skinned. That may actually be projection on the part of some critics, but the blows landed on Shyamalan and his film nonetheless.

The result? Negative noise has drowned out the simple, heartfelt virtues of this fable, of this bed-time story.

“Man does not listen!”

By night, a mysterious stranger has been swimming at the pool at the apartment complex called The Cover. The handyman, Mr. Heep (Giamatti) attempts to catch the perpetrator, and encounters a beautiful young woman, named Story (Howard), in the pool. The further she gets from water, the sicker she becomes.

Story is a "Narf," a sort of mermaid from the "Blue World," come to change the destiny of the human race for the better. She must "see" a writer living in the Cove and influence him to write a book that will change the world.

But Story is more important even than that.

She is actually a future leader of her people, a Madame Narf. Because of this, a monstrous being, a green wolf called a scrunt, is hunting her, attempting to kill her. This being doesn't want her to return home to lead her people, and prevents Story from hitching a ride with a giant eagle back to the sea.

Mr. Heep learns, however, that several humans -- a healer, a symbologist, a guardian and a guild -- can protect Story and help her accomplish her mission. At the very least, they must protect her until supernatural judges, the Tartutic, arrive to dispense justice.

“What kind of person would be so arrogant as to presume the intention of another human being?”

I once asked a friend why he did not like Lady of the Water, and his response was that the story felt made up as it went along.

I actually understand and appreciate that comment, but feel that this structural quality is sort of baked into the movie. Lady in the Water is a bedtime story, and bedtime stories are, often, made up as they go along.

Why? Children are eager and curious listeners, and so they call out the storyteller when something doesn’t make sense. (Think of the sick kid with Peter Falk in The Princess Bride [1986]).

Therefore, as a storyteller you go back, retcon your story, and then adjust, going forward, so that it makes sense to the listener.

I had to undertake this process with my son, Joel, all the time during our night-time ritual, when he was young (he's 19 now!). I had o explain exceptions. I had to reveal why something that happened couldn’t happen in the way he now sees it could have, and so forth. Kids are smart. They see how threads connect, and they are aware when they don't connect.

As a bedtime storyteller, you have to be nimble; you have to be a quick thinker.

Hence the “fixed routine of cliffhangers” and “setbacks” in bedtime stories. A good storyteller needs not only to throw in “twists and stuff,” per Shyamalan, but also constantly re-adjust the narrative's trajectory towards the conclusion, in the face of questions and speculation. Or, described anotherway, in light of constant interruptions from smart kids.

This is what the process of communication is, actually. Think of Gamble and Gamble's Model of Communication for a moment, with encoder and decoder working together, adjusting to the feedback of the other. That's also how a bedtime story works; the sender must adapt to the responses of the receiver, and change approach.

In the film, we get the wrong symbolist, guild and healer, and then have to do it all again. In the film, we get the wrong writer (Farber) and then find the right one. And we miss the first run of the giant eagle to collect Story, and wonder why the Tartutic (the judges) take so long to find and eliminate the Scrunt.

All these things have to be explained.

Questions? We have a lot of ‘em!

But if the film’s approach is to feel like a bedtime story, to approximate a bedtime story's feints and lunges -- and Lady in the Water was advertised, actually, as a “Classic Bedtime Story for a New Generation” -- we must ask a question.

Is this a valid and creative way to structure the narrative?

My answer would be affirmative.

In fact, this is an inspired way to tell the story. In the Monomyth, we know we’re going to get the hero, the elder, the gatekeeper, the loki-like mischief maker, the call to action, the quest, and the community changed. A bedtime story -- a different kind of story -- offers a different set of variables or elements, and as I note here, Shyamalan does his best to conform to them.

He's not making a conventional fantasy. He's not making an epic, or a quest film. He's explicitly crafting a bed time story, so there is no better way to go about his tale, is there?

As a consequence or effect of this type of storytelling, we might feel that it is being made up as it goes along, but is that so bad?

Did it take away from your bedtime stories, as a kid, knowing that your Mom or Dad was making it up as he or she went along, adjusting to your input, devising new schemes, going one way and then another?

Lady in the Water apes that approach but if you study the actual scenes, it’s clear that Shyamalan knows where it is going all along. My evidence: information presented early recurs later. For instance, Farber criticizes the movie romance he sees in a theater, noting that it was stupid for having two characters stand in the rain. And as I noted above, that’s how Lady of the Water ends. The movie is actually tightly-structured I would argue, it only seems like it is out of control, in part because of the constant addition of new mythology and new terms (such as Narf, Madame Narf, Scrunt, Tartutic, and so on…).

Like Mr. Heep, we are constantly having to pay attention as the story twists and turns, and some new elements comes into play.

I also understand why people object to Mr. Farber. He’s kind of a straw man character; the vessel for Shyamalan to bottle all his anger and resentment towards critics.

In the quotation at the beginning of thus section of the review, a character observes that he can’t understand a person who presumes to understand the intentions of another.

To me, this is much like Shyalaman asserting that no one can look at art and judge for themselves, based on film grammar, observation, or thematic analysis, what a work of art means.

And I object to that. I disagree with that vehemently.

What kind of person presumes to understand the intentions of another human being?

Just about every person you’ve ever met.

It isn’t just critics who do this.

But critics are necessary and valuable in the culture I believe, to remind us that there is a difference between “art” and “entertainment.” The best critics look to art, see how it fits in with the culture, and reveal to audiences how it was assembled, what it means, and how it means what it means.

That is significant. Who else but critics discusses art at all these days? I don’t defend the critics who have dismissed Shyamalan outright, but I also know that critics have their place, and it is an important place.

And, also, we all go before critics. I have a new book out. And my web series, Abnormal Fixation (hint: please watch it!). And critics will take them both on. They’ll either love my work or hate my work. Those who dislike it, or don’t understand it, will make assumptions about me as a person, as a writer and as an artist.

That’s just how it is.

But it is still worth having the discussion. Shymalan can't expect to make films and have critics not attempt to interpret it, analyze it, or even second-guess it.

The worst thing, in my experience, that can greet a writer is not harsh criticism, but silence.

I’d rather be raked over the coals -- and this has happened to me more than once -- than have nobody discuss my thoughts; to greet my musings with nothing but deafening silence. Shyamalan's critics have been unfair to him on more than one occason, I believe, but the answer isn't that critics are terrible, inhuman people deserving of death.

The answer is more nuanced than that.

In conclusion, I believe that Lady in the Water is quite beautiful, and that the bed-time story structure allows us another lens by which to view the typical Shyamalan obsession: a person denied their destiny. "Story" gives Heep a second chance. And Heep, in turn, assures Story's destiny as Madame Narf. There's a nice symmetry to this bed-time story, and a powerful emotion release, in that rainy denouement.

You can't count tear drops in the pounding rain, can you?

Check Out WatchGuide

2026-07-20T06:50:31.235-04:00

Last week, I had the great pleasure of being contacted by WatchGuide, an independent German film & series community (online since 2022, 1,600+ reviews, one editorial 0-10 "Watcher score" per title), where the authors link to this blog (and the site even sent me a nifty badge; on the right sidebar!).

I've had a great time digging into some of the Watchguide movie data since then, and thought the audience here might enjoy the experience too.

According to Frank at WatchGuide, "German film fans have long memories. The world moves on from a film - we keep rewatching it until it becomes a classic. The data really does say: the older it gets, the more we love it."

Specifically, Watchguide matched 785 of titles to their global TMDB audience score, keeping only titles with at least 500 audience votes.

What they found out is that Germany and the world mostly agree on assessments of movies (correlation 0.709) But they differ in ONE direction: the older the film, the more German critics rate it above the world. And the cult era is where the gap explodes.

THE PATTERN (average gap, WatchGuide minus world)

- 1960s: +1.48

- 1970s: +1.32

- 1980s: +1.32

- 2000s: +0.85

- 2020s: +0.78

Overall: Watchguide average is 8.32 vs the world's 7.29 (+1.04 across the whole sample).

CULT-ERA TITLES GERMANS RATE WAY ABOVE THE WORLD (WatchGuide vs TMDB audience)

- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): 9.7 vs 7.3 (+2.4)

- Mad Max (1979): 9.2 vs 6.7 (+2.5)

- Tron (1982): 9.3 vs 6.7 (+2.6)

- Cujo (1983): 8.7 vs 6.1 (+2.6)

- Pet Sematary (1989): 9.2 vs 6.6 (+2.6)

- It (1990, TV): 9.5 vs 6.9 (+2.6)

- On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969): 9.2 vs 6.6 (+2.6)

- From Russia with Love (1963): 9.6 vs 7.1 (+2.5)

- Paranormal Activity (2007): 8.7 vs 6.0 (+2.7)

...AND WHAT GERMANS DON'T GET (the reverse, for balance)

- The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007): 3.5 vs 6.5 (-3.0)

- Justice League (2017): 4.2 vs 6.1 (-1.9)

- Rocky V (1990): 4.2 vs 5.8 (-1.6)

A FUN FOOTNOTE

Anime is the one corner where Germany and the world almost perfectly agree (+0.28 average gap). Horror as a whole sits at +0.93 - so it is the CLASSICS that spike, not the genre.

LINK

- The study itself (source link for the figures): https://watchguide.net/critics-vs-audience/

So, if you're interested in digging further, let WatchGuide be your guide!

40 Years Ago: Vamp (1986)

2026-07-19T06:00:00.001-04:00

Writing for The Richmond Times Dispatch, movie critic Carole Kass termed Vamp (1986) “sleazy, tawdry and disgusting.” Oddly, those are some of the very reasons I enjoy this film so much. The film is absolutely all those things, and, I would argue, delightfully so.

But the reason Vamp worked in 1986, and still (largely) works four decades later is that the film boasts a goofy big-hearted sense of humor.

Although I am not one of those horror fans who insists that the genre today is dead or even in trouble, I do believe that the quest for gritty authenticity has, in some way, driven the horror genre away from humor. By contrast, the mid-1980s represents a great time in the horror cinema precisely because efforts such as Return of the Living Dead (1985), Fright Night (1985) and yes, Vamp, all walked that uneasy line between horror and comedy. Fright Night and Return of the Living Dead are better films, but Vamp is stylish, and boasts a powerful reason for using the creative approach that alternates screams and giggles.

In short, the film is a coming of age story about a sheltered, privileged suburban kid, Keith (Chris Makepeace) who sees life in “the Big City” for the first time, and must reckon there with people who are different from him, and possibly dangerous. These people have different life-styles, different orientations, and yes, different appetites. Mostly, they’re vampires.

In the film, Keith takes his first steps into this larger, initially unsavory world, and must determine where and how he fits in. He must learn how to recognize those who are dangerous (like Grace Jone’s Katrina, or Billy Drago’s albino, Snow,) and those who are merely different.

Taken on those terms, Vamp is fun and forward-looking, and probably deserving of a re-examination in 2026. One might even conclude that the film, with its meditation on a vampire co-culture feels “very new, very now.”

“Welcome to your worst nightmare!”

Fraternity pledges Keith (Makepeace) and A.J. (Robert Rusler) make a deal to hire a stripper for the frat house’s upcoming party, in exchange for membership in the organization. Unfortunately, their campus is “200 miles from nowhere” and they don’t own a car. Accordingly, Keith and A.J. agree to pretend to be friends with Duncan (Gedde Watanabe), a rich kid who owns a car, and take a road trip to the big city to procure an exotic dancer.

There, by night, the trio visits the “After Dark Club” in hopes of finding a good stripper for the party. A.J. is enamored with exotic Katrina (Grace Jones), but the dancer turns out to be an aged Egyptian vampire. Worse, the young men seem to have stumbled into the Vampire District!

After Katrina kills, A.J, Keith must step up and find a way home. He must do so alongside an employee at the club who claims to know him: Amaretto (Dedee Pfeiffer).

But it’s going to be a long night…

“All you are to her is a quick fix.”

As I noted in Horror Films of the 1980s (2007; McFarland), there’s a nice little joke informing Vamp. Many hero’s journey tales or coming-of-age stories involve, specifically, the crossing of the threshold. That concept is literalized here. Early in the film, Duncan’s car goes on a crazy, out-of-control spin, and when it stops, those inside it have arrived at the world of the Big City.

It’s as if a tornado itself has deposited the car and the occupants there, and one character -- appropriately referencing The Wizard of Oz (1939) -- jokes “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” The idea, clearly, is one of transition; of Keith moving from his cultural comfort zone (as A.J.’s straight man) in the safe world of college, to the larger, more dangerous and exotic world beyond.

The exotic (and erotic) world of the After Dark Club is depicted in Vamp in lurid shades of green and red, a color palette that suggests the red light district, cheap motels, and neon signs. It is Keith’s task, in this garish world, to determine who is friend, and who is foe. If he is to grow up (and not die), in other words, he must come to understand the perils of pleasures of a multi-cultural world. He must confront those who are not like him and determine how to view them.

What I resolutely admire about Vamp is that even though the film is yet another "heroic journey," it nonetheless takes time to genuflect to a superior idea; that Keith’s narrow, parochial world view isn’t the only one, and that he can and will grow beyond it.

One delightful moment in the film finds Keith realizing, to his horror, that all the denizens of the After Dark Club are vampires. “That doesn’t make them bad people,” replies a patron, and that’s sort of the film’s point. As human beings, we are afraid of the things that we don’t know. We judge that which is different --- at least at first -- to be bad.

So at least initially, the vampires of the film are terrifying to Keith. They aren’t people…they’re monsters!

Note, for example, the scene in which he watches a child vampire viciously attack an unsuspecting stranger. Keith recoils in horror and disgust at the sight. And when he confronts A.J. as a vampire, his friend tells him he can no “longer be trusted” because of what he has become.

Yet by Vamp’s denouement, Keith is not only more confident, he is more experienced, and therefore willing to accept that his former best friend, A.J. (Robert Rusler) can be two things simultaneously: both a vampire and buddy.

After the new-ness of the vampire population has worn off, and Keith feels he can conquer the danger they represent, he is open to A.J. returning to school, and re-establishing his friendship with him. He has also met a love-lorn vampire (one who dreams of being more to Katrina than a quick-fix), and another who dreams of being “classy” like the people he imagines in Las Vegas. Now these characters may still be monsters, but they are people at the same time. The dynamic has reversed.

Some years ago, a reader on Twitter (now X) contacted me and pointedly asked me if I felt there was homo-erotic tension between Keith and A.J. in Vamp. My answer? I think there is, and I think that it is absolutely intentional. That unspoken homo-eroticism fits in with the film’s bigger idea: that Keith is growing up in a world of different kinds of people, and reckoning with different kinds of relationships.

Far from home (which remember, in terms of the film, is 200 miles from the city metropolis…) Keith must reckon with new vistas and new ideas. And it’s impossible to deny that, historically-speaking, vampirism is often equated in the horror film with homosexuality.

Therefore, it is possible to read Keith and A.J.’s bromance as being indicative of desires deeper than mere friendship. A.J. come out as a vampire -- a surrogate for homosexuality -- but confesses to Keith that because of his new identity, he can no longer be trusted. That’s an expression of fear in the face of something new. But in Vamp, after some initial discomfort and trepidation with that “new” idea, however, Keith finds he is absolutely okay with A.J. and his new orientation. A.J. is okay with it too. They find they can still be friends, even with new knowledge about each other. Ironically, this plot-line makes Vamp the second film (after A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy’s Revenge [1985], to pinpoint Rusler as an object for homo-erotic desires.

In Vamp, however, the homo-eroticism is quickly defused. In growing up, Keith finds his confidence, and that confidence is expressed in the fact that his amorous attentions are now directed towards women, namely Allison/Amaretto. A.J. becomes a vampire and friend rather than a potential lover.

Still, I would argue that the film deserves credit, at the very least, for its through-line of acceptance. By the end, A.J.’s “other-ness” is de-fanged as a threat, and he stands around kvetching about his wardrobe. He has been assimilated into the mainstream, his “difference” from the dominant culture no longer judged a mortal danger to it. He can be a vampire, and still go to college, and still be best friends with straight-arrow Keith. No longer is he a “monstrous” other. He’s just one voice in a culture of many.

Grace Jones’ Katrina is the yang to that yin, one might conclude.

If A.J. is The Other made normal (and acceptable to mainstream society), Katrina is the “Other” as a continuing threat. Katrina is a feral, abusive user, one who does not seek consent before indulging in her feral appetites. Jones is perfect for this villainous role, given her career and physical attributes. As Julia Felsenthal quotes photographer Jean-Paul Goude in Vogue (September 28, 2015): “Men think she’s sexy. Women think she’s a little masculine…and gays think she’s a drag queen.”

Vamp plays up Jones trademark androgyny in a clever way. We aren’t certain, seeing Katrina, what exactly she is, how she identifies, or what she wants. Her strip-tease is quite different from the others featured in the film, and seems an expression more of wildness than any particular brand of sexuality. We see Katarina and we register her as hungry, animalistic, prowling. She could be, essentially, any number of things -- male, female, gay, straight, what-have-you -- but in fact Katrina is just one thing: a hungry “user” of those around her.

Of all Grace Jones’ 1980s genre roles, from Conan the Destroyer (1984) to A View to a Kill (1985), Vamp utilizes her physical presence and charisma best. We have doubts about Katrina’s identity until the truth becomes plain. She is a monster, and yet that monstrosity has nothing to do with how she identifies (gay, straight, androgynous), but rather with how she treats those around her: as walking blood banks.

But at first, her physical otherness is all the viewer sees.

Today, it seems difficult to deny that Vamp is about category-straddling as a normal aspect of life in the Big, Modern, American City. The child-vampire is both innocent and a monster. Snow is both ‘white’ and part of a deried co-culture (the Albino gang). The After Dark Club is both sexually liberated and predatory, perhaps even simultaneously sleazy and “classy,” given the predilections of its owner. Likewise Amaretto is both known and unknown to Keith. In broaching a multi-cultural, diverse world, Keith must navigate all these contradictions, and accept the ones that don’t hurt him (like A.J.’s new orientation) and dismiss those that could (Katrina, namely).

In other words, the film asks Keith, ultimately, to view others not by categories, but by their actions. The world, if not shades of gray, is shades of red and green.

I opened the review by noting that Vamp is alternately funny and scary, and I believe that approach is the best way to mimic the film’s leitmotif about the Big City. When confronted with the unknown, sometimes we assess it as dangerous, and sometimes not. By making us laugh and scream, Vamp reflects this reality. We can react to “new” things with terror, or with humor. Danger can be defused by humor…or not.

Vamp is a fun, gory horror movie, and an example of a different age and different sensibility in the genre, for certain. But the film retains value today because it is about a person of the dominant culture opening his eyes to the fact that not everybody who is different than he is must by definition be bad, or a “monster.” Sometimes, Vamp reminds us, people are only “monsters” until you get to know them; until the initial dread of difference recedes and you see the people not for their categories or labels, but for their common humanity.

40 Years Ago: Aliens (1986)

2026-07-18T06:00:00.004-04:00

The first two films in the long-lived Alien franchise tend to stir passionate debate, especially when placed in direct comparison to one another.

There are those viewers who appreciate Ridley Scott's terrifying, original 1979 "space trucker" film and consider it the superior work of art. And then there are those who feel just as strongly regarding James Cameron's intense, militarized sequel, Aliens (1986). The bottom line, however, is that each film is superb in its own unique manner and style.

James Cameron's greatest decision regarding Aliens, perhaps, involves his judgment to move the protean film series in a fresh direction. His sequel does not, in any significant manner, attempt to re-create the Gothic atmosphere of Ridley Scott's classic horror film. Instead, the Cameron film forgoes the "ten-little-Indians," or "haunted house in space" aesthetic of Alien for a wider, more epic scope, one exemplified by the well-remembered ad-line "This time, it's war."

Where Scott's Alien focuses on an atmosphere of dread, jumps and jolts, plus out-and-out terror, Aliens functions more as a non-stop rush; a roller-coaster ride of almost unparalleled excitement. And as much as Scott brought his remarkable perspective to Alien, James Cameron imbues the sequel with his own individual viewpoint and obsessions. The result is that Alien and Aliens complement each other in a most gratifying and satisfactory fashion. Each film is the superlative work of an individual artist; meditations on a theme (or franchise), as it were, with Sigourney Weaver and the titular monsters as the primary connective fabric.

To fit the film into his career, James Cameron movies often feature strong female characters, and comment on matters of military and big business. Aliens very much fits this description. At the center of the action is Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, a paragon of common sense and intelligence in two spheres where such qualities seem in alarmingly short supply (the futuristic military establishment, and the Company's hierarchy, specifically.)

The basis for Ripley's common sense, bravery and intelligence arise, apparently, from her initial experience with the alien in the Scott film, but also, importantly, from her singular status here as a fish-out-of-water. As the film opens, Ripley is 57 years out of her natural element, and (in the special edition of the film) has lost her only daughter. These qualities diagram Ripley as both outside a command structure of any type, and as a woman seeking to re-capture what she has lost, namely motherhood.

Because she is unfamiliar with the technology and protocols of the soldiers and the space yuppies, Ripley is also a powerful surrogate for the audience: one who catches on quickly, and who countenances no bullshit regarding the hostile alien species. We in the audience share Ripley's concerns, having "lived through" the traumatic events on the Nostromo with her. A distinctive quality of Cameron's approach in Aliens is that he uses our familiarity with Ripley and her "biases" (regarding androids, for instance), against us. He plays on our expectations again and again, to layer surprises and shocks into the film's narrative. These "bumps" in the road have the effect of keeping us both off-balance and anxious.

A movie of breathtaking action and intense emotions, Aliens also ably functions on an allegorical level, serving as a commentary on American involvement in the Vietnam War (1962 -1975). This commentary makes the film a crucial example of the Vietnam War film "revival" that occurred mid-way through the two-term Reagan Presidency, and which -- for lack of a better description -- re-fought the conflict either under more favorable, familiar "war movie" terms (Rambo: First Blood Part II [1985]) or which, contrarily, demonstrated vividly why the Vietnam War seemed a lost cause (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, etc.)

At the time of the film's release, critics were overwhelmingly positive about James Cameron's Aliens, often comparing it favorably to Alien. Elliott Stein at the Village Voice termed the sequel "intense, suspenseful" and "filled with gritty dialogue." Time Magazine voted Aliens one of the ten best films of 1986 and noted its "technically awesome blend" of horror and science fiction. I still remember Joel Siegel's review on ABC TV at the time, wherein the movie critic noted that the last half hour of Aliens was like attending a Bruce Springsteen concert...from "inside the bass drum."

In terms of James Cameron's career, Aliens (1986) was the director's first big budget motion picture following the surprise success of The Terminator in 1984. Aliens also features several members of the unofficial Cameron repertory company, including Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton, all of whom appeared in his previous effort. But Aliens was not just an expensive film "reunion" for Cameron: it was the opportunity to prove that The Terminator was not a fluke, and that he could successfully tell a story against an epic backdrop and in an already-established universe.

Needless to say, considering the film's sterling reputation today -- now 25 years later -- Cameron succeeded wildly with Aliens. In 2011, the film still thrills both as a straight-up war movie in space, and as a metaphor for America's involvement in Vietnam.

"We're on an express elevator to Hell...going down!"

Fifty-seven years after the events of the movie Alien (1979), Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is awakened from hyper-sleep when her shuttle, the Narcissus, is recovered by a salvage crew.

Once back on Earth, Ripley meets with representatives of the Company, including Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), regarding events aboard the Nostromo. She recounts her story of the hostile alien life form that her crew encountered on distant LV-426, but Company executives are skeptical of the tale, They suspend Ripley from flight duty. Meanwhile, Ripley learns from Burke that her daughter died -- an old woman -- not long before Ripley was recovered.

Some time later, Carter and a representative of the Colonial Marines, Lt. Gorman (William Hope), visit Ripley in her small apartment. The terraforming colony on LV-426 has dropped out of communications contact, and the Company fears that Ripley's "monsters" have reared their heads. After getting assurances from Burke that the mission is to "wipe out" the aliens and not study them, Ripley agrees to return to LV-426 with a platoon of well-equipped Colonial Marines. Among the crew is Bishop (Lance Henriksen), a "synthetic" or android. His presence doesn't sit well with Ripley because of her encounter on the Nostromo with the android Ash.

Upon arrival at LV-426, Ripley and the Marines discover the only apparent survivor of an alien attack, a small girl named Newt (Carrie Henn). Ripley bonds with the child almost immediately, even as Gorman sends in the platoon to examine life signs emanating from the terraforming station. There, the marines discover the cocooned survivors of the colony, now being used to propagate the alien life cycle.

After a disastrous first engagement with the aliens and the destruction of the military drop ship, Ripley, Newt and the surviving soldiers take up sanctuary in a control center, and attempt to procure a second vehicle for evacuation from their orbiting ship. Unfortunately, the aliens are on the move again, and a traitor -- now exposed -- makes his move.

As more of the soldiers are killed in action, Ripley attempts to rescue Newt, who is taken to the alien "hive" for facehugger implantation. There, Ripley and Newt encounter a new foe: the Alien Queen. To escape from this monster, Ripley must put her trust in someone she fears: the inhuman Bishop.

"Hey, maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!" - Aliens and The Vietnam War

It took the American cinema a good long time to understand and synthesize the nation's traumatic experience in the Vietnam War.

Although celebrated films such as Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) all played theatrically in the same decade as the war's ending, it was not truly until the Reagan Era that a real renaissance in Vietnam War films arrived in theaters.

From 1984 to 1989, audiences saw Missing in Action (1984), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), Hamburger Hill (1987), The Hanoi Hilton (1987), and 84 Charlie MoPic (1989), to name just a few films.

Why had the floodgates opened to the Vietnam War film in the 1980s, in both action mode (Chuck Norris, Sly Stallone) and award-winning mode (Stone, Kubrick)? In part it may have been because of President Reagan's Operation Urgent Fury in 1983, a successful invasion by American forces of the small Caribbean island of Grenada.

Unlike the Vietnam conflict, which lasted through the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford, this effort was a short, contained engagement and one in which the Americans could readily and easily be declared victorious. There was no "mission creep," so-to-speak. In that new moment of American victory and clarity, it was easier, perhaps, to exorcise the demons of Vietnam than it had been in the 1970s, when new military failures such as President Carter's Operation Eagle Claw only reinforced the sense of America's inability to use armed force successfully.

Whatever the reason, Aliens quite clearly fits into the Vietnam War movie trend of the mid-1980s. In fact, at least metaphorically-speaking, it could even be considered the ultimate Vietnam War film, even though it concerns alien monsters not Viet Cong, and space marines rather than American soldiers.

Whatever the exact reasons, the Vietnam War was clearly on Cameron's mind as he fashioned the script for his sequel to Scott's Alien. Cameron had recently finished writing Rambo: First Blood Part II for Stallone and by his own admission "was kind of fascinated by Vietnam at that point."

This obsession with the American experience in Vietnam plays out in Aliens in several ways, but most importantly in the style of warfare portrayed in the film. In considering the Vietnam conflict, the authors of Living Through History: the Twentieth Century World described a war in which the Americans brought the latest, high-tech equipment (such as helicopter gunships and rocket launchers) but were met by an enemy, the Viet Cong, who "did not fight open battles, where these weapons could be used." (Heinemann Educational, 1988, page 77.) Furthermore, after their attacks, the Viet Cong "melted back into the jungle where the Americans could not find them."

This overarching dynamic is almost perfectly replicated in the battle of LV-426 in Cameron's film. The Colonial Marines come bearing M41A pulse rifles, drop ships, synthetic officers (Bishop), flame-throwers, smart guns, APC vehicles, and motion detectors, yet their weaponry proves entirely ineffective in stopping the alien attacks. The aliens don't literally "melt back into the jungle" here, but they do seem to melt into the walls of the terraforming station, a trick which offers them perfect natural camouflage.

Or as Hudson notes: "They're coming outta the walls. They're coming outta the goddamn walls!" The alien battle tactics are certainly guerrilla in nature, then. The beasts use natural cover (their resin-coated caverns), pools of water, and air ducting to engage the humans in conditions favorable to their extra-terrestrial strengths. This is not a "stand-up" fight in other words. Again, consider that in Vietnam the Viet Cong was famous for using a subterranean tunnel supply system. Once more, the aliens mirror that function, taking up residence in the "sub levels" of the battlefield, moving back and forth out of easy sight.

It is not just in battle specifics that Aliens re-parses the details of the Vietnam War. The central argument against the Vietnam conflict on both the conservative and liberal sides of the political spectrum has always been that America fought a "limited" and "bureaucratic" war, one in which the U.S. could not simply annihilate the enemy, or invade and occupy the country. A common refrain heard at the time of the Vietnam War was that our superior military forces were fighting with one arm tied behind their backs. They were never really unloosed...to win, hence Rambo's memorable plea to his superiors, "do we get to win this time?" Whether or not this perception is entirely true is beside the point in regards to Aliens.

Here, quite clearly, the problem is that the Colonial Marines fight a limited, bureaucratic war in much the same fashion. Their wrong-headed commander, Lt. Gorman orders the committed troops -- in the battle zone, no less -- to holster their pulse rifles and smart guns. He even has the sergeant collect their magazines. The reason for Gorman's action is valid: delicate machinery ("primary heat exchangers") stands nearby and could be destroyed (thus causing a nuclear blast...) should it be damaged.

But suddenly, these high-tech soldiers are forced to use old-fashioned pistols and shotguns to fight their invisible, incredibly powerful enemy. Like the American forces in the jungles of Vietnam, the Colonial Marines thus wage a war with one hand tied behind their backs, and not surprisingly are unable to win that war in direct engagement.

On the urging of Burke, Gorman attempts to safeguard property (corporate property) ahead of actually winning a battle, or even safeguarding his men. Burke's agenda is to preserve an expensive "investment," not destroy the aliens, and so the bureaucratic agenda surfaces and, again, clouds the rules of war.

It goes further than that. Ripley herself becomes a vocal advocate of a different-style of warfare. After suffering a debilitating defeat, she suggests to Corporal Hicks (Biehn) that the marines return to the Sulaco and "nuke" the alien hive from orbit because it is the only way "to be sure" the alien threat is neutralized.

Naturally, Burke can't get on board with that idea, and he says that Hicks is just a corporal and "not qualified to make a decision like that."  Again, he is attempting to impose limits on the nature of the fight. These are limits, by the way, that the aliens don't observe. Rightly, Hicks overrules the yuppie.

Importantly, Ripley's nuke-the-whole-site-from-orbit plan is a philosophy in direct contradiction to the "limited war" scenario engaged by both Gorman and by American generals in Vietnam. Ripley's suggestion, in the fictional case of Aliens at least, seems entirely reasonable. If the colony is overrun by deadly aliens, why engage them at all on ground level? Limited, bureaucratic war is not a blueprint for victory, the film seems to make note.

Again, this doesn't mean (at all...) that nuclear weapons should have been utilized in the Vietnam War, only that the bureaucratic, one-hand-behind-the-back strategy settled on by the American leadership was flawed, and in some sense, lacking in common sense.  Why fight a war if you don't intend to leverage your own strengths and win it?  Like Rambo before her, Ripley seems to be searching for a way to "win this time."

That way to win is, specifically, by avoiding the half-measures and limitations imposed by generals and bureaucrats. Accordingly, the end of the film sees the terra-firming station go up in an (accidental) nuclear blast, and the survivors returning home, their enemy vanquished. This is a victory (at least after a final "bump" with the Alien Queen) denied America in Vietnam. You may remember the shocking images of helicopters pushed off air craft carrier decks as the U.S. Armed Forces returned home in 1975, for instance.  Aliens re-fights the war on better terms, and brings at least some of the boys (and girls) home from the battlefield. At least until the sequel.

There are other simple connections to Vietnam in Aliens as well. Many Americans felt that the Viet-Cong were primitives living in "rice paddies." Their tactics, experience and skill were not respected, nor honored. Because the Viet Cong weren't from a modern, high-tech, industrial Western culture we were lulled into believing that the war would be a cake walk. The opposite, of course, was true. In Aliens, the marines -- but never Ripley -- often underestimate the aliens in a similar fashion. When the aliens cut the power to plunge the hiding marines into darkness, Hudson wonders aloud how "animals" could have cut the power. Even at this late juncture, he is still making the mistake of underestimating his opponent. The aliens are not just animals: they are a highly organized hive mind, a surrogate, in some sci-fi way, for Communism, too, I should point out. And of course, Communism was the real American target in the Vietnam War.

Right down to the marines' manner of self-expression, Aliens very powerfully suggests the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s. "The dialog itself, the idiom, is pretty much Vietnam era," Cameron reported in an interview here. "It's the most contemporary American combat "war speak" that I had access to. I studied how soldiers talked in Vietnam, and I took certain specific bits of terminology, and a general sense of how they express themselves, and I used that for the dialogue, to try and make it seem like a realistic sort of military expedition, as opposed to a high tech, futuristic one. I wanted to create more of a sense of realism rather than that of an interesting future."

Another unique facet of The Vietnam War: many Americans did not understand why the war was fought. The notion, of course, was that if Vietnam fell to Communism, other countries (Laos, Thailand, etc.) would also fall like "dominoes" to that ideology. But who were our allies, exactly? What would victory look like? Why should the average American on the street, struggling to make ends meet, care about what was happening in Vietnam, half a world a way? This wasn't like World War II, for instance, where fascism was moving like a dark tide across free Europe, and the consequences were easily understood. Instead, the motives and strategies surrounding the Vietnam War were ones of intellectual gamesmanship. It was, as James Cameron himself noted "a weird and surreal kind of war."

In contrast to the military in Aliens and the American soldiers serving in Vietnam, Ripley boasts a very strong and clear personal motivation for fighting a war on LV-426. She has an individual connection to Newt...a "family" member of a sort. So she picks up arms to fight the aliens, and does so effectively. I have always believed that Ripley is an example of the everyman (or woman) here in America. When our families are attacked or threatened, we will fight. To the death. But to fight for simply a cerebral theory of geopolitics (the Domino Theory), and one ultimately proven wrong, hardly seems an effective use of military might. What Cameron appears to express in Aliens is his grave concern about the application of American military power in foreign land when there is not a clear and just cause. This idea resurfaces powerfully in both The Abyss (1989) and Avatar (2009).

All this established, I think it's important again to note that Cameron is not anti-military. The "grunts" in the film, from Hicks to Hudson to Vasquez are clearly heroic in nature. Hicks is effective as a leader. Ultimately, Hudson finds his sense of courage. Vasquez fights to the death to save her fellow marines and survivors. Even the green Gorman finds redemption at the end, taking out a handful of aliens in a final act of self-sacrifice. So I don't think that Cameron is reflexively against the military or so-called "just" wars. Rather, his stance reminds me of what President Obama once said (and has since forgotten, vis-a-vis Libya): that he isn't against wars; he's just against dumb wars. In other words, there are legitimate applications of military might; but you better think them through; and you better fight to win.

Game over, man! Game over! Aliens and the fog of war.

The comparison to the Vietnam War in Aliens also involves another important element: "the fog of war."

For those unfamiliar with this term, it means, essentially, the uncertainty of the participants in a military operation once it has begun.

That uncertainty can cause mistakes and fatalities. There are different categorizations for "the fog of war," including operational types (meaning the commander of a force not having full sight of a mission imperative, for instance), or strategic type. In the strategic type, the commander fails to grasp the geography of the battle,and the enemy's capabilities, to the detriment of his men and his cause.

In Aliens, Gorman makes a fatal mistake of the strategic type by sending his soldiers into a trap; a trap from which they can't utilize their high-tech advantage. But what's most interesting about this failure is Cameron's method of visualization.

Throughout the early portions of the film, Cameron shows audiences how each soldier wears a camera mounted on his or her helmet. And then, he reveals Gorman's command post in the APC: a small corner of assembled video screens tracking the footage of each individual soldier, as well as ancillary data such as "mission time" and life-sign readings. When full scale war erupts in the terraforming station sub level, Cameron cuts to relatively few "live" shots of the soldiers actually battling the aliens.

Instead, Cameron cuts repeatedly to the chaotic images on those video screens as all hell breaks loose. We see static, for instance. We register failed communications and see a "rolling" picture. We see herky-jerky, hard-to-interpret visuals of gunfire, and marines in action. Marines repeatedly run directly at camera (at us), screaming above the din of bullets and hissing aliens.

In essence, Cameron reveals to us a futuristic version of the Vietnam War's particular brand of "fog." If you go back and watch Oliver Stone's Platoon, you'll notice how there are almost no clear battle lines, no clear "sides" in the many scenes of combat. Soldiers seem to run endlessly through the jungle, back and forth, constantly under attack, while air strikes occur all around them. It's Death from Above...and everywhere else, for that matter. It's impossible to guess where the enemies are hidden, at least in terms of geography It is pandemonium on a vast scale. As viewers we have no sense of visual order; of the enemy being on the left or right. Instead, we sense danger everywhere.

In Aliens, Cameron cleverly pinpoints a corollary for that approach, giving us "electronic" fog of war, essentially, in the first battle sequence. He uses video imaging, failed communications, and grainy visuals to suggest the bewilderment and panic of the grunts on the ground as they are attacked from all sides by an enemy that seems to literally appear out of nowhere, melting out of the walls. The point, of course, is that our technology will do us no good when fighting the aliens. The fractured, indecipherable images on a video screen provide us our only clues about what is happening, but again, don't reflect relative positions of armies or fighters.

The prominent use of the video screen is especially important in Aliens. You may remember that Marshall McLuhan once wrote (in May of 1975, for the Montreal Gazette) that "television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America, not on the battlefields of Vietnam."

In Aliens, the video screen dramatization of a hopeless battle seems to recall this particular scenario. We see the war fucked up to Hell on the video-sets in the film, and at least subconsciously (if you are the right age...), you will be reminded of similar images from the Vietnam conflict. In fact, while Gorman sits speechless, resigned to a catastrophic loss, Ripley leaps into action. She thus takes -- literally -- the living room (the APC) to the battlefield to effect action: to rescue the men and women still in combat. It's a weird reversal of the dynamic in the Vietnam War; as if American citizens could step up from their sofas and impact the goings on half-a-world away. And again, it's a way of saying (like Rambo), this time, we get to win. We don't just sit back and watch helplessly.

"I work for the company. But don't let that fool you, I'm really an okay guy" - The Yuppie Mentality in Aliens.

If James Cameron treats the "grunts" of Aliens with respect and admiration, he certainly doesn't hold back his venom for another demographic target: the yuppie movement of Reagan's America.

Again, some history is useful here. Newsweek termed 1984 the "Year of the Yuppie," and identified over one million Americans as belonging to this this newly identified demographic (Young Urban Professionals).

By and large, the Yuppies were baby boomers, and therefore former hippies. But these peaceniks had by Reagan's years traded their political activism for stock options, power suits, and corner offices. Primarily, yuppies were concerned with personal status and conspicuous consumption. In other words, making oodles of money. A side effect of this self-absorbed outlook was that many Americans who were not Yuppies were left behind. This was an America were the rich grew richer, and everyone else was getting squeezed out. By the end of the 1980s, horror films were obsessing with this class warfare gap in films such as They Live (1988) and The People Under the Stairs (1991).

In Alien, audiences learned that The Company had thoughtlessly sent the crew of Nostromo to acquire an alien life form for study, considering the men and women of the ship "expendable." In Aliens, we actually get to meet some of those Company executives and V.I.P.s...and it is isn't pretty.

In an early scene set in a smoky board room (replete with coffee cups, fancy business suits and clouds of cigarette smoke...) we watch as the Company Board stages an inquisition at Ripley's expense. The Board arrives at the pre-ordained conclusion that Ripley is a liar, and focuses simply on the bottom line. Ripley admits to having destroyed the Nostromo, a "very expensive piece of hardware" and is summarily dismissed for her negative contribution to the bottom line.

Appropriately, Ripley terms the concerns of the Company "bullshit" and walks away from it, but the Yuppies aren't done with her yet.

In fact, the colonists on LV-426 face horrible death because an executive, Carter Burke, sent them out to the very coordinates Ripley specified on one of her reports: the location of the alien derelict ship where thousands of eggs were located.

Notably, Burke does so without warning the colonists of what they might find. Why? He wants to save the lion's share of the profits from the aliens for himself. This is how he rationalizes his behavior: "What if that ship didn't even exist? Did you ever think about that, I didn't know! So, now, if I went and made a major security situation out of it, everybody steps in; Administration steps in, and there's no exclusive rights for anybody, nobody wins! So I made a decision, and it was... wrong. It was a bad call, Ripley. It was a bad call."

Notice the terminology there: "bad call."

It explicitly refers to Wall Street jargon (namely "call options"), but more importantly, Burke's comments share the attitudes of many "players" on Wall Street. For a living, they gamble with the retirement and pension funds of investors, and don't necessarily act responsibly in light of such responsibility. In essence, Burke does the exact same thing in Aliens, playing with the lives of the colonists on the chance that he could win "exclusive rights" to what he perceives as a treasure trove: the rights to alien biology and "bio-weapons" created from it.

Aliens' most trenchant and memorable observation about yuppies and 1980s yuppie values comes from Ripley. She compares the Aliens -- a hive mind working for the common good of their race -- with Burke's brand of selfish "humanity:" "You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage." She's right. As hideous and monstrous as the Aliens appear and act, they move as one; they don't betray and sabotage one another so one drone can get ahead.

Although Aliens arrived before the stock market crash of 1987, it certainly suggests the fall of the Yuppies, because of this self-absorbed attitude. Had Burke worked to protect Ripley, Newt and the Marines, they would have certainly reciprocated and worked to save him when push came to shove. Instead, Burke is left alone, and therefore without the support he needs to survive in an arena overrun by aliens. His very philosophy of life -- me first! me second! and me third! -- dooms him. Of course, he's too short-sighted to see it.

Clearly, Burke is the most despicable character in the film. He's a liar, a turncoat and a murderer. But what makes him so sick is that all of his sins came about from a desire simply to be rich. Again, the Aliens act according to their nature, not out of extraordinary malice. They kill, certainly, but do so not to acquire personal wealth, but to assure the continuance of their species. This is a very sharp counterpoint to human behavior in the Reagan/Yuppie Era, and one not lost on audiences.

There's so much more to discuss here regarding Aliens, yet this review has certainly gone on long enough.

So, if you'll forgive me, I'll close with a few bullet points to think about while you watch the film:

1. Cameron shows a real preference for movement within the foreground of the frame, especially during action sequences. In the climactic battle between Ripley (in a power suit) and the Alien Queen, for instance, one hydraulic arm moves up and down in the frame repeatedly, obscuring our view, occasionally, of the close-quarters, mother-against-mother combat. This movement not only takes our eyes away from any deficiencies in terms of special effects; it adds to our desire to "see" the action and makes the action seem all the more urgent. Cameron would utilize the same approach (with a swinging light panel in the foreground of the frame) during the knife-fight in The Abyss.

2. Aliens reads as a "faithful" continuation of Alien despite deliberate alterations in the alien life-cycle in large part because Cameron has, like Scott before him, targeted a particularly colorful class of people, namely blue collar people, as main characters. In Alien, the crew of the Nostromo was famously termed "space truckers," and Brett and Parker constantly complained about their contracts, shares and responsibilities in the Company. In Aliens, Cameron lands us into battle with blue collar "grunts," and their flamboyant and gritty language also seems real, and often very funny. In particular, the character of Hudson is a source of continuous humor with his colorful observations ("Game over, man! Why don't you put her in charge? You want some of this?!). But the tenor of the characters from Alien to Aliens is surprisingly consistent. Both films pit the average joe -- of stalwart heart -- against faceless and callous white collar-types: business executives and military higher-ups.

3. Aliens has often been termed the ultimate battle of the Moms: Ripley vs. The Alien Queen. That dynamic is definitely present here, and it is interesting to contrast these two matriarchs. Ripley suffers from guilt because she was not "there" to raise her biological daughter, and so goes to extreme lengths to protect Newt from danger. She won't make the same mistake twice. The uber-protective mother resurfaces in Cameron films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), but here is contrasted with a mother of a very different and inhuman perspective.

Specifically, the continuance of the Alien race rests with the Queen and her survival, whereas the continuance of the human race rests with the child, the heir to our lineage. The Alien Queen ultimately fights to the death for her own survival then (so she may lay more eggs), whereas there is an emotional, personal connection and component to Ripley's love for Newt. She would never consciously choose her own survival over the child's. This is the difference, perhaps, between the mentality of an insect, and the mentality of a mammal.

4. The last half-hour of Aliens is a virtual replay of the finale of Alien, only with more combat, and bigger, more elaborate sets. Once more, Ripley is required to don protective gear (a power suit rather than a space suit) so as to eject an alien life-form from a spaceship, via the airlock. Only in this case, Ripley is fighting for more than her own survival (or the survival of a cat). Here, she has an android, another adult, and a child to safeguard. The higher stakes in this battle render the "rerun" ending incredibly effective and it hardly seems like a regurgitation of what Scott accomplished. But at least from an objective standpoint, the film's final act is the only part of the film that slavishly mirrors the dynamics of its predecessor.

5. I always find it interesting how the Alien films treat non-humans and non-aliens. In Scott's Alien, Jones the Cat was just as much a survivor as Ripley, and operating as much by its unique nature as were the humans and the alien. In Aliens, another non-human, Bishop, plays a critical role in the action. And he too lives up to his unique nature (or programming, in his case.) Ripley's eventual rapprochement with Bishop is a good example of the fact that humans need not be obsessed with jingoistic hatred or malice for "the other." In a series obsessed with violence, and with aliens and humans at war, this is a nice bit of business to throw in. Humans still have the capacity to empathize with other creatures even if they are different, like Bishop, who comes across as a complete innocent. There can be little doubt here that Bishop is the model for Star Trek: The Next Generation's Lt. Data.

In so many ways large and small, Aliens is almost a perfect time capsule of the 1980s. It shares that decade's obsession with the Vietnam War, and with the emerging Yuppie culture. As a sequel, it is bigger and more elaborate than its progenitor, and it features state-of-the-art special effects sequences. But what makes Aliens resonate beyond the original context is its overwhelming sense of heart. The bonds between Ripley and Newt, and even the bond between the Marines are strong evidence that man is the superior species in this war with an aggressive species, and will ultimately prevail.

James Cameron makes big, expressive, emotional action films, and Aliens is one of the best of that category ever made. The performances are uniformly strong, and Sigourney Weaver was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. But most importantly, Aliens cogently reminds the viewer of a critical and powerful human truth.

If you are fighting for a just cause -- for your family, for instance -- you truly feel like can slay dragons.

50 Years Ago: At The Earth's Core (1976)

2026-07-15T06:00:00.012-04:00

In the early 1900s, David Innes (McClure) and inventor Abner Perry (Peter Cushing) test the doctor’s experimental “high-calibration drilling machine,” the Iron Mole, which can burrow deep into “the bowels of the Earth.”

Something goes wrong on the initial journey, however, and Iron Mole emerges not on the far side of a hill, but deep within the Earth’s core, in a heretofore unknown world called Pellucidar. In this savage jungle world, humans are the slaves of giant, telepathic pterodactyl creatures, the Mahars, and brutalized by their enforcers, the Sagoth.

Even as David falls in love with the beautiful princess Dia (Caroline Munro), he attempts to unify the t human tribes of Pellucidar to confront and destroy the Mahars.

At the Earth’s Core is the second Amicus film in its Edgar Rice Burroughs cycle, and the film re-teams star Doug McClure with director Kevin Connor. This fantasy, set in the interior world of Pellucidar, is not quite as grounded or believable as the previous entry, The Land That Time Forgot (1975), which utilized World War as its background context, but its antagonists -- the green-eyed, squawking, strafing Mahars -- are certainly memorable in design and execution. They make effective villains in a film whose pace drags all the way through, and seem like an early version of The Dark Crystal’s(1982) Skeksis vultures.

At The Earth’s Core possesses a strong thematic through-line, and this fact helps to pass the time between monster fights. Early in the film, Professor Perry (Cushing) notes with irony that the Sagoth, creatures of limited intelligence, lord it over the far more intelligent humans, and that this is often the case on Earth as well; that aggression overcomes intellect.

Later, David recognizes that that the human tribes must rise up against the Sagoths (and Mahars) under the auspices of cooperation, rather than aggression. Or at the very least, he suggests cooperative aggression: that unity can combine to beat brute strength. The Sagoth, for all their brutality, are not divided: they are singular in their ruthlessness and barbarity, and this single-mindedness gives them power.

Much of the film involves David unifying the tribes and bringing the fight successfully to the Mahar City. In the end, one of the humans notes “For as long as we can recall, our tribes have been divided. Now, with our newfound friends, we are united.”

The idea, relevant to Burroughs’ time (pre-World War I) and also to the 1970s and Cold War Era, is that nations -- as well as people -- can overcome tyranny through cooperation and alliance. The same ethos is seen in such World War II era entertainment as Flash Gordon (1936), which involves another fantasy figure uniting disparate human groups on the distant world of Mongo in order to unseat Ming.

When At the Earth’s Core follows through on this idea, the film works, but even so the pace is often very slow. The film takes a long time and two different giant monster attacks before David and Abner even reach the Mahar City, and are introduced to their opponents. The film could use a bit more of the wicked sense of humor revealed by the brilliantly composed final shot, of the Iron Mole coming up through the Earth…onto the grounds of the White House, another realm where David’s brand of cooperation and unity would certainly prove helpful

Despite pacing deficits, At the Earth’s Core creates a vivid and colorful fantasy world on its sound-stages. The “alien” foliage of Pellucidar is bizarre and wild, and the monsters (mostly of the kaiju, monster-in-suit variety) are inventive, if weird. One scene that involves McClure battling a Mahar pet in a pit clearly forecasts Return of the Jedi’s (1983) rancor battle in both the specifics of the man vs. monster fight and the orchestration of the fight. And it's commendable that the screenplay doesn’t take the easy route and resolve the David/Dia romance happily. Instead (and unlike the Burroughs novel…), Dia willingly remains behind in Pellucidar while David realizes, expressing the idea that they each belong in their separate worlds.

I had the opportunity to speak to director Kevin Connor about the film at a Space:1999 convention 25 years ago, and talk about the film:

KEVIN CONNOR: Milton (Subotsky) wrote the script of At The Earth’s Core and I had become part of the Amicus stable. They seemed pleased with what I was doing so they hired me again. The script wasn’t the greatest but it had some fun sequences in it. Cushing and McClure were a delight as usual and enjoyed working with each other.

MUIR: Pellucidar is a different world from Caprona. Did you have discussions about making sure this was so, both visually and thematically?

KEVIN CONNOR: With the D.P. Alan Hume, we devised a colour scheme for Pellucidar which was a mauve-orange backdrop. Most of the film was on one huge stage at Pinewood, and therefore the colour was very controllable. I think the budgets had risen to $1.2 million.

MUIR: The creatures featured in this film are more fanciful, less realistic, you might say, than in Land. Was there a concerted attempt to get away from featuring the dinosaurs that you had just included in the last film?

KEVIN CONNOR: With the production designer, Maurice Carter, we decided to try and put humans into our monster suits. This worked well for some of them, and not so well for others.

MUIR: I understand that the bird-like God creatures, the Mahars were quite difficult to wrangle.

KEVIN CONNOR: The Mahars were stuntmen in suits, suspended by wires, and we were limited as to their trajectory. I think these were the most successful creatures in the picture, especially with the soundtrack that was created by the brilliant Jim Atkinson.

MUIR: Any thoughts on working with Caroline Munro?

KEVIN CONNOR: Again, I get on very well with all my actors and Caroline was no exception. She rarely left the set, and sat knitting next to the camera, distracting all the boys in her revealing costume.

MUIR: This movie was another big attraction at the box office, wasn’t it?

KEVIN CONNOR: It did well in the UK, but not so well in the States, but it does play on cable TV quite a bit. I don’t think the making of the third film was predicated on the success of this one. It was a good franchise and these stories have a good long shelf life.

50 Years Ago: Futureworld (1976)

2026-07-14T06:00:00.002-04:00

A key character in Futureworld (1975) informs another character that the problem at Delos -- the amusement park of the future -- is "the memory" of the nightmarish events that occurred in Western World, or for viewer purposes, the harrowing events of the great sci-fi movie Westworld (1973).

The very same problem might be ascribed to this less-than-satisfactory cinematic sequel directed by Richard T. Heffron and starring Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner. In short, it just doesn't live up to the original, action-packed experience of Westworld.

Though it is rewarding and ambitious that this AIP, Samuel Z. Arkoff sequel heads off into new story territory rather than aping the formula or plot-line of the previous film, Futureworld still suffers dramatically from a lack of forward momentum, and a slow-moving, obvious narrative.

In short, it takes this movie roughly 83 minutes to get to the plot point that audiences have already reached much sooner, and that is that the robots at Delos have taken over the park, and are producing robot duplicates of world leaders and opinion makers.

Today the amusement park...tomorrow the world.

Since the two lead actors in the film are playing ace newspaper and TV reporters, you'd expect them to put two and two together a lot sooner than they actually do. But no, they can't even detect a robot close-up, face-to-face in the Delos mission control room.

Not exactly Woodward and Bernstein, this Browning (Fonda) and Ballard (Danner).

Worse, Futureworld spends an inordinate amount of the film's running time in the underground bowels of Delos, apparently really the Intercontinental Airport in Huston. Whatever the precise location, it looks like an endless, over sized boiler room, and after a while all the scenes set there look interchangeable and play as deadly dull.

"In Futureworld, nothing can go wrong..."

Some time after the violent events at Western World, the Delos board of directors holds a briefing to announce the re-launch of the $1,200-a-day amusement park.

The company has committed 1.5 billion dollars to replace the malfunctioning equipment, and executives claim that the new Delos is "fail safe."

International Media Corporation sends reporter Chuck Browning (Peter Fonda) to investigate the new Delos.  Browning is eager to take the assignment because an informant just recently contacted him about a "big" story at the park and then was found murdered, with news-clippings clutched in his hand.

Tracy Ballard (Blythe Danner) a TV newswoman with an audience of fifty-five million viewers is none-too-pleased that Browning will be tagging along at Delos, but she and Chuck quickly develop a flirtatious and competitive relationship.

Once at Delos, the reporters visit "Futureworld," a new theme park to go alongside Roman World, Medieval World, and the now-defunct Western World.   After their arrival, the reporters board a rocket simulation, visit a space station, spar with robot boxers, and otherwise enjoy the space age sights and sounds of the luxury resort. A Delos executive named Duffy (Arthur Hill) escorts the duo on a tour of the Delos facility, and Chuck sneaks off to see if he can discover the truth behind the smooth-running facade.

What Chuck and Tracy soon learn with the help of an employee named Harry (Stuart Margolin) and his android buddy, Clark, is that Delos has been producing duplicates of all the big-wig, high-roller visitors, from Russian generals to Iranian oil magnates.   Ballard and Browning themselves are to be duplicated by the robots, who believe that "the human being is a very unstable, irrational, violent animal" and that mankind will destroy the Earth "before the end of the decade."

Before escaping Delos, Tracy must face down a robot double of herself in the abandoned Westworld, while Chuck battles his own malevolent doppelganger in Futureworld.

"Once you make it with a robot, you don't want anyone else..."

All movies are a reflection of their cultural context, and Futureworld is no exception.

Coming soon after the Watergate scandal and Nixon's resignation, this movie headlines two "hero journalists" -- again, think Woodward and Bernstein -- as they uncover a far-reaching conspiracy and essentially save the world as we know it. In other words, this movie comes from an age in which we had respected journalists (not "lame-stream" media), and believed that these truth-seekers could successfully stand-up to City Hall.

The other cultural or historical context at work here is one that a blog reader Indianhoop insightfully suggested to me in a comment on my original review of Westworld way back in 2011. I had asked the question "why were the mid-1970s obsessed with robots who could have sex, and duplicate other human functions?

In particular, I was thinking of movies such as Westworld, Futureworld, The Stepford Wives and TV characters such as The Bionic Woman's fembots. Indianhoop suggested that the women's rights issues and battles of the 1970s (Roe v. Wade, Title IX, the ERA, etc.) were at the crux of the issue, and I believe Indianhoop is correct. In the mid-1970s, women were stepping out of so-called "traditional roles" and countenancing more economic and reproductive freedom than in any decade before. The reaction by men -- if genre movies are any guidepost -- seemed to be downright fear.

Without women to lord it over, I guess, human robots were considered next in line for domestic servitude. After all, machines follow orders, don't step outside of their programming, and can fake orgasms brilliantly...at least if Stepford Wives is any indication.

Ironically, one fact that so dramatically undercuts Futureworld is the writing of the lead female character, Tracy Ballard. This is a dedicated woman who has risen to the top of her profession (think Barbara Walters in the 1970s) and who commands a vast worldwide audience. And yet Ballard spends most of the film as an arm ornament for Peter Fonda, alternately poo-pooing his theories or screaming in terror.  Ballard initiates no investigation on her own, and shows not the slightest bit of interest or curiosity in learning the truth about Delos.

Lois Lane, she ain't.

Despite what was going on in America at the time, what we really have in the Tracy Ballard character is a good old fashioned damsel-in-distress, dressed up in disco-decade, women's lib clothing.   Ultimately, she's kind of laughable, and almost wholly incidental to the narrative.

That's not Futureworld's only letdown either. Late in the film, robot duplicates of Chuck and Tracy are produced, and sent out to hunt down "the originals." All throughout the film, the robots of Delos have been portrayed as unemotional creatures who obey orders and programming, but have no overt "human" countenance.

Well, wouldn't you know it, Fonda and Danner both play these robot duplicates as devilish, sinister characters, who seem to take tremendous, sadistic pleasure in destroying their human prototypes.

Why are these robots -- all of the sudden -- out-and-out evil? Aren't they just fulfilling their programming? Even when The Gunslinger went on a rampage in Westworld, he wasn't cackling with malevolent glee. That's what made him scary: he was an implacable foe with a neutral countenance. We were able to project our human fears upon his relatively blank visage, but he was no two-dimensional mustache-twirler.

Another major scene in Futureworld is simply baffling. Duffy escorts Ballard to a "dream chamber" where she can go to sleep and Browning can watch her dreams unfold on a video monitor that resembles Spock's library computer on Star Trek.

Almost immediately, Ballard dreams of the Gunslinger (Yul Brynner) from Westworld, but not as a terrifying predator or foe, but rather as a "fantasy lover."

In the dream, the Gunslinger appears out of nowhere and rescues Ballard from doctors in red-jumpsuits who are pursuing her. The Gunslinger shoots them down, and then lassos Ballard in slow-motion...and beds her.

So, why is Tracy Ballard -- TV newswoman extraordinaire -- dreaming of the Delos Gunslinger as a fantasy lover? Not a single word in the screenplay indicates she even has specific knowledge of the rogue robot cowboy. But assuming she did have such knowledge, why would Ballard's dreaming mind spontaneously turn the murderous Gunslinger into a fantasy sex partner?

Maybe I'm being obtuse, but I just don't get it.

I know that my wife thinks Yul Brynner is hot, but come on. Would you dream of bedding a mass murderer? And a robotic one at that? This entire, incongruous scene feels like an excuse to shoehorn Brynner into the proceedings. It's a bizarre and confusing interlude, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the film. The moment wherein Brynner lassos Danner with an animated pink lasso is just...well, embarrassing. It's great to see Brynner back in his iconic role, looking as fit and menacing as ever, but his presence adds nothing to the movie.

I've read various reviews of this film over the years indicating that there is "high tension" here, but I certainly didn't feel that way. Unlike Westworld, which moved with drive, humor and purpose, Futureworld meanders around for about an hour-and-a-half minutes, then spends the last fifteen minutes tying up loose ends. There's almost no real tension, since Delos employees allow Browning and Ballard to look around, and the 400 robot series is programmed to ignore visitors in their midst.

I also find it unfortunate that Futureworld wastes so much time in the bowels of the amusement park rather than exploring the Futureworld setting. This is a place of "space safaris," holographic chess (presaging Star Wars by two years...) and skiing on the "ice slopes of Mars." Wouldn't you rather see some of that, instead of endless boiler rooms?

But the trenchant point here concerns fantasy...and the fantasy experience. Westworld was about living in a fantasy world of violence and sex, and discovering it isn't such a fantasy after all. The film didn't hammer you over the head with that theme. Rather, it had a nice, droll sense of humor about the whole thing.

Futureworld ignores this idea (and the sense of humor) entirely in favor of its very dry conspiracy about lookalike robots...and boiler rooms.

Or as Tracy Ballard declares at one point in this interminable movie, walking through yet another industrial-looking chamber, "This is about as exciting as a visit to the waterworks."

Yep. This movie went to Futureworld and all the audience gets is a dumb T-shirt.

Abnormal Fixation wins BEST WEB SERIES at Best Hollywood Day Short Film Festival

2026-07-13T12:31:24.905-04:00

Guest Post: Obsession (2026)

2026-07-07T06:00:00.000-04:00

Obsession: A Disquieting Commentary on a Popular Trope

Guest Post by Jonas Schwartz-Owen

Remember those beloved ’80s teen comedies, where Lloyd Dobler blares his boombox outside his ex-girlfriend’s window despite her breaking up with him, or the geek has sex with a passed-out prom queen? Hilarity ensues - until the hangover of hindsight kicks in and we realize these “charming” moments were never funny, never charming, and definitely not forgivable.

Curry Barker’s runaway hit Obsession drags those moments back into the light and reconstructs them for what they always were: stalking, assault, and other atrocities. This time, the “hero” gets the consequences he always deserved.

Bear (Michael Johnston) has a deep fixation on his coworker and friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette), who long ago relegated him to the friend zone. Desperate, he buys a trinket from a magic shop that promises to grant one wish. He wishes Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world, then snaps the twig-like charm as instructed. As anyone who’s read W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw knows: be careful what you wish for.

New-media wunderkind Curry Barker has scared up a fortune for Blumhouse and Focus Features, thanks in part to his massive YouTube following - 1.33 million subscribers - and the viral success of his first film, Milk & Serial (3.2 million views). More importantly, Obsession is a taut, confident piece of filmmaking. Bear’s responsibility for the chaos never gets swept under the rug to make him seem heroic, and yet his core “crime” remains relatable. Who hasn’t, at some point, wished a friend would become something more? Barker establishes a creeping sense of dread early, so when the horror erupts, the audience is already primed.

The film delivers several memorable set pieces that linger: Nikki’s patient wait for “her man” to come home, a nimble spoof of the much-maligned animal cracker scene from Armageddon, a game of Jenga with far more than wooden blocks at stake, and possibly the worst college acceptance reveal in cinematic history.

The film does stumble in one key area - particularly frustrating given its commentary on toxic relationship tropes. The “real” Nikki becomes more of a conduit, her unseen suffering functioning as torture for Bear. But the movie never fully establishes the stakes for Nikki herself. Is her consciousness trapped in a kind of hell (as one tech-support gag implies), or is she imprisoned inside her own body, à la Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out? Nikki is blameless - she didn’t cause any of the insanity Bear unleashes - yet the audience only truly connects with her in the final moments. It feels less like a revelation and more like a final twist of the knife. For a film dissecting toxic masculinity, it occasionally forgets the woman at the center of it.

The cast grounds the movie with quirky, committed performances. Johnston, who is openly gay, brings an added layer of subtext to Bear, despite the character being heterosexual. Anyone who has wrestled with identity in their youth may recognize the desperation to appear “normal” by fixating on someone of the opposite sex - an obsession that’s less about love and more about self-denial. Whether intentional or not, it’s a compelling layer.

Though the script sometimes shortchanges Nikki, Inde Navarrette nearly steals the film. Her character’s hairpin emotional shifts give her the opportunity to play multiple registers at once.

Megan Lawless, as the girl-next-door hopelessly in love with Bear, channels the great “third wheel” archetypes - Watts (Some Kind of Wonderful) and Duckie (Pretty in Pink) - while making the role her own. She’s a fully realized love interest who is consistently overlooked. Cooper Tomlinson, Barker’s comedy partner, slots neatly into the jock-best-friend role, serving as both comic relief and moral sounding board.

For Obsession to become such a massive moneymaker, it’s clearly tapping into something in the zeitgeist. Maybe it’s that Barker, a Gen Z creator, has cracked the code and delivered a $750,000 budgeted juggernaut. Maybe it’s proof that a well-made horror film can still drag audiences back into theaters. Or maybe it’s both. It could take years before scholars like John Kenneth Muir fully dissect its cultural significance.

For now, though, the new king definitely has clothes - and they’re bloody good.

50 Years Ago - The Bicentennial!

2026-07-04T06:00:00.001-04:00

Since it is July 4, 2026, I thought it might be an opportune to remember America's Bicentennial celebration of 1976....50 years ago

I remember the occasion, five decades ago, well. I was six years old, and the Bicentennial -- the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence -- was all the craze, all over the country. I was in Kindergarten at the time, and much of our class work was geared towards the Bicentennial and remembering the beginnings of our country.

At the time, Gerald Ford -- an unelected President, ironically -- was Commander-in-Chief, and he spoke meaningfully in Philadelphia, on the occasion, about the aspirations of the first Americans. He tallied them as personal freedom, self-government, and national unity.

I also remember that my family participated in a costume contest and parade for the Bicentennial at Forest Avenue Primary School in Glen Ridge, the town where I lived. You can see us all in the photo from that occasion, above. I'm the little guy up front. My mother sewed all the costumes from scratch.

Today we usually see costumes such as these worn only by protesters, but during the Bicentennial madness of 1976, tri-corn hats hadn't yet been appropriated by any political movement. They were for everyone who wanted to celebrate the 200th anniversary of our belovednation.

Actually, the Bicentennial was celebrated in all kinds of ways back in 1976. There were Bicentennial coins (quarters, I believe...) a Bicentennial lottery (in my home state of New Jersey) and even Super Bowl X got into the act with players from the Steelers and Cowboys wearing Bicentennial patches. There were Bicentennial TV commercials, and more.

Honestly, I can't believe that this was fifty years ago. Sometimes I can remember it all so clearly.

I will be 106 if I live to see America's Tricentennial...but I'm eating right and exercising in hopes of making the date.

I hope I'll see you there!

40 Years Ago: Psycho III (1986)

2026-07-02T06:00:00.001-04:00

Directed by Anthony Perkins, Psycho III (1986) is -- perhaps paradoxically -- both sleazier and more spiritual than its 1960 and 1983 predecessors were.

The third film in the Psycho mythos explores a world of the fallen; a world of sex without love, and cynicism but no truth. Yet the film’s consistent use of religious symbolism suggests that Norman Bates can yet be redeemed, and yet navigate this mortal coil. He may, perhaps, even find forgiveness, and love.

Although Psycho III does not feature a tightly-structured mystery like the ones that dominated Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or Franklin’s Psycho II (1982), the second sequel nonetheless thrives on its finely-developed sense of gallows humor, particularly in a scene involving a (bloody) ice machine.

Also, Anthony Perkins’ unparalleled understanding of the Norman Bates character makes this film, perhaps, the most sentimental entry thus far, and Psycho III is the first film in the series that might genuinely be said to feature a happy ending, even if it is arrived at through tragedy.

Although Psycho III’s loose narrative structure means that the story feels less urgent than it should, it also permits Perkins’ more breathing room, more freedom to excavate the character of Norman, the “man boy.” At least some critics would consider this a fair trade. I know I do, especially since Perkins still leans hard on crisp imagery and visual symbolism to express Norman’s tale.

On that point, the late Robert Ebert recounted in his review of Psycho III a scene in which Norman believes that he will come face-to-face with his (dead) mother. Ebert writes that though Perkins’ “facial expressions” -- in a long, unbroken shot of him walking the length of the motel front -- are not subtle, he isn’t over-acting, either.

Rather “he projects such turmoil that we almost sympathize with him.”

This is Perkins’ modus operandi throughout Psycho III, making viewers see Norman as more than a murderous schizophrenic, and more than a pawn to be maneuvered on a chess board about like others of strong will (such as Mother, Emma Spool, or Lila Loomis).

Although it was not a box office success in 1986, Psycho III gained (sometimes grudging) respect from many critics, in part because Perkins’ has charted such an intriguing path for Norman. In the past, Bates has seemed so confused, so directionless that redemption wasn’t necessarily even an option. In Psycho III, one can, for the first time, see his path towards that destination.

The result is a sequel that, in the words of horror film scholar Ken Hanke is “just short of being a little masterpiece.”

“You remind me of someone I knew once.”

A fallen nun named Maureen Coyle (Diana Scarwid) is responsible for the accidental death of a fellow nun at her convent following a suicide attempt. Consumed with guilt and feeling faithless, Maureen leaves the church and her responsibilities. She wanders the desert with only a suitcase of her belongings, until she is offered a ride by a sleazy guitar player, Duane (Jeff Fahey).

After Duane makes unwanted advances, Maureen ends up in the desert again, but she soon happens upon the town of Fairvale, home to Norman Bates and the Bates Motel. Almost immediately, Norman is drawn to Maureen because she reminds him of Marion Crane (and even shares her initials and hair-cut).

Growing closer to Maureen by the day, Norman hires Duane to manage his motel at the same time a nosy reporter, Tracy Venable (Roberta Maxwell) comes to town wishing to interview Bates regarding “the insanity defense.”

Norman saves Maureen when she attempts suicide again, slitting her wrists in bathtub, and Maureen resolves that she can save Norman too.

But Mother may have other ideas..

“The past is not really the past.”

From Psycho III’s opening blast -- Maureen’s sacrilegious shout that “There is no God!” -- the film treads deeply into a religious argument and symbolism. The film’s inaugural image is of the Virgin Mary, and not coincidentally, Mary looms as an important figure in the film when one thinks closely about Norman and his journey.

For one thing, the Virgin Mary is a mother -- the mother of Jesus in particular, -- and we all know that a boy’s mother is his best friend, according to Bates own testimony. For a franchise that obsesses on a Mother’s power over her family, it is appropriate that this Psycho sequel should choose the symbol of the Virgin Mary to explore.

More to the point, Norman boasts a long history of falling in love with women named Mary, women who can -- under the right circumstances -- “save” him from himself/Mother, if given the opportunity. Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane. Meg Tilly plays Mary Loomis. And Diana Scarwid, here, is Maureen. All three are human versions of Mary, one could say, women who try to help Norman in some way.

The film’s first act also suggests, after a fashion, a story from Scripture: the expulsion from Paradise or the Garden of Eden. We see Norman living a life alone at the motel, happily stuffing birds and never interfacing with people or the larger world. This little tract of desert land is his paradise, away from the prying eyes of Fairvale, and it is a place where he gets to be…innocent.

The events of the film soon compel Norman to leave that paradise, reckon with the real world, and finally, embrace a genuine human relationship

Early in the film, we see a plastic Jesus figure in Duane's car. Later in Psycho III we get a close-up of the Holy Bible, and finally, Maureen hallucinates that Norman in his Mother gear, brandishing a knife, is actually the Virgin Mary holding a crucifix, coming to save her from herself.

Mother wears a dark blue dress, as always, and importantly, many art works from antiquity associate Mary with the color blue as well.

One level, one could note that this is a wicked joke: a murdering, knife-wielding “Mother” as the Virgin Mary?

On another level, however, Maureen’s hallucination of the Virgin Mary suggests the ultimate strength of her faith, and it is that faith which allows her to forgive Norman and help him seek his redemption.

Thus Psycho III suggests a weird symbiosis. By dressing as Mother and saving Maureen from death, Norman rekindles the nun’s belief that she deserves a second chance. And by embracing that second chance, Maureen decides to spend it saving Norman, despite her full knowledge of his past wrong-doings. They each help or complete the other.

Another figure known for love – Cupid – however, proves Norman’s undoing. Maureen falls on the staircase in the Bates house and her skull is speared by a Cupid sculpture, an act which precludes Norman and Maureen from finding happiness together. Yet, in a way, Maureen, by showing Norman love and acceptance, has already done her job. By the end of the film, Norman turns his butcher knife on Mother and declares that he is finally “free” of her.

Sure, he’s headed back to the looney bin, but Mother is no longer a monkey on his back. Norman has known love because of Maureen, and will no more be enslaved to his most peculiar form of Oedipal love.

Oddly enough, the sleazy aspects of Psycho III ultimately add to the film’s spiritual argument.

Duane puts the moves on Maureen and when she resists, quips that she could have been “coming” instead of “going.” Nice.

Later, Duane is nasty and abusive to a woman he has bedded. He throws her out of his hotel room, leaving her stranded -- and topless -- in public.

At another point, we see the drunk, horny revelers of Homecoming in the motel, and again there’s the feeling of a cynical, sleazy world. That Norman and Maureen find true love -- even for a brief, shining moment -- against this backdrop, is truly an accomplishment. They not only forgive and accept one another, they love each other in a way that is not ugly or cynical, but sweet.

One of the best scenes in the film is a quiet one, wherein Norman, sitting in a diner, allows himself to be interviewed by the toxic, chain-smoking reporter, Tracy Venable. She asks him about the insanity defense, and Norman replies that his cure “could not cure the hurt” that his actions caused. He furthermore explains that “the past is not really the past,” a viewpoint that suggests a highly developed form of Catholic guilt.

Long-time readers of the blog may remember how I discussed Catholic guilt vis-à-vis Captain Kirk in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), but Catholic guilt could defined as a melancholy or world-weariness brought about by an examined life. It's the constant questioning and re-parsing of decisions and history (some call it Scrupulosity). Here, Norman shows the capacity to examine his life, and see it from a perspective that is not to his favor. His quest is to be forgiven for “the past that is not really the past.” Maureen helps him to do that, but the scene with Venable explores the fact that Norman is not some mindless lunatic (in sharp contrast to the other slashers of the 1980s), but a man who is fully aware of the “private trap” in which he is snared.

The greatest scene in Psycho III, however, is one that would have made Hitchcock proud, and which isn’t strictly speaking, a part of the film’s theme of forgiveness/redemption.

Instead, it’s just a droll scene brilliantly shot, that fosters suspense. The scene involves Fairvale’s Sheriff Hunt at the Bates Motel. He has come to question Norman about a missing woman, and digs his hand into the outdoor ice machine to cool off.

Right out of his view, is the body of that victim, buried under all the ice in the freezer. Norman knows the corpse is there, but the Sheriff doesn’t. Perkins’ camera cuts to a close-up of the ice -- the bloody ice -- next to the Sheriff’s grasping hands. The scene’s pay-off is a close-up of the sheriff’s face as he licks bloody ice water from his lips, but is no wiser to the game.

This scene is brilliantly written, constructed, and executed and it gets to the core appeal of the Psycho films. Not surprisingly, that appeal is schizophrenic. On one hand, we want Norman Bates to get caught. On the other hand, we want him to go free and find happiness. Those two ideas compete in the brain, and the result is a kind of unbearable suspense.

Perkins gets it, naturally, and as Jeff Strickler in the Star Tribune wrote, he “shows the same precision as a director that he demonstrates as an actor.” Psycho III is a “cut above” most sequels horror sequels because of his involvement, and proof positive that the film series was still conjuring new and worthwhile stories for Norman Bates in the late 1980s.

40 Years Ago: Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

2026-07-01T06:00:00.001-04:00

One of my all-time favorite cult movies is John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986), a film involving an American hero treading into a mysterious, non-Western world where he feels like an “outsider.” That world, in this case, is not literally another planet, but rather the mystical and dangerous world of Chinese black magic.

So. movie audiences get an on-screen representative of “us” countenancing a strange land and strange customs, but Big Trouble in Little China leverages tremendous humor not only from the peculiarities of this culture clash, but from the rather dramatic presentation of the American hero in question.

To wit, Kurt Russell’s truck-driving, self-important protagonist, Jack Burton, is a swaggering, blundering John Wayne-voiced blow-hard. He’s Jack Blurtin’, so-to-speak.

And yet Jack also reveals (in the words of the screenplay) “great courage” under stress, and his heart is always (well, almost always...) in the right place. I have always maintained that the accident-prone but intrinsically heroic Burton represents director Carpenter’s most positive silver screen depiction of American dominance upon the world stage, especially compared with the perspectives showcased in the dystopian Escape from New York (1981) and the 1980s social critique, They Live (1988).

I also wrote in my book The Films of John Carpenter that “it’s all in the reflexes,” to quote Jack. So Big Trouble in Little China serves as Carpenter’s almost reflexive tribute to the style of Chinese martial arts films. Thus, this is a movie that rests largely on Carpenter's unimpeachable film-making instincts, his fully-developed directorial muscle or chops. The action sequences -- particularly an early one set in a Chinatown alley -- represent a visual tour de force. The final battle in the film is one of the most giddy, over-the-top, visually-dynamic set-pieces put to celluloid in the 1980s, and a high point for the fantasy/action genre.

But here's the big secret in Little China: the film is much more than action too.

What is Big Trouble in Little China, then? Well, the film is one part culture clash, one part genre pastiche and all camp humor. Writing for the Village Voice, Scott Foundas suggested Big Trouble was a “far more enjoyable mash-up of classic Westerns, Saturday-morning serials, and Chinese wu xia than any of the Indiana Jones movies, with Kurt Russell in full bloom as Carpenter's de rigueur hard-drinkin', hard-gamblin', wise-crackin' loner hero—a bowling-alley John Wayne.”

And as critic Richard Corliss wrote in Time Magazine (“Everything New is Old Again”), Big Trouble in Little China “offers dollops of entertainment, but it is so stocked with canny references to other pictures that it suggests a master’s thesis that moves.”

And boy, how Big Trouble in Little China moves. It never stops moving, in fact.

This is one frenetically-paced spectacular, and the feeling of unfettered delight Carpenter engenders simply from the film’s manic sense of speed is a remarkable thing. One scene near the climax that begins with a close-up of a hammer pounding an alarm bell escalates to such intense velocity that your heart threatens to leap out of your chest. And naturally,the moment ends on a joke. After running a gauntlet of monsters, bullets, and opponents, Jack Burton is nearly undone...by a red traffic light.

Frankly, I’ve never understood why so many critics rejected this film upon its release in the summer of 1986, but as I always argue: don’t bet against John Carpenter in the long-run. Big Trouble in Little China has ably survived the slings and arrows of bad reviews and stood the test of time to emerge one of the most beloved cult movies of the 1980s.

I think this is likely so because of Jack Burton. Other films have been set in distinctive "underworlds," and many movies have been set against the backdrop of Chinese myth or legend.

But there is only one Jack Burton.

“Everybody relax. I’m here.”

When his friend, Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) is unable to re-pay a bet, surly truck driver Jack Burton (Russell) tags along to the airport to pick up Wang’s betrothed, Miao Yin (Suzee Pai). Unfortunately, the green-eyed beauty is abducted right out from under the duo by a Chinese gang known as the “Lords of Death.” Miao Yin is then delivered into the custody of an ancient warlord and cursed spirit called Lo Pan (James Hong). Lo Pan believes that if he marries and sacrifices a green-eyed woman, he will be rendered flesh again, after two-thousand years as an insubstantial ghost.

Jack and Wang pursue the gang to Chinatown and become embroiled in an all-out gang war. Jack’s parked truck is stolen from an alleyway, and the theft draws the skeptical American further into the realm of Chinese black magic. Soon, Jack teams-up with an elder sorcerer, Egg Shen (Victor Wong) and a crusading lawyer, Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) to stop Lo Pan and recover Wang’s would-be bride and his own ride. This quest takes Jack deep underground, into the Hell of Upside Down Sinners, into Lo-Pan’s secret lair, and into fierce battle with monsters, warriors and ghosts of all shapes and sizes.

“May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.”

As the The Village Voice review notes, Big Trouble in Little China can be interpreted as an example of the Chinese literary and film form known as the Wu xia, or simply “wuxia.”

In stories of this type, a young hero survives and overcomes tragedy in his life, undertakes a heroic quest, and ultimately emerges as a great fighter and an adult, all while maintaining a strict code of honorable behavior. To state the matter broadly, “wuxia” is the Chinese equivalent of the western-based “heroic journey.” It’s a rite-of-passage tale, and one that heavily features a romantic component.

Big Trouble in Little China conforms with many details of the established wuxia formula if and only if the viewer considers Wang Chi the film’s prime hero figure. Wang loses his bride-to-be, undertakes the quest to save her, and becomes – during the course of the film – a real hero. Each time he fights, Wang becomes stronger until, by film’s end, he is actually an equal to Lo Pan’s invincible minions, the Storms.

Of course, the quality that makes Big Trouble in Little China so unusual as wuxia and as action film is that the capable hero – the man on the quest and with all the heroic capabilities – is but a sidekick or second fiddle to the star, the bumbling, accident-prone Burton.

Thus, in some significant but very funny and subversive way, Big Trouble in Little China questions and teases long-standing Hollywood assumptions that America and Americans must always stand at the center of the cinematic action, and must always play the “hero.” This film suggests there’s another tradition and source of inspiration for cinematic adventure too.

After all, George Lucas raided the film oeuvre of Akira Kurosawa to create Star Wars, so here John Carpenter pays tribute to Eastern-produced martial arts fantasies and their unique style of heroic storytelling.

Again and again, then, Big Trouble in Little China invites us to view our "hero" Burton in distinctly funny and non-traditional terms. He faces the implacable bad guys with bright red lip-stick marring his face, for example. Far from striking fear in the heart of his enemies, Jack’s battle cry actually renders only himself unconscious. At one point, we see Jack miss his intended target with a knife throw, and on several occasions he expresses fear and uncertainty about the creatures and world around him.

In spite of all this, Jack is certainly persistent and loyal and yes, heroic. So you get the feeling that, when held in contrast to the film’s Asian characters, Carpenter’s depiction of Jack charts an intriguing new global dynamic.

Specifically, American might and bravery joins with Asian complexity for a great victory against evil. Jack is a big and strong American, grounded in stereotypical western concepts, whereas the Asians are more introspective and ambivalent. In other words, Jack seems to live on the surface of reality; reality as his (limited) imagination weighs it. This quality enables him to see clearly “right” and “wrong.” By comparison, the Chinese characters dwell in a more ambivalent, complicated self-doubting state; one where modernity requires them to eschew the beliefs they know to be true.

In terms of the film’s characters, the Americans in Big Trouble in Little China are defined basically by what they look like and what they say. Jack is a muscle-bound, athletic truck driver and looks every bit the traditional hero. Gracie Law is a beautiful lawyer and simultaneously a walking parody of the old Hollywood film cliché: the lady crusader. “I’m always poking my nose where it doesn’t belong,” she enthuses at one point, effectively defining her own purpose in the narrative. Both Jack and Gracie boast an exaggerated sense of self-importance too. At one point, Jack blusters into a room and says, flat-out, “Don’t worry, I’m here.”

The Eastern characters, by contrast, seemed defined…differently. On the surface, Egg-Shen appears to be a little old man and bus driver, but in reality he is a powerful sorcerer. Wang Chi is a skinny, diminutive man who works in his uncle’s Chinese restaurant, and yet is actually a warrior of superb skills. The Chinese heroes seem to possess layers of self-awareness, modesty and contradiction that Jack and Gracie do not.

Kurt Russell does a mean John Wayne impersonation as Jack, and that choice underlines the film’s unique approach to heroism. When we think of John Wayne, we think of the idealized American hero, a man from a time when “men were men” and when morality was as plain as black and white. But Jack Burton drives his truck into an alleyway in Chinatown in this film, and all bets are off. Suddenly, he might as well be on another planet, just like Flash Gordon because he’s asked to countenance an ethnically diverse world where all the truths he holds dear about the nature of the universe may no longer apply. Certainty is harder to come by.

If John Wayne had met the moral ambiguity of the late 1970s or 1980s, perhaps he’d be Jack Burton.

The front-and-center placement of the anachronistic John Wayne character in a drama about foreign mythology and spiritual is the very thing that makes Big Trouble in Little China more than just your average adventure film, but rather a commentary on our shifting position in a globalized world. In the 1980s, when it looked like the East (particularly Japan) was rising to eclipse America in terms of innovation and technology, along came Big Trouble in Little China to -- with tongue-in-cheek -- critique our place in the new world order.

“I’m feeling a little like an outsider here,” says Jack. “You are,” is the reply from the Chinese. But then, as they must readily admit, the Chinese protagonists need Jack. Their destiny rests in his “capable hands.” He is the one they require (with his black and white views of the world?) to bring "order out of chaos."

Jack has a lot of catching-up to do in the film in terms of understanding Chinese lore and mysticism, but in the final analysis, who ultimately takes out Lo Pan?

When Jack does save the day (because he was born ready, remember), he does so, literally, with time-worn reflexes. Lo Pan tosses a knife at him, and Jack instinctively tosses it back, with fatal results. When Jack states “it’s all in the reflexes” it’s a deliberate comment on America too. Our reflex – our instinct - is to act heroically, even if we don’t always think our way fully through a problem before jumping in. We may have to play catch up, like Jack, but when big trouble rears its head, the world counts on us to do something...and we invariably deliver.

Moving with breathtaking speed and with ample good humor, Big Trouble in Little China is much smarter than it tends to get credit for. It takes the long-standing cliché of American Exceptionalism and both questions and re-affirms it for the age of globalism. But if the delightful, one-of-a-kind Jack Burton – warts and all – is an insult to our traditional American images of strength and power as some film scholars insist, then, to quote the great man himself, “Go ahead…insult me.”

Because when the "chips are down," you can count on Jack Burton.

(Not to mention John Carpenter).

40 Years Ago: Labyrinth (1986)

2026-06-27T06:00:00.003-04:00

Although it bombed at the box office in 1986, Labyrinth -- director Jim Henson’s elaborate follow-up to The Dark Crystal (1982) -- is one of those films that, across the span of decades, has attained cult classic status. More than that, the film has found meaning and relevance for generation after generation of enthusiastic, imaginative children.

Although the film’s final act degenerates into unnecessary and ultimately uninteresting violence, Labyrinth finally deserves its longevity because it symbolically and effectively makes its case for female agency, for the explicit right of its fifteen-year old protagonist, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) to chart her own path as she reckons with maturity and the world surrounding her.

As is plain from any close analysis of the film, Labyrinth acutely concerns a young woman who is trapped between two worlds both literally and metaphorically. At fifteen, Sarah is no longer a child, nor precisely an adult. Instead, she is somewhere in between, and not certain where, precisely, she belongs.

Importantly, Sarah also resides at the half-way point between childhood fantasy or imagination, and real world responsibilities, as befitting her age.

The film’s opening scene reflects Sarah's uncertain status of “in-between.” Labyrinth’s inaugural shot reveals Sarah dressed in a flowing white princess gown.

She runs through a fairy-tale glade, an ivory owl perched in the composition's foreground. After a moment, however, the audience realizes that Sarah is not some damsel dwelling in Never-Never Land, but rather a modern teenager in 20^th century America, acting out a scene from a book (titled, not coincidentally, The Labyrinth).

Throughout its running time, Labyrinth sees Sarah go from world to world, from childhood fantasy to reality and back, making choices as she goes and reckoning that whether life is fair or not, “that’s the way it is.”

Armed with this fact, Sarah must make decisions based on that knowledge, and that are true to her heart.

Many, many films of the 1980s (E.T. [1982], Invaders from Mars [1986] to name two) involve the trope that I call “This Boy’s Bedroom:” a peek into an adolescent boy’s world of interest. It is his sanctuary and lair, and a place of model kits, monsters, and action figures. Delightfully, Labyrinth provides us a peek at “This Girl’s Bedroom” for insight into Sarah’s psyche. There’s a case to be made that every fantastic event in the film is based, at least in part, on the inspirations we see in this domain, whether it be Maurice Sendak or M.C. Escher.

Furthermore, another item in Sarah’s bedroom -- a scrapbook -- helps audiences understand Sarah’s existential quandary.

Delightfully, no dialogue points us towards this understanding, and the film allows us to draw conclusions about this hero’s journey based primarily on well-placed images.

“Things are not always what they seem in this place.”

Tired of babysitting her baby brother, Toby, the imaginative Sarah (Connelly) calls upon the Goblin King to take the child away to his kingdom.

Unfortunately, Jareth the Goblin King (Bowie) has been listening, and complies with Sarah’s demand.

Now Sarah has just thirteen hours to navigate the king’s labyrinth, reach his palace, and rescue her brother. If she fails, Toby will be a goblin forever more.

On her journey through the labyrinth, Sarah encounters a variety of strange creatures, both helpful and treacherous, including Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus.

She also navigates dangerous terrain, encountering the cavern of helping hands and the Bog of Eternal Stench

Finally, Sarah must confront the Goblin King, and her own fantasies about adulthood as well…

“The way forward is sometimes the way back.”

Gaze closely at the scenes in Labyrinth set inside Sarah’s suburban bedroom, and you’ll detect posters, scrapbooks, and photographs of her (absent) mother.

Her mother, an actress named Linda Williams, has apparently left the family behind for a love affair with an actor -- played by David Bowie. In the scrapbook, we read headlines of Linda’s on-again/off-again relationship with this actor, and see photographs of the couple together.

In the same scrapbook, we see that Sarah has drawn hearts by the photos of her mother, and written the word “Mom” in red marker.

Sarah now lives with her father, stepmother and baby brother, and has fantasized that normal existence as a sort of put-upon Cinderella-styled one.

Her new “mom” reports that she doesn’t appreciate being cast in the role of “wicked stepmother," but Sarah persists in doing just that. She idolizes her own mother, who -- despite leaving the family -- lives in the glamorous world of romance and acting.

So, through visuals, Labyrinth establishes that Sarah loves her biological mother and misses her desperately. But, at the same time, this imagery suggest her mother has abandoned that which is important: family.

The fantasy narrative of Labyrinth, in which Sarah must choose whether or not to abandon her baby brother, Toby, deliberately mirrors the choice her mother has made. And David Bowie doubles as both the actor who took away Sarah's mother (seen only in photograph form), and the Goblin King, Jareth, who entices Sarah to a life in which abandoning a child is okay...at least if fantasy and romance are involved.

The bedroom setting is vital to the film, not only for establishing the context of Sarah’s story (her first steps into adulthood) but also for revealing the direction of the eventual fantasy sequences. Virtually all of Sarah’s travails in the Goblin King’s world emerge right from the items we see decorating Sarah's bedroom.

In a long, slow pan, Henson’s camera falls across a strange, pink plush animal that later finds life in the Goblin world as the dancing fire gang creature (the one with the detachable limbs).

Similarly, Sarah encounters the gentle Ludo, who looks like he came right out of Where the Wild Things Are. Accordingly, a Sendak book also seen in the same pan.

The same pan also reveals a music box in which a beautiful princess stands inside a golden pavilion or frame work. Later in the film, Sarah becomes that princess, at least for a time, after eating the poison peach given her by Jareth. She is then depicted wearing the same dress that we saw on the music box figurine. he is also viewed inside a bubble, and the world -- like the music box -- is most definitely a gilded cage.

Inside that gilded cage, Sarah can live a life with Jareth as her romantic lover, but the price for such romance and lust is that she loses her brother, her family, forever.

In real life, of course, this is the “illusion” that her mother has already selected. Linda went off and romanced an actor, a figure who might be correctly described as being deceitful in a sense, since he appears to be one thing, but is actually another.

In the fantasy world, standing in for that kind of "two faced" figure is not just Jareth, but several masked individuals. They cloak their real identities behind those masks, but it’s a lovely, romantic world on the surface.

The film's central setting, the labyrinth, is also foreshadowed in that early, detailed pan across the bedroom.

Even the film’s final confrontation, in which Sarah must make a choice between Jareth or her brother, Toby, we see a visual reference to Sarah’s bedroom.

There, on the wall, in the film’s early scenes, we see a painting of an impossible labyrinth created by Escher. In the climactic scene, Sarah actually inhabits that labyrinth, and attempts to rescue Toby. It takes some time to reach him, because the world -- like adulthood itself -- is so confusingly rendered.

In The Wizard of Oz, every character that Dorothy knew in Kansas had a double in Oz, and in Labyrinth, virtually every item, book, or figure (including a Goblin King custom figure!) in Sarah’s bedroom also comes to life in the fantasy world.

One thing that remains so delightful and affirming about the film and this symbolic approach is that Sarah is ultimately able to make a good choice regarding her future (and her brother’s) without surrendering her right to imagination. These things in her bedroom (books, posters, etc.) are part of her gestalt.

After the Goblin King is defeated, Sarah begins to say goodbye to those who helped her on her quest, including Ludo and Hoggle. But Sarah realizes that they are part of who she is now, and that since she is the one with the power, she can continue to have them as guides, going forward, as long as she wishes.

To grow up means to think differently, but it doesn’t mean you forget who you are. That was the mistake Sarah's mother made. When Linda left Sarah behind, she sacrificed too much for a “fantasy” image of perfect romance.

One of the most successful and symbolically-wrought scenes in Labyrinth comes soon after Sarah has rejected temptation and a life inside Jareth’s bubble or music box, symbolically rejecting the adult choice her mother made.

Next, Sarah ends up in a junkyard, and a junkyard representation of her bedroom. A weird junk lady begins accosting Sarah with all of her old plush animals, all the toys she has outgrown. Sarah rejects the goblin's entreaties because she is no longer an innocent child. Those particular toys belong in her past, but the junk lady -- not unlike Jareth -- keeps trying to define her, keeps trying to tell her the things she “needs.” In other words, if Jareth represents a negative "face" of adulthood that Sarah must avoid, the junkyard lady interlude represents a face of childhood that Sarah has outgrown.

Finally, Sarah defeats the Goblin King when she remembers a line from her book: The Labyrinth.

That line asserts “You have no power over me.”

This is Sarah’s ultimate recognition of her own agency, her own power and capacity to chart her path. She is not bound by the actions of the junk goblin, who tries to infantilize her, nor seduced by the Goblin King, who wants her to believe that adulthood is, simply, an offering "of dreams come true.”

On the contrary, with adulthood comes Sarah’s reckoning that life isn’t fair...but that’s the way it is.

The trick is to understand that fact (that life isnt fair) and plan accordingly, knowing the truth. Labyrinth is a delightful and valuable film because it suggests that adulthood is not about getting your dreams to come true, usually, or finding a fantasy love with an appealing, bad-boy figure (Jareth, and the actor who romance Linda).

Instead, life is about holding onto who you are and your influences and beliefs even in the face of a world that is not always as you would wish it to be.

Even the film’s central idea of a labyrinth seems to reinforce this idea of Sarah’s heroic journey. She does not go through a maze, notably, but rather a labyrinth, which is a single path to a central location. That’s what life is: finding the identity that is “central” to your personality. Some might even call it your heart.

When I first watched Labyrinth many (many…) moons ago, I must confess I was disappointed with the film. I felt it was a sort of creative pull-back from the uncompromising genius of The Dark Crystal: a film lighter in mood, with identifiable human performers at its center. I felt that few of the creations here could rival the ingenuity or imagination The Dark Crystal put on screen in the form of the Skeksis, the Garthim, or Aughra.

I see now, as an adult, that I missed the point. By a mile. As much as The Dark Crystal charts a completely alien world, Labyrinth asks audiences to understand its “in between” worlds premise about Sarah, and make her journey to adulthood one we can relate to and understand.

And without making invidious comparisons to other films, the creation of Sarah’s fantasy world here is quite remarkable. The “helping hands” cavern is unforgettable, and Ludo seems to be Chewbacca by way of Where the Wild Things Are.

Yes, the final battle between Sarah’s allies and the Goblin King’s minions is largely unnecessary (especially the machine gun sequence…), but otherwise that the film ingeniously visualizes Sarah’s imagination, drawing “life” from the fantastic inspirations we see decorating This Girl's Bedroom.

I am also quite certain that, as a teenager, I entirely missed the idea that the Goblin King had a surrogate in reality, as the man who took Sarah’s mother away from the family.

With full knowledge of this today, the metaphor underlying Labyrinth is all that much clearer. Jareth is the bad boy and romantic promise of adulthood (sex, romance, dreams, adventure come true…) that allows the idea of sacrificing family even exist as a possibility. What’s truly intriguing, too is the idea of Toby’s fate if left un-rescued. He will grow up to be a Goblin, to be a “family thief,” essentially, if raised by Jareth. In other words, the cycle of raising "goblins" continues.

Labyrinth is by no means a perfect film. Some of the musical sequences seem badly-dated, and the pacing is a bit off in spots too. But nonetheless, this is a fantasy film with heart, and it features the relatively rare occurrence of a female hero driving and motivating the action.

Labyrinth is also an implicit rejection of princess-ism, a true blight in our modern culture because it suggests that a woman has worth only by virtue of marrying a prince, or being born to a King. In other words, basically for a woman to be successful and special she must be connected to a powerful man in some way. In short...no agency of her own.

Sarah’s story, by contrast, is very much about her own agency. Labyrinth is about Sarah choosing her own path, and maintaining her own identity while she does so.

To quote the film: “that’s the way it’s done...”

30 Years Ago: Independence Day (1996)

2026-06-25T06:00:00.005-04:00

"In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. "Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom. Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day! "

- President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) delivers an historic address in Independence Day (1996).

Independence Day (1996) remains one of the big “event” movies of the 1990s, a sci-fi blockbuster of monumental, almost unimaginable proportions. The crowd-pleasing film successfully tapped into the decade’s unending fascination with aliens and UFOs (The X-Files, for example) and significantly augmented that interest too, resulting in a slew of further alien films and TV programs from Dark Skies (1996) to Men in Black (1997).

As an inside-the-industry cautionary tale, Independence Day also represented the (unfortunate) cementing of the Emmerich/Devlin blockbuster “formula” -- a revival of 1970s disaster film tropes. This format would meet its Waterloo in 1998’s Godzilla, but nonetheless continues right into this decade with films such as the dreadful 2012 (2010).

Of all the Emmerich genre fare, I’m most fond of 1994’s Stargate, as it seems to strike the right balance between spectacle and intelligence. After that film’s release, the scales in further efforts kept tipping towards spectacle and away from brains, and so the ensuing films suffer mightily for the imbalance.

That established, I was certainly part of the enthusiastic audience for Independence Day upon its summer release, and I still remember how great the film looked on the big screen. A recent re-watch confirms how terrific the miniature effects remain. The scenes of awesome alien saucers lumbering to position over major world cities -- though obviously reminiscent of Kenneth Johnson’s V (1984) -- remain downright staggering.

What ages Independence Day most significantly, instead, is the pervasive shtick and the schmaltzy, sentimentality-drenched characters. At every step of the way during its narrative, Independence Day punctures its end-of-the-world majesty and gravitas with low humor and over-the-top sentimentality, qualities which today render the whole affair close to camp.

Science fiction fans, of course, experienced conniption fits over Independence Day’s unlikely finale: a third act which sees an Earth-produced computer virus successfully uploaded to an alien computer aboard a mother-ship, thus giving humans the opportunity to strike back…on July 4^th, no less.

The movie doesn’t pay even lip service to the idea that aliens from another solar system might have developed anti-virus software (!), let alone computer systems totally incompatible with our 20th century Earth technology.

Given how badly things go for Earth in the first hour of Independence Day, it’s difficult to countenance the film’s final veer into outright fantasy as every heroic campaign – with split-second timing – comes together perfectly.

Despite my misgivings about the film’s humor, sentimentality, and narrative resolution, however, I still find the grave, apocalyptic, anxiety-provoking tone of Independence Day’s first hour worthwhile, especially the President’s grim choice to deploy nuclear weapons in an American city to drive off the aliens.

It would be absolutely foolish to deny, too, that some of Independence Day’s imagery has become iconic in the annals of cinema history. We all remember that portentous shot of hovering saucer pulping the White House for instance. Thus -- even while criticizing this over-sized beast -- I've got to give the Devil his due for getting matters right on a visual terms

In terms of theme, Independence Day works overtime to remind all of us that although we are separated by oceans and other Earthly partitions, we are all nonetheless citizens of the same planet. It’s a laudable message in an age of hyper-partisanship to be certain, even if delivered with little nuance or subtlety. This through-line in the film is consistently and well-conveyed, both in terms of incident and in the make-up of the diverse dramatis personae. Who would have imagined our precious Earth could be saved by a war veteran, a drunk crop-duster, a Jewish cable repairman and an African-American fighter pilot?

Movie critics were understandably divided on Independence Day. At The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote: “Guess what: "Independence Day" lives up to expectations in a rush of gleeful, audience-friendly exhilaration, with inspiring notions of bravery that depart nicely from the macho cynicism of this movie season. Its innocence and enthusiasm are so welcome that this new spin on "Star Wars" is likely to wreak worldwide box-office havoc, the kind that will make the space aliens' onscreen antics look like small change.”

Writing for The Washington Post, Rita Kempley opined: “"Independence Day" is primarily a $70 million kid's toy, a star-spangled excess of Roman candles and commando games designed to draw repeat business from 9- to 12-year-old boys. Little girls won't find any role models among the barnstormers, though a plucky exotic dancer is featured among the heroines. Even with the end of the world in sight, she shakes her booty. It's for her kid. No, really. Maybe the moviemakers' mission was to boldly go where everyone in Hollywood has gone before: the bank.”

Honestly, I can see both sides of the critical equation in this case. Independence Day is such dumb fun, and yet fun nonetheless.

“A toast...to the end of the world.”

The people of planet Earth watch with anxiety and wonder as three-dozen alien saucers descend from orbital space to take up positions over cities around the globe. President Whitmore (Bill Pullman), a former jet pilot in Desert Storm, advises calm, but new information from genius cable repair man David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) suggests the alien ships have initiated a countdown and are preparing a coordinated attack.

As the countdown ends, Levinson’s suspicions are confirmed, and the alien ships destroy Los Angeles, Washington D.C., New York and other population hubs. President Whitmore survives the attack on the Oval Office and escapes by Air Force One. He promptly orders a retaliatory strike. Pilot, top-gun, and would-be astronaut Steven Hiller (Will Smith) downs an alien ship during battle, and captures one of the fearsome aliens for study. The rest of the fight, however, is a rout, and the U.S. jets are unable to penetrate alien shields. Humanity stands upon the edge of extinction.

The President visits the secret military base at Area 51, and learns there that scientists there have been experimenting with an alien ship for close to fifty years. When Hiller arrives, the President attempts to communicate with Hiller's captured alien, but finds the being implacably hostile. The aliens, he soon learns, are like locusts. They travel from solar system to solar system using up planetary systems and then moving on…leaving only carnage and waste in their wake.

After nuclear weapons prove ineffective against the aliens, President Whitmore is at a loss how to save the planet, or the human race. But David comes through again. He believes he can take the captured alien ship at Area 51 to the mother-ship and upload a computer virus there, thus bringing down alien shields…at least for a few minutes. When Steven volunteers to fly that risky mission, it’s up to the President himself to coordinate and lead a huge aerial attack against the alien saucers, both in America, and world-wide…

“It's a fine line between standing behind a principle and hiding behind one. You can tolerate a little compromise, if you're actually managing to get something accomplished.”

For a film about such a terrifying topic – an alien invasion – Independence Day frequently plays thing...light. At least a half-dozen major supporting characters in the film are defined by their shtick. Judd Hirsch plays a nagging Jewish Dad, Julius Levinson, and his lines and delivery are pure Borscht Belt ham-bone. Harvey Fierstein plays another kitschy character, Marty, who hams it up and makes jokes about his therapist and his (presumably overbearing...) mother. Harry Connick Jr. portrays a cocksure pilot who provides the film at least one dopey gay joke.

But the worst character is likely Randy Quaid’s Russell Casse, a drunken crop-duster (and alien abductee) who joins the air battle against the aliens during the film's denouement. Quaid’s dialogue is so incredibly dreadful that it has become the stuff of legend and MST3K fodder. “I picked the wrong day to stop drinking,” springs immediately to mind.

Among all these actors hamming it up and stealing time, Brent Spiner likely fares the best as aging ex-hippie and scientist Dr. Okun. Spiner comes off as weird and eccentric, but not so dreadfully hammy that you want to turn away from the screen in shame for watching. His last scene -- played with alien tentacles pressing against his larynx -- is also genuinely unsettling.

Why do I have a problem with the film's pervasive moments of low humor? Well, Independence Day already boasts Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith continually cracking wise in leading roles. Their dialogue is dreadful too, from "Welcome to Earth" to "Now that's what I call a close encounter!" Given all this material from our leads, do we really need Judd Hirsch, Harvey Fierstein, Harry Connick Jr., Randy Quaid and even Brent Spiner dishing out lame one liners too? The ubiquitous nature of these characters makes Independence Day, at times, resemble an overblown sitcom. Maybe if the material were stronger, these characters would not seem so objectionable. I guess what I'm saying, is that these moments are rarely actually funny.

Another weak character is Secretary of Defense Nimzicki (James Rebhorn), a man who in one scene advises the full scale nuking of many American cities, but in a later scene argues against a “risky” maneuver to attack the alien mother-ship and upload the virus. His objections to the (ultimately) successful plan make no sense, and aren’t consistent with the “war hawk” image he projects in the film all along; a guy who advises going to Def-Con 2 before the President has made his final decision. Instead, Nimzicki is contradictory simply so the audience can boo at him, and the President can dress him down…thus appearing tough and resolute.

While I have real disdain for much of the writing and characterization in Independence Day, I do feel that the film's visuals often still shock, and often still carry real emotional resonance. One shot, set on July 3^rd, reveals the Statue of Liberty toppled, face down in the harbor...a massive saucer hovering low in the sky. Colored in autumnal browns, this is a terrifying composition of American culture annihilated.

It’s tough indeed to compete with the amazing Statue of Liberty imagery of Planet of the Apes, yet this moment in Independence Day remains quite upsetting. The film is also anxiety-provoking in the way it reveals American military might crushed before a more technologically-advanced enemy. The battle sequences, the nuclear option, and other heavy moments are all deeply scary because one realizes that if America can’t save the world…the world ain’t getting saved. Indeed, Independence Day plays up the alien threat so successfully in terms of spectacular visuals and special effects that there’s almost no way the scripted, climactic victory can ring true. It’s like we’ve slipped into an alternate movie or something.

The first half of Independence Day is undeniably the strongest, as alien saucers push through storm and cloud fronts, and emerge over our cities, casting dark shadows upon bewildered and amazed populations. These moments continue to impress, and pack an almost visceral gut punch. We’ve all wondered if, one day, we’ll wake up to something like this imagery…a new dawn in which we learn definitively we are no longer alone. As much as I deride Independence Day’s silly humor and bad dialogue, I have no quibbles whatsoever with the way that these scenes of “arrival” are vetted. As I said in my introduction, many of these scenes still carry a staggering punch.

From its first shots to its final ones, Independence Day also makes an interesting point about mankind being unified by a threat from the outside. The film opens with imagery of a plaque on the moon which reads “We came in peace for all mankind.” That’s a wonderful thought, the movie seems to suggest, but then the filmmakers set up a paradigm by which that hopeful expression of common cause is tested. Suddenly, all mankind must work together to defeat the alien threat, putting competition and petty differences aside. This idea is expressed through scenes set in Iraq, the location of America’s most recent war (Gulf War I). There, in the desert, British and Iraqi soldiers join the battle against the mother ships. The implication of such scenes is that mankind is indeed capable of working together.

The same idea is presented in the film in the (positive) character of President Whitmore. Before the alien crisis, he is viewed not as a warrior, but as a “wimp.” He can’t even get his Crime Bill passed by a hostile Congress. Whitmore laments that “it’s just not simple, anymore” and that people don’t seem to understand that compromise is the only path towards moving everyone ahead, together. He then works with the nations of the world to defeat the aliens, and in the process transforms an American holiday into an Earth holiday. Again, the message implicit in Independence Day is that we can apply ourselves to solve big problems, not just alien invasions. Why can’t we all band together to keep our neighbors and our neighbors' children from starving? Or to eliminate poverty? Once we acknowledge our common humanity, petty partisan differences shouldn’t really matter, should they?

In this sense, Independence Day -- set in part on July 4^th -- acknowledges a new, evolved brand of patriotism. It is a patriotism not merely to party or to one nation, but to all of humanity. As a fan of Star Trek and a person who believes we can achieve great things if we sometimes accept compromise, I appreciate the film’s ultimate message of hope about human nature. This consistently-applied theme almost mollifies my concerns about the film’s ridiculous and ill-conceived conclusion, and the surfeit of characters who spew cliché after cliché, bad joke after bad joke. Almost, but not quite. Still, I know I'm spitting in the wind against an 800 million dollar blockbuster, a veritable entertainment machine.

So am I a hopeless sentimental for recognizing Independence Day’s entertainment and social value, even amidst so many stupid groaners and moments of cynical, calculated humor?

Or, like Randy Quaid's character...did I just pick the wrong day to stop drinking?

50 Years Ago: Logan's Run (1976)

2026-06-23T06:00:00.001-04:00

In the 23^rd century, the survivors of a nuclear war live inside The City of Domes, a paradise of plenty. The world is a hedonist’s delight with the Love Shop and other pleasures, but the metropolis is not without a downside.

Every citizen must die at age 30, and hope for “renewal” in a state-sponsored ritual called Carousel that keeps the civilization perfectly balanced. Policing this edict are a cadre of armed law enforcement officials, the Sandmen.

One such Sandman, Logan 5 (Michael York) is tasked by the city’s controlling Computer with determining if the destination of refugees, called Sanctuary, is real. Logan enlists the help of a young woman, Jessica (Jenny Agutter) in escaping the city, but is tagged as a “runner” and hunted by his former partner, Francis.

When Logan and Jessica manage to escape the city, first they find a malevolent robot, Box, and later see the outside world for the first time.

In the ruins of Washington D.C., they meet an Old Man (Peter Ustinov) who proves that the edict of “death at 30” is not natural.

Logan's Run serves as a critical "bridge" production of the 1970s. It blends the dystopian qualities of such film predecessors as Soylent Green (1973) and Planet of the Apes (1968), with the elaborate, expensive visual effects and action-adventure qualities of the Star Wars (1977) age.

Logan's Run is based on the William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson novel of the same name, which was first published in 1967. The novel depicted a bizarre world set post-"Little War," in which the ascendant youth society of the turbulent late 1960s (think student demonstrations and sit-ins) had grown to become the globe's dominant social force. In an attempt to stave off overpopulation, starvation, and poverty, a new society of the young was forged in which the mandatory age of death was 21 years of age. It was "never trust anyone over thirty" (or 21 here...), but as a governing philosophy.

Citizens of this New World Order had "palm flowers" embedded in their hands which displayed their age and their chronological proximity to "Last Day." On said "Last Day" (their 21st birthday...) they would willingly report for mandatory termination at a local Sleep Shop. Those who didn't choose death would illicitly "run" instead, seeking escape through an underground railroad, in search of a place called "Sanctuary." Policing the populace and destroying these rebellious runners is the bailiwick of a young, fascist military force called "Sandmen."

In the book, a dedicated Sandman named Logan 3 teamed with a female runner named Jessica to locate Sanctuary, but he was secretly a double-agent for the government, tasked with the destruction of Sanctuary. Logan was pursued on his "run" by a Sandman friend named Francis, who also boasted a secret identity...as Ballard, an ally of runners and the man who knew where Sanctuary was actually located. In the book, Sanctuary was but a rocket trip away, on Mars...

Many aspects of Nolan and Johnson's brilliant novel were significantly altered for the blockbuster film, which earned over 50 million dollars on a cost of less than 10 million.

Specifically, Michael York's Logan 5 (not Logan 3) was the hero of the silver screen version, and his Sandman comrade, Francis (Richard Jordan), became a dogged enemy and Agent of the State instead of a secret aide to the Runners.

Also, the Sleep Shops (actually seen in Soylent Green....) were replaced with the bizarre but impressive public spectacle of Carousel, a festival in which those aged thirty (not twenty-one) would be blown up before the eyes of excited crowds who believed that the doomed were actually being "renewed," miraculously reincarnated.

The general setting was altered for the film too. In Logan's Run the movie a nuclear war rather than a "Little War" precipitated the creation of the City of Domes, meaning that the world outside the City was almost entirely destroyed....post-apocalyptic rather than merely futuristic. Perhaps the most significant change in the movie was that there was no real Sanctuary...no place of safety and peace for the runners. Instead, Sanctuary was a myth, a fairy tale.

Despite such radical changes from the source material, Logan's Run thrives as a worthwhile, exciting, and intriguing science-fiction artifact of the 1970s for quite a few reasons. The one-of-a-kind disco-era visualizations and tenor of Logan's Run -- the aura of “anything goes” hedonism -- continue to ably support the film’s didactic narrative. The glittering, sexy-but-shallow production design, abundantly rich in neon and mini-skirts, suggests youth and sexuality, even forty years later.

But perhaps the finest aspect of Logan's Run is indeed the film's capacity to build in the viewer's imagination a believable and frightening future dystopia. The City of Domes and its byzantine laws and practices fit the very definition of an authoritarian or totalitarian state.

Let's gaze a little at what the pieces of that definition are, and how Logan's Run successfully conforms to them.

First, according to one definition, a totalitarian state "creates myths, catechisms, cults, festivities and rituals" designed to "commemorate" the State. The central myth of the City of Domes, of course, is "Renewal," the State-supported lie which promises immortality. Upon death, the souls of the fallen (those who attend Carousel) will transmigrate to new, young bodies.

This lie is reinforced by the numbering system employed to "name" individual citizens (Logan 5, Jessica 6, Francis 7, etc.) These numbers, which replace last names in this future society, explicitly indicate the march of generations; that a new baby is actually a "new" version of a person who has already existed, "died" and "renewed." The numbers are also totally de-humanizing. Humans become one in a vast indistinguishable line.

The Carousel "festival" -- a state-sponsored celebration of "Last Day" -- is attended by all citizens of the City of Domes, and is essentially the equivalent of, for example, a contemporary NASCAR race, only govt. run. The people down on the track or field (those who are ostensibly to be renewed...) circle around and around, and many of them "wreck" before our eyes, blown apart by a ceiling-mounted laser device that resembles a crystal. Spectators watch and cheer for Carousel participants to "renew," but what they are really cheering for is the violent, explosive deaths of friends and fellow citizens.

The State has thus transformed a mandatory death sentence into the very "ritual" or "festival" inherent in the tradition of totalitarianism, one that actually reinforces (or "commemorates" as the definition goes), the Law of the State: mandatory death at 30.

Economically, this ritual of Carousel combines the "bread and circuses" aspect of Rome's gladiator games -- satisfying the blood lust of the crowd -- with a "spiritual" or "religious" church function: the honoring of the dead (or dying); the belief in transmigration or reincarnation.

This ritual of Carousel is also supported by a State-created and encouraged catechism, an education in the faith meant to indoctrinate the people, here termed in short-hand, "One for One."

In the film, we witness Logan and Francis debate the dogma/doctrine of "One for One." Francis accepts it blindly (by simply repeating it mindlessly) while Logan questions it...the first sign of his independent streak.

This easy-to-remember phrase means -- in simple terms -- that one person dies/one person renews. It's the seamless, simple transmigration of the soul or spirit from the dead to the living. From Logan 4 to Logan 5. From Francis 5 to Francis 6. It's so simple that there can be no denying it.

It's essentially programming through mnemonics and repetition, a phrase/teaching/sound-byte repeated so often and so widely that it is accepted blindly for "truth." The idea of "One for One" (and catechism) is part and parcel of entrenched absolutism (or totalitarianism) because it is representative of a "cliche-ridden language whose formulaic utterances are designed to impede ambivalence, nuance and complexity."

People don't die in the City of Domes, they "renew" (as if they are just TV programs, not living human beings.) The light on your palm which signals your death is not a "death clock" but, tellingly, a "life-clock." Sandmen don't kill. No, they never kill, according to Logan. They simply "terminate" Runners. And Runners are like "Terrorists" aren't they? Just a faceless boogeyman...not real flesh and blood people. Additionally, the day of a citizen’s death isn't called "Death Day or "Execution Day," but known by the pleasant euphemism Last Day.

This is precisely how Orwell's double-speak, jargon and euphemisms work. These phrases are widely-disseminated simplifications designed to impede questioning; to preserve and nurture an authoritarian regime and its agenda.

A totalitarian state is also defined as one with a "culture of military solidarity" in which "the pursuit and elimination" of Enemies of the State has become a primary purpose.

Again, it's easy to detect how Logan's Run fits this aspect of the definition of totalitarianism. In general, the Sandmen lord it over the non-military personnel of the City of Domes, as Francis specifically does when an innocent civilian bumps into him at Arcade. Furthermore, according to City of Domes-style catechism, the Sandmen (the military of this State) are elevated above other citizens in matters of transmigration too.

"Sandmen Always Renew," the catechism goes.

The enemies of the state are termed "Runners," but they are those, simply, who question the status quo and consequently opt out of Carousel, attempting to live longer than their allotted thirty years. The Sandmen are in place to destroy the Runners and prevent all knowledge of "Sanctuary" from the distracted populace. Runners can't be imprisoned (that would imbalance the population control system); they have to be "terminated" on sight. And again, the State employs euphemisms like terminate (instead of "kill") to make the act more palatable. When a runner dies, the corpse is melted down by strange hovering, futuristic machines, but this gory act is euphemistically termed "cleaning up." If people were to see the destroyed human body and count it as such they might begin to question the government's simplifications and slogans, not to mention the status quo.

Logan's Run succeeds as a film in no small part because of the carefully designed and constructed totalitarian state that our protagonists, Logan and Jessica flee.

This world -- run by an unfeeling computer -- is so inhuman, so callous, that it does not even permit mothers and fathers to raise children. No, families create a sense of personal loyalty outside of loyalty to government, and that cannot be tolerated in a totalitarian state.

A good villain goes a long way towards making an effective movie, and in Logan's Run there is a great one: a 23rd century Big Brother ordering mandatory executions and destroying humanity's spirit.

Note too, that like many real life dictatorships, the City of Domes is carefully erected on lies and deceit. Inherent in the system of the City is the belief that one does not need to work or produce. Its people are occupied entirely with leisure.

This lie is laid bare when Logan visits the outer workings of the city and finds that a mad robot called "Box" has frozen the 1,056 unaccounted for runners to be used as food for the city goers. Box ran out of plankton and animals some time ago, and now has resorted to capturing and storing unlucky humans in stasis. So the City of Domes is actually feeding on itself to survive. The self-sufficient system (which demands death at 30) is not so self-sufficient after all.

Rather, it is cannibalizing itself.

Yet if the City of Domes is a cage for its people, it's rather definitively a gilded cage. The people who dwell there, according to the film's opening card "live only for pleasure." And that's another core aspect of the Totalitarian/Absolute State: distraction.

The government wants your mind on "other things," not the government, not the way things are. One way to avoid politics and matters of national import is to focus on materialism, on owning things, or in the vernacular: shopping. Well, the people of the City of Domes have been told to go shopping in perpetuity.

Their beautiful City is actually a colossal shopping mall, and the film was, in fact, shot in a shopping mall in Texas. This Arcade offers every manner of distraction and entertainment imaginable.

So if you're feeling vain, why not head over to the New You Shop, where you can get a quickie face lift (or tummy tuck) and come out looking absolutely fabulous? If you hurry, you can make your work-out at the gym this afternoon too (as Logan and Francis do during one critical scene...). If you seek companionship, head over to another part of the mall: the Love Shop -- the 23rd Century equivalent of Studio 54. There you can take legal (and safe!) mood-altering drugs called "lifts" (think Prozac or Xanax).

Then, you can have casual sex with gorgeous strangers (all under 30!). If you want to stay in your deluxe Sandman apartment tonight instead (conveniently located right off the mall's promenade...), Logan's Run even offers the 23rd century corollary to our Internet Porn: the so called computer "circuit" which materializes sexual partners (male or female), right at your doorstep.

What does all this mean? Well, clearly the City of Domes is consumed with youth, beauty, sex, and hedonism. Again, this is a pointed reflection of our culture in the 1970s, and even more so today. Who cares if the world is burning? We want our MTV!

Logan's Run's antidote to dystopia may be naive, however, especially in 2026

The film espouses, among other things a renewal of the natural order: a return to the re-born outside world, and a prescribed departure from computers, climate-controlled shopping-malls and 24-hour-a-day leisure.

Alas, that's a genie you can put back in the bottle easily.

Although Logan literally sees the "light of day" when he leaves the City of Domes -- his first vision of the natural world is an apricot-colored sun rise -- it is not until he encounters The Old Man (Peter Ustinov) that the pieces of a re-born future start to come together. In the end, the message of Logan's Run is that with age comes wisdom, but -- heck! -- "older" leaders were the ones the original youngsters of the City of Domes inherited the messed-up Earth from in the first place.

One thing is for certain: Logan's Run favors humanity over machines. When faced with the reality that Sanctuary is but a fairy tale, Logan and the humans go on to (hopefully) construct a better society, a new "Sanctuary" where death is not mandatory at 30.

By contrast, the Computer that runs the City of Domes is not able to conceive of such a silly idea -- a fantasy utopia and paradise -- and it goes haywire in response; short-circuited. Once again, we see imagination as a critical human quality; but it is a heritage that Logan's people have largely neglected for hedonism. It takes the odyssey outside by Logan and the return visit to the City by the Old Man to rekindle it.

Those who watch Logan's Run and deride it as cheesy or outdated may have missed the point. Perhaps they have not gazed deeply enough at the world it so confidently creates. The film -- for all its silliness and outdated special effects -- reveals what might happen to a society that finally turns irrevocably inward; becoming obsessed with youth and beauty at the expense of wisdom. If we let that future become reality, then Washington D.C. and all the beautiful national landmarks there will end up but monuments to irrelevancy; artifacts of an age when liberty and intellect actually meant something. Indeed, they have become in Logan's Run: meaningless, empty ruins from another epoch.

In the final analysis, Logan's Run is a good cautionary science fiction film, one that reminds us to hold Big Brother accountable. And to -- at least every now and then -- peer out of our happy little gilded cages and ask, precisely, what is happening in all our names.

Totalitarian States believe you are either with them (and Carousel) or against them (Runners), but Logan and Jessica find that a rich life exists beyond dogma, sound-bytes, catechism, and jargon. After their visit to the ruins of Washington D.C., they find that, at the very least, life possesses nuances. And that also -- with human experience and age -- should follow...wisdom.

50 Years Ago: The Food of the Gods (1976)

2026-06-18T06:00:00.022-04:00

A pro-football player, Morgan (Marjoe Gortner) and two friends spend a weekend in the country and unexpectedly meet up giant animals in the woods. After one of his friends his killed, Morgan investigates and find that a strange substance bubbling out of the ground on the Skinner farm is causing animals such as rats and wasps to grow to dangerous proportions. A selfish businessman, Bensington (Ralph Meeker) and his assistant, Lorna (Pamela Franklin) also arrive on the farm, and Bensington plans to exploit this “food of the gods” for all its worth. But very soon, the farmhouse comes under siege from a pack of hungry, giant rats.

In 1904, the novel The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth by H.G. Wells was published. The book was structured in three parts, but the first part involved a scientist who engineered a special food supplement that could cause those who ate it to grow to colossal size. This first section explored how the food substance accidentally got to wildlife on the Skinner farm, and thus began to imperil normal society. Also, in the book, some human children received the food of the gods, and became forty-foot-tall giants, but ones derided by society. The novel was intended as a social critique, as well as a science fiction story.

Bert I. Gordon’s The Food of the Gods differs dramatically in tone and intent from its source material. In the case of the film, the food is a naturally occurring substance and it appears to have bubbled up from the Earth’s interior in response to man’s mismanagement of the environment. Gortner’s opening narration puts a fine point on the matter: “This is mother nature’s revenge,” he declares. Gortner’s Morgan also celebrates the “open spaces man hasn’t ruined with his technology,” further painting a picture of man’s misdeeds. Mrs. Skinner’s interpretation of the food is not all that different from Morgan’s. She believes the growth-substance comes not from Mother Nature, but “the Lord.” Representing the other side of the question is Ralph Meeker’s character, a rampaging businessman who can see only dollar signs when he looks at the food of the gods, not its impact on the world at large.

In ways entertaining, though not particularly nuanced, The Food of the Gods diagrams these different opinions about the “miraculous” food by having this small group of characters, along with a few others, countenance a siege situation. They become trapped in a farmhouse as rats swarm around everywhere, outside. The film’s social critique doesn’t fully emerge until the coda, which sees the food of the god survive Morgan’s attempts to destroy it, seep into the water, and then get packaged into milk cartons in school cafeterias. The idea there is simply that when we pollute the Earth, we are ultimately polluting our children, and ourselves. All life on the planet is connected, and if treat Mother Nature poorly, we’ll reap the whirlwind. This wicked climax -- featuring innocent little kids slurping down contaminated milk -- is so much nastyfun that it almost redeems the rest of the movie, and earns it a positive review.

The Food of the Gods’ falters almost entirely on the basis of its own story logistics. Characters die on the island, and there is no real response from authorities. Morgan leaves the island after some of the animal attacks, and comes back. He brings a football buddy, but no the police. On the same front, no one in the film suggests calling animal control. It’s a little weird, but I suppose this approach saves money on cast members.

Surprisingly, the special effects in the film are often impressive, and hold-up remarkably well. Although some of the giant animals look ridiculous (namely the wasps), the giant rats and giant worms appear in convincing dimensions and shapes. The moment when Mrs. Skinner is attacked by blood-sucking worms is genuinely disturbing. And some of the film’s climactic moment, with rats swarming over the farmhouse in large number, are impressive too. What also works in the film’s favor is its violence. The animal attacks are so gruesome and bloody and that they galvanize the attention, especially when the (potential) victims include a very pregnant woman.

The Food of the Gods has long been considered schlocky, and probably rightly so, but the film features that droll finale, some sharply visualized attacks, and another 1970s message about being good to the Earth. I confess, this film was in regular rotation in TV syndication when I was a kid, and I must have watched it ten times. I have great affection for it, low-budget roots, acting, effects and all.

Abnormal Fixation Wins 10 (Ten!) Awards At The New York Movie Awards!

2026-06-08T10:12:09.054-04:00

40 Years Ago: SpaceCamp (1986)

2026-06-06T06:00:00.001-04:00

If ever a movie was the victim of unfortunate timing, it was SpaceCamp (1986), a summer genre film released forty years ago.

Specifically, the Harry Winer film premiered just five short months after the space shuttle Challenger disaster occurred.

As you may recall, Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds into its flight on January 28, 1986 because of a problem with a solid rocket booster. All seven of the crew members died, including school teacher Christa McAuliffe.

Since SpaceCamp involves another space shuttle mission, and another accident at NASA to boot (also featuring a booster, strangely enough…), the movie highlighted unintended and unfortunate connections to the national tragedy.

Many film critics, including Roger Ebert, reviewed the film on the basis of the Challenger trauma. In his review, Ebert wrote: “The great looming presence all through this movie is the memory of the Challenger destroying itself in a clear, blue sky.”

The association with real-life horror pretty-much killed SpaceCamp in the crib.

It was intended as a light, bubbly, uplifting film of no more seriousness or gravitas than any other disposable, would-be summer blockbuster. And suddenly, it was saddled with comparisons to one of the worst days of the decade, and in space program history.

In concept and casting, SpaceCamp was a “teenager” movie in the age of such teenage science fiction films as Back to the Future (1985), My Science Project (1985), Explorers (1985) and Weird Science (1985). This was an era when Hollywood films were capitalizing on the youth market, and its interest in the genre.

But SpaceCamp wasn’t just a love letter to American youth, but to the space program itself, and even -- somewhat awkwardly -- Star Wars (1977).

A box office bomb in its day, SpaceCamp is remembered, if not wholly beloved, by a generation of fans who discovered it on VHS and found it, at least, inoffensive. There, on the secondary market, the film cemented a reputation as a cult film, if not, necessarily, a cult classic.

Today, SpaceCamp seems somewhat hokey and far-fetched. The constant references to Star Wars grow irritating quickly, and don’t naturally fit with the space program setting.

Actually, Star Trek jokes would have worked better. Star Trek is about building a better tomorrow, the study of science, and the conquest of space. Star Wars is more of a fairy tale (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

The teen drama in SpaceCamp also seems forced at times, and even the technology seems unreal, since the film posits space stations and smart robots operating under NASA auspices in the mid-1980s.

In short, SpaceCamp shouldn’t shoulder the blame because real-life tragedy pre-empted it.

But outside its unfortunate context, the film still isn’t particularly well-made, or even all that memorable.

“With space, anything is possible.”

A group of teens at NASA’s space camp in Huntsville train for three weeks to become astronauts, under the tutelage of astronaut Andie Bergstrom (Kate Capshaw) and ground control operator Zach Bergstrom (Tom Skerritt).

One student, Kathryn (Lea Thompson) dreams of being a shuttle commander, but is made the shuttle pilot instead, while the happy-go-lucky Kevin (Tate Donovan) takes the command post.

Other students on the team include Tish (Kelly Preston), Rudy (Larry B. Scott), and Max (Joaquin Phoenix). Max befriends a robot named Jinx.

Jinx is responsible for the unusual set of circumstances which sees the teenagers, aboard the shuttle Atlantis, launched into space without preparation…or enough air.

Now the teens must work together to get home, and Andie must coordinate and aid their efforts, making her first voyage into space to do so.

“You’re all dead because you didn’t work together as a team.”

I’ve been to the location of Space Camp -- the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama -- on two unforgettable occasions.

I went as a twelve year-old in 1982, and I took my six year old son there for a return journey in 2012.

It’s a great place, and a destination I was so glad I shared with Joel. I hope I have opportunity to return with my granddaughter or grandson, many years from now.

The movie version of Space Camp is not such a wholly delightful experience. Variety’s reviewer opined that the movie “never successfully integrates summer camp hijinks with outer space idealism to come up with a dramatically compelling story.”

I don’t know that I feel that way, exactly. Certainly, the story of argumentative teens launched into space and having to take part in their own survival can be described as compelling.

My issue with the film is slightly different.

SpaceCamp takes too many liberties with the real life space program to really fulfill its premise that contemporary (and dedicated) 1980s teens could pilot a space shuttle, and get home safely.

In other words, the film suffers from a different form of schizophrenia than the one tagged by Variety.

SpaceCamp aims to be contemporary and real, but then, willy-nilly, throws in technology and details that are, simply, pure fantasy.

To wit, the teens rendezvous with a space station under construction that, conveniently, already has the extra oxygen supplies Atlantis requires.

Here the space station is called Daedalus, but no such space station existed in the mid-1980s. A much more primitive station, Skylab had re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in 1979. And the ISS (International Space Station) was still more than a decade off. In fact, the only space station in Earth orbit in 1986 was the Russian Mir.

And secondly, and perhaps much more to its detriment, SpaceCamp gives us the comic-relief robot Jinx.

Simply put, there was no robot capable of such complex thought-processes, speech-patterns, and emotional reactions (“Friends Forever!”) in 1986.

And if there were, its presence at Space Camp would have been a gross misuse of such advanced technology.

I know that Jinx is cute, and I have nothing at all against cute robots in SF films. He just seems oddly out-of-place in a film that is supposed to be about a real, not futuristic NASA.

Also, I’ll admit that I dislike then near-constant Star Wars references in SpaceCamp. “What are you an Imperial Guard?” asks one camper. “I’m not Han Solo…there’s no Force…there’s no dark side,” Kevin notes at another point. “I’ll arm the laser guns. May the Force be with You!" .

On and on it goes, but Star Wars isn’t really the right production to name-check in this particular context. All the talk of the George Lucas movie feels a little off. Why? Well, Star Wars isn’t really about training to be an astronaut, or learning to drive a spaceship. It isn’t, even, really, about a team of diverse people learning to work together.

Indeed, one great thing about Star Wars was it took all those concepts for granted, and went off, lasers blazing, to tell a story in a “lived in” universe. That story had mythic underpinnings, and fairy tale qualities. It was a space fantasy, where there was no talk of how the hyper-drive, tractor beams or light sabers actually worked.

SpaceCamp seems to owe much more to the concept of Star Trek; to the idea of becoming the best that you can be so you can conquer space; to the idea that by working side-by-side with someone of different qualities, you can grow to become more than the sum of your parts.

But, belying the film’s superficial writing, SpaceCamp loads up on the Star Wars call-outs, and they never quite feel right.

I know a lot of people boast nostalgia for SpaceCamp, and I understand and respect that. I remember watching the film on VHS in the mid-1980s, and being absolutely in love with Lea Thompson, and enjoying the (then) state-of-the-art special effects in the movie.

I am also in love with any movie that involves the space shuttle. I love that ship, and I love the films -- like Moonraker (1979), Hangar 18 (1980), and Lifeforce (1985) -- that feature it prominently.

On a re-watch, I found SpaceCamp occasionally diverting, but pretty inconsequential. At one point, Kevin notes, cynically, that astronaut training isn’t valuable because “we’re all going to get nuked anyway.”

SpaceCamp might have felt more real, and more uplifting, actually, if it had made a bigger deal of such Cold War frissons, and the way that the conquest of space can bring all the people of Earth together as one.

Bragging About the Paranormal 2: Amityville (An Abnormal Fixation Podcast)

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JKM on Horror 101 to discuss 70 Years of Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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JKM on Father, Son, Galaxy!

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30 Years Ago: Mission: Impossible (1996)

2026-05-22T06:00:00.005-04:00

Created by the late Bruce Geller, the TV series Mission: Impossible ran for seven high-rated seasons -- from 1966 - 1973 -- and was followed by a sequel series of the same title that ran for two years, beginning in 1988.

Each TV iteration of the espionage series depicted the top-secret and dangerous activities of the American IMF (Impossible Missions Force) Team as it brought low bad guys foreign and domestic utilizing a combination of high-tech and low-tech trickery.

Gun play was rarely involved in the series, and instead the IMF agents often waged a kind of psychological warfare against enemies in order to make the evil doers bring themselves to ruin. All told, star Peter Graves played IMF team leader Jim Phelps in a whopping 178 hour-long episodes (accounting for both series).

Director Brian De Palma came to the Mission: Impossible franchise in the 1990s after he had successfully revived another classic TV series at the box office, 1987's The Untouchables.

In many ways, the Geller 1960s creation was a perfect property for a director who believes that "the camera lies 24 times a second," since that axiom is the underlying essence of Mission: Impossible: the "lie" committed against the villain that makes him believe something false. That lie may involve a prosthetic mask that cloaks the identity of an IMF agent, or that lie may involve a camera broadcasting images that are believed to be real (like the death of an operative...), but which, are, in fact, lies. Our perception of reality -- according to De Palma and the IMF force -- can be manipulated by the dedicated (and cunning) use of technical inventions.

And for the tech-obsessed De Palma -- who in his youth had won a science fair prize for a project titled "An Analog Computer to Solve Differential Equations" -- the focus in Mission: Impossible on gimmicks, devices and high-tech toys (like cameras embedded in eye glasses and TV screens on wristwatches...) also appeared a perfect fit.

"My Team is Gone!" -- TV Series vs. Film Series

Where the new Mission: Impossible film of the Clinton Era diverges most dramatically from the 1960s TV series heritage is in the nature of the protagonists. The series universally featured a team of IMF operatives, each one flawlessly and emotionlessly fulfilling a designated role in a large, complex plot.

But because box office sensation Tom Cruise was attached to star in the new movie, the updated Brian De Palma Mission: Impossible was designed instead as a star vehicle. That means one man at the forefront of the action...not an ensemble piece, like the original. Cruise's new character, Ethan Hunt, survives the massacre of the team in the film's dynamic first act and then spends the bulk of the narrative working on an unofficial mission to clear his name from the "disavowed" list.

This deliberate change in focus riled some long-time fans of the classic series (as well as the former stars...) because Mission: Impossible had always concerned cooperation and team work; the sublimation of the personal for the greater cause or mission. Indeed, on the TV series, audiences knew virtually nothing of the characters' lives outside of the job. Emotions, personal connections, even humanity itself were downplayed and the "con" was everything. As producer Herb Solow described Mission: Impossible in Patrick J. White's excellent The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier (Avon, 1991 pages 10 and 11): "The story was always what pushed the program forward, not the characters."

When I interviewed original series star Martin Landau (Rollin Hand) for Cinescape in 2000 (November/December, Volume 6, Number 8, page 79, ) he was not particularly enamored with the re-direction of the continuing film series (particular after John Woo's MI:2). "The TV show was about a team getting in and out and no one ever knowing it was there," he reminds us. "They've turned it into an action-adventure with fireballs and chases...It's Mission: Impossible in name only."

Another reason the new film adaptation angered some longtime fans of the popular series: Jim Phelps (here played by Jon Voight) is actually the film's villain, not the hero. Original star Peter Graves had been offered the opportunity to resurrect the beloved character, but turned it down rather than participate in a film that would see the character transformed into a disloyal mercenary and, ultimately, killed while conducting an illicit, personal mission.

The other original team members, including Landau, were offered a chance to participate in the film too, and -- down to the very last actor (Emmy winner Barbara Bain, Greg Morris, and Peter Lupus) -- they all turned it down. "They wanted the old team in the first movie..to kill 'em off," Oscar-winner Landau reported, and he was all too-glad not to accept that particular mission. "I said, 'no way.' Rollin Hand will live on in reruns."

Despite this controversy, the 1996 Mission: Impossible film remains one of De Palma's mainstream blockbuster masterpieces. It was the third-highest grossing film of 1996, and the highest-grossing film of De Palma's career. It is true that the thrust of the movie version of Mission: Impossible is quite different from the predecessor series (featuring an individual James Bond-style hero rather than a team effort...), and it is also true that Jim Phelps is featured as a double-agent/villain. And yet -- to some extent -- that latter development serves its purpose well in De Palma's snake-like narrative: proving itself the king of all surprise twists.

I submit that this climactic twist would have worked even better had Graves returned to the TV role he originated...because then nobody at all would have seen the villainous turn coming. I am sympathetic to the fans who decry the transformation of the property into a Tom Cruise vehicle, but in the case of the first Mission: Impossible, it is difficult to deny that the film is a thrilling, kinetic, invigorating experience, regardless of the perceived fidelity to the TV source material.

And -- after 178 "missions" in two TV series -- you might even wish to commend De Palma (and his writers, Steve Zaillian, Robert Towne and David Koepp) for featuring something the audience had never seen before: "IMF blow back." Here -- for the first time -- we see a mission go disastrously, catastrophically, irrevocably off-track and desperate agents forced to improvise on the spot, under fire and in constant life-threatening dangers. Perhaps that's not the core principle of the long-standing Mission: Impossible franchise, but as a one-off adventure, it's an intriguing tale. I can defend the artistic integrity of M:I as a film -- and as a De Palma film -- till the cows come home. I just don't know if I can do the same for MI:2 or MI:3 which have -- essentially -- become James Bond films on (Tom) Cruise control.

Homage, McGuffins and Lies: Avowing The De Palma Touches

One of the qualities I most admire in Brian De Palma is his unswerving ability to enliven material not his own (such as The Untouchables or Mission: Impossible) with his unique and individual film sensibilities.

In Mission: Impossible, we get another classic, familiar De Palma touch: the tribute or homage.

First off, Mission: Impossible pays tribute to one of De Palma's enduring inspirations: Alfred Hitchcock. Much of the hullabaloo in the film involves something called "The NOC List." In short, this list of clandestine American operatives -- which seems to change hands frequently -- serves as a modern variation on Hitchcock's favorite thriller device, the McGuffin (a plot element that drives a narrative in terms of structure, and is generic enough for easy, quick comprehension). In Mission: Impossible, everybody wants the NOC List, everybody is obsessed with the NOC List, and it is the raison d'etre for each character's behavior and misbehavior.

Another object of homage here is clearly the film canon and stylistic conceits of filmmaker Jules Dassin, who directed two of the all-time great heist films, Rififi (1955) and Topkapi (1964). Indeed, the trademark "black vault" heist in Mission: Impossible has been described as a direct updating of the scene in Topkapi involving the theft of an emerald dagger in a glass case. And the exquisite, meticulous attention to detail during the course of the central crime in Rififi (a film that eschewed sound, music and dialogue for a focus on the details of a jewel heist) is also mirrored in De Palma's exhaustive direction of the film's three impossible missions (in Kiev, in Langley, and in London, respectively). Ironically, it was these two films (Topkapi and Rififi) that reputedly inspired Bruce Geller to create Mission: Impossible in the first place.

More important than either of these two tributes, however, is De Palma's return to his common thesis that the camera lies 24 times a second. In Mission: Impossible, the duplicitous Jim Phelps secretly runs a mission op within a mission op, so-to-speak, in Kiev. His operatives are running one mission; and Phelps is actually working against them, right under their noses. But the camera lies about this fact: we don't see Phelps' hands in-frame as he operates the computer that sends IMF agent Jack (Emilio Estevez) to his death in an elevator shaft. We don't see Phelps douse himself in stage blood before his eye-glass-mounted camera registers a shot of his bloody hands, fumbling at an apparent gunshot wound near his abdomen. Instead, we see Phelps apparently get shot by an independent assailant (on Ethan's wristwatch screen...) and then -- in master shot -- he fall offs a bridge into a river (a death that forecasts a similar scene in De Palma's Femme Fatale).

Next, during a splendid, third-act sequence involving Hunt and Phelps, we get the truth for the first time, or at least one possible version of the truth. We see the images of Phelp's nefarious activities -- depicted as Hunt's thoughts; his unvoiced suspicions. On this pass of the events, we see Phelps operating the computer to murderous effect. This time, we see him "act out" his own death for the glasses-camera (and Ethan's benefit). Meanwhile, in the dialogue itself, Phelps lies to us again about what actually occurred and who might be behind it. He fingers IMF supervisor, Kittredge (Henry Czerny)

In another brilliantly vetted moment, Hunt even "re-thinks" the moment that one agent's car was destroyed, first imagining Claire (Phelp's wife) detonating the bomb; and then -- in more palatablefashion -- imagining Phelps doing the deed himself. In this case, we never know the exact truth. This is in keeping with the ambiguous characterization of Claire (Emmanuelle Beart), who is either -- in another typical De Palma move -- a Madonna or a whore.

The Mount Everest of Hacks, (Or a Simple Game For Four Players...): The Black Vault Sequence

The Langley interlude in Mission: Impossible, or the so-called "Black Vault Sequence," remains so accomplished, so tense, so remembered that it has emerged, perhaps, as the most parodied scene in mainstream movies over the last decade.

Basically, this harrowing scene involves four operatives breaking into CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia. Their mission: to download the NOC List from a small chamber called The Black Vault.

First, De Palma lays out the specifics of the difficult operation, showing the audience all the relevant information while Hunt describes it in voice over. For instance, we learn that the console is a standalone mainframe...which means that the expert hacker Luther (Ving Rhames) can't access it from outside. Furthermore, the security checks (voice-print ID, 6-digit access code, retinal scan, and intrusion counter-measure key cards...) prevent conventional access.

Therefore, Hunt, "our point man," must enter the vault through the ceiling, positioned some 30-feet above the console. But the vault itself is wired with counter-measures to prevent just such an invasion. The room is sound sensitive, meaning that if the sound goes up even a few decibels, an alarm will be tripped. A sensor also registers body heat, meaning that if heat rises in the room just a single degree -- again -- the alarm is tripped. And finally, the floors are pressure sensitive, and if they are tripped by any additional weight at all, an "automatic lock down" is initiated.

That's the mountain to climb, and in the film's second act, subtitled "Langley," Hunt and his team broach the impossible mission of accessing the Black Vault console. Hunt is lowered via harness, upside down, through a ceiling vent (initially protected by lasers...), wearing his camera/eye-glasses.

And then, once he's inside, De Palma puts the screws to him and to us. The console operator, William Donloe, for instance, interrupts Hunt in the vault, and the agent is forced to dangle just feet over his head. Donloe need to glance upwards but once, and the mission fails. Importantly, De Palma positions Hunt and Donloe in the same shot to cycle up the anxiety factor: the close-proximity between men becomes plain (and terrifying) as they share space within the same frame.

Secondly, a rat (first viewed in a rack focus, distracting our attention), enters the vent shaft and causes Jean Reno's character to lose a grip on Hunt's harness. Accordingly, Hunt plummets downward and nearly smashes into the pressure-sensitive floor. Hunt then swings uselessly and impotently, trying to maintain equilibrium (an act revealed in long shot, so we can note his spatial relationship to the dangerous floor). And then, in close-up, we see a single, glistening drop of sweat fall down across Hunt's harried face. We trace it down his eye glasses, and down towards the floor....

At the last second, Hunt catches the drop in his open palm...

The punch-line is a humdinger. As a successful Hunt climbs out of the vault, with Reno's help...a knife falls down (in agonizing slow-motion) towards the pressure-sensitive floor below. Miraculously (and humorously) it lands on the console, point down...avoiding immediate detection. At least until Donloe re-enters the room. This is a perfect example of De Palma's wicked sense of humor, the knife functioning as a kind of unintentional "flag" planting by Hunt and his team in the conquered territory.

All throughout this sequence, De Palma utilizes the Dassin motif as seen in Rififi, minimizing dialogue, music and sound effects to great impact. The idea is that the movie -- like the audience itself - is virtually holding its breath throughout the Black Vault Sequence, focusing on the details of the operations with a singular sense of focus, and nail-biting.

The Black Vault Sequence is superlative film style, the trademark De Palma set-piece we have come to expect and cherish in his films (and the climactic equivalent, essentially, to the Odessa Steps scene in The Untouchables). Every shot, every camera move -- every technical parry and every thrust -- is perfectly calibrated to play the audience like a piano.

I had not seen Mission: Impossible in thirteen years before screening it again last night, and I must admit, it was a much stronger, cleverer, and witty film than I recalled from my single theatrical viewing in 1996. De Palma gives us three distinctive impossible missions here, makes clever use of technology and gadgets, and admirable downplays conventional violence (such as gun battles) in the same fashion as the classic series did. Indeed, watching De Palma's tale of a rogue, "disavowed" agent trying to clear his name and outwit his own intelligence superiors reminded me a great deal of the popular Bourne films. It makes you wonder if this movie was somehow a template or inspiration for those (great) movies.

Although fans may certainly feel justified in quibbling over the fact that their beloved series was handed over lock-stock-and-barrel to action-star Cruise, for Brian De Palma Mission: Impossible is Mission Accomplished. No need to disavow the film -- or the director for that matter -- for a job capably and stylishly done.

Bragging About the Paranormal #1 Patterson-Gimlin (An Abnormal Fixation Podcast)

2026-05-20T07:51:49.100-04:00

50 Years Ago: Grizzly (1976)

2026-05-16T06:00:00.001-04:00

The first shot of William Girdler’s Grizzly (1976) is actually a really good one. The film opens with a lovely, wide-angle establishing shot of the natural forest.

The shot is well-composed, with an imposing mountain in the distance, slightly off-center. Just as you settle in for a viewing -- pondering the natural beauty of the environment -- the unexpected buzz of a helicopter in flight suddenly and loudly interrupts the tranquility, and the craft jets into the frame.

The pastoral setting is thus shattered by the presence of the helicopter, and this transgression is followed up by the dire warning of its pilot -- played by Andrew Prine -- that if man keeps encroaching on the wild, he will “destroy the natural beauty” of forests just like this one.

Girdler’s inaugural shot cannily demonstrates that this brand of destruction is already occurring, and that’s the perfect note on which to commence a revenge of nature film. Especially one about a killer grizzly bear coming down the side of a mountain even as vacationing hitchhikers and campers insist on encroaching from the other end, probing ever higher up the same mountain.

Bear and man will meet in the middle…for terror!

The best-looking of Girdler’s films so far – and by far -- Grizzly (1976) proved a huge box-office hit in the year of America’s bicentennial, in part because it was the first “when animals attack” movie to arrive after Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws (1975). The movie was not a critical success, however, and reviewers such as the one at Time Magazine dubbed the Girdler film “an idea-for-idea, character-for-character, and sometimes even shot-for-shot knock-off of Jaws.”

That assertion, alas, is accurate.

Last week in the Girdler Guide, I noted that Girdler is often remembered as the king of the rip-offs for his cinematic variations on Psycho (Three on a Meathook), The Exorcist (The Manitou) and, yes, Jaws (Grizzly), but really, Grizzly is the most on-the-nose and derivative knock-off of that bunch. You can go up and down the line in the film -- from narrative, to characters, to compositions -- and see how Spielberg’s great white shark film casts a heavy shadow over virtually every aspect of this work.

“You know…bears got patterns.”

In an American national park, Ranger Kelly (Christopher George) and his men and women are concerned about the number of campers and back-packers visiting during the season.

When two female campers are found ripped apart and mauled to death by a grizzly bear, Kelly realizes that the tourists are in terrible danger. The administrator at the park, however, refuses to close the forest to visitors. After more attacks, Kelly prevails and plots a strategy to hunt the grizzly, which has demonstrated murderous and even cannibalistic tendencies.

With the help of a pilot, Don (Prine) and a naturalist, Scotty (Richard Jaekel) Kelly heads out into the deep woods by helicopter to face the monsters on its home territory

“That’s all we need: a killer bear on the loose.”

The DVD version of Grizzly I watched for this review came complete with a good, informative documentary about the making of the film. In the doc, the project’s writers good-naturedly noted that they had not intended the film to be a Jaws rip-off, and that, if you pay attention to the script, Grizzly is not really a Jaws knock-off at all. They are so charming and informative that you really want to believe that assertion.

But allow me to tally, just briefly, the various points in common shared by Jaws and Grizzly.

The heroic triumvirate: Both films feature three male heroes who “bond” over the hunting of a wild, dangerous animal. In Jaws, the triumvirate consists of the law-enforcement official, Brody (Roy Scheider), the man of science, Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the local man, Quint (Robert Shaw) who captains a boat and is a veteran of World War II. In Grizzly, we have the ranger, Kelly, the naturalist, Scotty, and Don, who captains a helicopter and is a veteran of Vietnam. Also note that both Quint and Don stand-out by virtue of their local accents, New England/Southern, respectively.

The over-sized nemesis is more than mere animal: In Jaws, we meet a giant great white shark who is almost supernaturally clever, and efficient, out-smarting its human hunters at every turn, and evading both capture and death.

In Grizzly, we likewise get a very large, very intelligent bear instead. And as one character notes, this giant man-eater “seems to know what we’re thinking,” meaning that it is not, as Yogi might say, your average bear. There is the implicit suggestion that the bear here, like the shark in Jaws, may actually be a supernatural monster.

Economic/professional interests are imperiled by the presence of the intruder: In Jaws, the beach town of Amity thrives on summer business, and so the Mayor (Murray Hamilton) argues that “the beaches stay open.” He even covers up a coroner report to assure that the beaches stay open.

In Grizzly, the park administrator similarly refuses to act responsibly in order to save people. “There’s no need to close the park,” he insists, despite the presence of the vicious predator. When bear attacks keep occurring, however, and bad press threatens to overwhelm the park, he is forced to change his mind.

Local yokels: Sheriff Brody almost has a conniption fit in Jaws when amateur local fisher-men take to their boats, go out to sea, and start hunting the great white shark. They get drunk, dynamite fish in the sea, and cause all sorts of problems for law enforcement

In Grizzly, rednecks put on their camo vests, grab their rifles and head into the woods to hunt the grizzly bear, threatening everybody in the process. “Those clowns are going to shoot everything in sight,” Kelly complains, echoing Brody.

Naked or half-naked girls are delicious: In the first scene in Jaws, Chrissy’s midnight skinny-dip turns sour when the great white shark attacks and kills her. Early in Grizzly, a half-naked camper, also a young woman, frolics in a waterfall until a grizzly attack turns the mountain waters blood-red.

Children also make good lunches: In Jaws, little Alex Kitner gets killed by the great white, and his mother slaps Brody for allowing the beaches to stay open when he knew better.

In Grizzly, a little boy gets attacked by a bear (though “part” of him survives, according to Kelly), and the attack is proof that the park’s approach to the problem is not working.

In both cases, the attack on the child stiffens the spine of the law-enforcement official, either Brody or Kelly. They commit themselves to the hunt, lest any other innocent (like a child) suffer.

Animal P.O.V.: Several shots in Jaws represent the subjective perspective of the great white shark as it hunts and stalks it unwitting victims.

Likewise, Grizzly features a number of bear-attack style P.O.V. shots.

On the monster’s turf: Jaws culminates with a splendid third act in which the heroic triumvirate takes to the sea aboard Quint’s boat, the Orca, to hunt the monster. The Orca is pulped in the ensuing clash, and Quint is killed. The law enforcement official, Brody, blows up the shark with a well-timed shot to a flammable gas tank.

In Grizzly, the heroic triumvirate takes to the wooded mountain aboard Don’s helicopter. The helicopter is pulped by the bear in the ensuing clash, and Don is killed. The law enforcement official,

Kelly, blows up the Grizzly with a bazooka.''

Despite these many similarities, I must establish one fact: Grizzly looks absolutely great. Frankly, I don’t remember the film looking so damn good when I watched it on VHS for a review in Horror Films of the 1970s.

On this viewing, however, I was struck several times by the lovely photography, and the utter bluntness of the editing style. Several attacks are editing with lightning-fast “shock” cuts so that severed limbs, decapitated heads and other extremities fly across the frame.

They may not be scary, but these moments are certainly…bracing. In fact, I’ll go further. I believe that Girdler did the best work anyone could reasonably expect on Grizzly with the script he had in hand, which -- clearly -- was highly derivative. Girdler actually executes the film well in terms of its exploitative content, but it’s difficult to leave behind, even for a moment, the fact that the film seems to ape Jaws with a near-religious fervor.

One other big difference between Jaws and Grizzly bears a mention. Sharks are inherently scary on screen. Bears…not so much. Sharks have soulless-seeming black eyes, razor-sharp fangs, and exposed, meaty gums. They hide beneath the roiling ocean surface, with only a jutting fin signifying their presence. They can break the ocean surface and then retreat beneath it suddenly, and seemingly anywhere at any time.

But Teddy in Grizzly is a big, roly-poly, fuzzy animal with sleepy eyes. His stomach rolls jollily from side to side when he runs. And when he rears up on his hind legs, he looks like he wants to give you a hug, not rip you apart.

I’m not saying that I’d like to encounter a grizzly in the woods, or that it wouldn’t be terrifying to do so. I’m talking about visual representations here. The bear just doesn’t transmit as some kind of hideous monster on screen and is thus a markedly less-effective “monster” than the shark in Jaws is.

Screening Grizzly this time, I also had more respect for the performances, especially those of Prine and George. They are thoroughly professional here, and try to do more with their thin characters than merely ape the performances in Jaws. Between Girdler’s occasionally tactless but fun visualizations and Prine’s good ole boy drawl, I must confess I felt more positively about Grizzly than I did when I last watched it in 2000.

It’s still a rip-off of Jaws, through and through, but Grizzly has its moments. It may be a bad movie, but the film is an entertaining bad movie, and a good time-capsule of the Jaws craze that struck the nation in the mid-1970s.

30 Years Ago: Doctor Who (Fox TV, May 14, 1996)

2026-05-14T06:00:00.001-04:00

While transporting the remains of his dead rival, The Master, from Skaro to Gallifrey, the Seventh Doctor’s (Sylvester McCoy) TARDIS experiences a “timing malfunction” and lands on Earth in the “Humanian Era,” on the eve of the new millennium, December 30, 1999

Unfortunately, the malfunction has been caused by the Master himself, who in a strange, slimy reptilian form, escapes from captivity and moves into the body of an unsuspecting American paramedic (Eric Roberts).

Upon venturing out of the TARDIS, the Doctor is almost immediately injured in urban San Francisco’s gang violence. He is rushed to a hospital, where a cardiac surgeon Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook) operates on him. Unfortunately, he appears to die on the table, though he actually regenerates that night, in the morgue.

The new Doctor (Paul McGann) -- suffering from amnesia -- befriends Dr. Holloway, and together the duo must prevent the Master from opening The Eye of Harmony inside the TARDIS for the express purpose of stealing all the Doctor’s future lives…

Worse, the Master’s plan will destroy Earth’s future, meaning that the world will stop, permanently, when New Year’s Day, 2000, happens.

An American co-production with the BBC, the 1996 Doctor Who movie stars Paul McGann as the eighth incarnation of the Doctor, and also features a good-sized role for Sylvester McCoy, the seventh Doctor, who hands off the role to his successor with style and grace.

Like many Doctor Who serials of the classic series, the Doctor Who TV movie functions primarily in “pastiche” mode. This means, essentially, that it skillfully pulls ideas from popular productions in the culture, and then blends them together in a new and frequently amusing fashion.

The Paul McGann movie, directed by Geoffrey Sax pulls ideas from The Terminator movie franchise (right down to visual framing, at one point), the pre-eminent genre franchise of the day, The X-Files (in terms of an Earth-based mystery involving aliens), and also the increasingly popular post-modernism of horror genre films such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Scream (1996)

In terms of The Terminator (1984), the Doctor Who features two time travelers from another culture (otherworldly, rather than the future…) duking it out on modern-day Earth, while a human bystander is pulled into the action. The Terminator and the Master both wear sun-glasses and leather, and both cause much destruction. Both are also endeavoring to re-shape the future.

The X-Files, meanwhile, famously gave 1990s audiences “the black oil,” a kind of sentient ooze that would crawl up inside of human beings and take them over. Those possessed by the evil of the black ooze on the Chris Carter would then also boast black eyeballs. In The Doctor Who movie, the Master is seen as a kind of reptilian ooze, sliming to the TARDIS console, and down the throat of an unwitting EMT. Similarly, those possessed by the Master (in this case, Grace), showcase the telltale black eyes of the oil.

Finally, the eighth doctor movie explicitly compares the Doctor’s regeneration to the famous “It’s Alive” moment of revival of the monster in James Whales’ Frankenstein (1932), which happens to be playing on television during the Time Lord’s regeneration process.

At one point the film explicitly cross-cuts from the Monster’s hand twitching to the Doctor’s hand undertaking the very same motion. The allusion is intriguing, but it ultimately doesn’t serve as anything beyond a recognition of the fact that the makers of the movie are aware of pop culture. Is the Doctor being compared to a monster? Is his regeneration, monstrous? It’s a nice allusion a beloved old film, but nothing more. The moment would have worked better if the Master’s resurrection had been intercut with footage from Frankenstein.

Although Paul McGann is splendid in the role of the Eighth Doctor and certainly deserved his own long run in the role, his TV Movie isn’t especially good. It looks like what it is: a cheap TV production circa the mid-1990s. The special effects haven’t aged particularly well, the acting is generally pretty bad, and there doesn’t seem to be much by way of budget which could show audiences anything special. Most of the action is very tame, and the details surrounding the Eye of Harmony are quite confusing.

Alas, the 1996 Doctor Who movie also adds some baffling new ideas to the long-standing canon.

First among those is the Doctor’s surprising revelation that he is half-human (on his mother’s side). This is a shock to say the least, and may not be accepted as canon by fans. I suspect this was a bone thrown to American producers so the character would seem “relatable,” or some other such nonsense.

Secondly, the Master -- though described as a rival Time Lord -- is depicted in his natural form as a kind of snake or reptile. We see his reptilian eyes, and his coiled, snake-like body, at points. What’s this about? If he is a Time Lord, are all Time Lords reptilian? If the Doctor and The Master are both Time Lords, why are they physiologically so different from one another? There are no doubt fan ret-cons for this mystery, but no explanation appears in the movie.

Finally, since when is the TARDIS’s chameleon circuit known as a “cloaking device?”

Despite such stumbles, this Doctor Who TV-movie makes an honorable attempt to continue faithfully the ideas and characters of the franchise as seen on the BBC series, circa 1963-1989. The Doctor’s old sonic screwdriver makes an appearance, for instance, and the series even resurrects an old logo from Jon Pertwee’s era.

Similarly, the film went to the trouble of casting Sylvester McCoy for the pre-regeneration scenes, thus establishing a direct link between seventh and eighth Doctors. Had the filmmakers not taken this step, the TV movie today would likely be remembered as completely apocryphal (like the Cushing films of the 1960s).

It’s also fair to state that this Doctor Who movie pointed the way towards the re-invention in several regards.

For one thing, we get a very attractive, young, leading man-type Doctor in Paul McGann’s incarnation, as we later get with Eccleston, Tennant, and Smith. No grandfatherly or father types, as was the case with Hartnell and Pertwee.

Also, the interior of the TARDIS is redesigned here and for the first time actually looks gigantic, much as it would in the modern era. But the central column is clearly recognizable, as it remains to this day.

Last but not least -- and this is probably the most controversial touch -- there’s a hint of romance here between the Doctor and his companion, Grace. On more than one occasion, the duo locks lips, and, well, you can pretty easily sense the desire.

Once more, the new series has picked up on this dimension, with the Doctor and Rose falling in love, and Martha Jones also falling hard for the Time Lord.

In the original series, the Doctor never made eyes at any of his beautiful male or female companions…and there were many, to be certain. In the new show, there seems to be a hint of romance or attraction between the Doctor and virtually every companion (well, not Rory…).

Today, contextualize the McGann movie as a not entirely-effective missing link between the original series and the new series. In many ways, it is more nimble and fun than the last seasons on BBC were, but some aspects -- like the acknowledgment of the Doctor’s human half -- seem way off. The film’s plot-line is also muddled, and the Doctor’s solution to the closing of the Eye of Harmony doesn’t seem to make sense in light of what we know about time travel.

Doctor Who would not reach its full potential, again, until 2005, and yet I’m still grateful to have this 1996 movie in the catalog.

Finally, there is one visual composition in this TV movie that I absolutely love. An amnesiac doctor wanders through an abandoned wing of a San Francisco hospital, and sees his reflection for the first time…in eight mirrors. We get eight views of him with his new face, because, of course, this is his eighth incarnation. I love that moment. It’s as if the mirror is explicitly reminding him of his long and noble history…