Thunderbirds International Rescue Edition – DVD

August 11, 2004Posted in1960s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi, UK

THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966)
**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
screenplay by Gerry Anderson & Sylvia Anderson
directed by David Lane

THUNDERBIRD 6 (1968)
*/**** Image A- Sound A- (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B+
screenplay by Gerry Anderson & Sylvia Anderson
directed by David Lane

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Why is it that "Thunderbirds", the marionette sci-fi TV series of 1960s vintage, exerts such weird fascination? Narratively, it's nothing to get excited about–just the usual conservative guff involving stiff-necked operators of sci-fi machinery, all of whom are given one trait each and are as pure in heart as they are heavy on exposition. One wants to make an obvious joke about the delivery being as wooden as the puppets, except that to do so would be missing the point: the erotics of the series are powerful specifically because everything is made of wood. The figures themselves are as rigid and rock-solid as the meticulously-designed machinery, making the stylization of the series total and more convincing than if it were superimposed over the documentary image of mere human flesh. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two lavish and colourful movies made under the "Thunderbirds" brand, which, despite their formulaic tendencies, manage to hold our attention with a rich and affective sense of necrophilia.

Wizards (1977) – DVD

August 4, 2004Posted in1970s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
written and directed by Ralph Bakshi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I like Ralph Bakshi movies. I wish I didn’t, because they’re shrill and vulgar and slightly immature, and not even examples of brilliant cartooning. But they’ve got a working-class desperation to them that most American movies are too posh and moneyed to accurately capture. Hollywood filmmakers typically see poverty as an occasion for condescension from above; Bakshi sees it at ground level–consider the generations of failure that littered American Pop, or the chaotic skid-row scramble that defined Heavy Traffic. Thus I find myself in the unenviable position of guardedly praising his 1977 Wizards, which in the hands of any other director would have been merely a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff. This is not to say that it isn’t a sleazy Tolkien-meets-Heavy-Metal fantasy riff, but it’s one with moments that resonate beyond simplistic sex and violence and wipe the goofy grin off of the normally flighty and gossamer-draped genre.

Decoys (2004) – DVD

August 3, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Corey Sevier, Stefanie Von Pfetten, Meghan Ory, Kim Poirier
screenplay by Matt Hastings & Tom Berry
directed by Matt Hastings

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Faithful watchers of Canadian film held their collective breath when it was announced recently that the major funding bodies would no longer be supporting arthouse fare. Instead of nurturing the next Atom Egoyan, the country would shepherd in Hollywood-esque fare like Foolproof (ironically co-produced by Atom Egoyan), hoping for an increase in ticket sales and perhaps a rejoinder to those critics who attack our cinema for being a ruthless killjoy. The question remained: would a simple shift in mode rid us of the tag of funbusters? In the case of the recent, terrible Decoys, the answer is: not bloody likely. Despite its dedicated efforts at reproducing American-style mindlessness, it rings all of the Canadian bells about sexual disgust, aversion to pleasure, and fear of decisive action that have bedevilled our country's cinema from the very beginning. That it's awful on its own terms is beside the point: it's how it's awful that's most instructive.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

July 30, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Jonathan Demme, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Kimberly Elise
screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate is arguably more of a retelling of William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders from Mars (1953) than it is of John Frankenheimer’s incomparable 1962 original. Like Menzies’s science-fiction B-movie classic, the premise of Demme’s updating is that some alien force (Earthling mad scientist in this instance instead of Martian) has implanted a small device in certain respected members of our society in order to manipulate them into harming our surprisingly fragile good old American value system. Also like Invaders from Mars, the whole film moves with the logic of a fever dream, all intense close-ups, hallucinatory visions, and suggestions of going underground.

Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London (2004) [Special Edition]; The Cheetah Girls (2003); Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004) – DVDs

July 21, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Canada, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Germany, Music, Musical, Romance, Sci-Fi, UK

AGENT CODY BANKS 2: DESTINATION LONDON
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C-
starring Frankie Muniz, Anthony Anderson, Cynthia Stevenson, Daniel Roebuck
screenplay by Don Rhymer
directed by Kevin Allen

THE CHEETAH GIRLS
*/**** Image C Sound B Extras C-
starring Raven, Adrienne Bailon, Kiely Williams, Sabrina Bryan
screenplay by Alison Taylor, based on the series of books by Deborah Gregory
directed by Oz Scott

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Here’s how it works. The entertainment machine churns out low-quality wish-fulfillment fantasies for ‘tweens and teenagers, then print and web outlets assign grown men and women to review them. Yes, the logic behind this weird symbiosis is elusive, as few teenagers are savvy enough to read reviews and few adult reviewers (beyond the occasional junket flunky) are possibly going to recommend them to anyone else. But somebody somewhere must benefit from this arrangement, because I have two such discs staring me in the face right now: one is the Frankie Muniz vehicle Agent Cody Banks 2, the other is a Disney Channel TV movie called The Cheetah Girls. Both are fantasies of juvenile mastery, both are scrubbed clean and chaste, both seem to have been dashed off in an afternoon by drunken hacks, and I guarantee you that both will make anyone over the age of fifteen want to poke their eyes out with a metal spike. But that’s just me. I’m 31.

The Stepford Wives (2004)

June 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken
screenplay by Paul Rudnick, based on the novel by Ira Levin
directed by Frank Oz

by Walter Chaw At one time Jim Henson’s right hand, Frank Oz is the index finger that you close your book around when you get up to answer the door. An afterthought of a place-holder of a director, his cameo as the evidence officer in The Blues Brothers (“One prophylactic…one soiled”) is as succinct a statement as any of the man’s non-Muppet contributions to the films he directs. His visual style flat, his rapport with non-plush actors non-existent, Oz instinctively arranges everything as he would puppets on a soundstage: sightlines clear, movement in straight lines, and coverage that establishes the marvel of place but no sense that living things exist there. He’s not a bad choice at first glance, then, for the second adaptation of Ira Levin’s paranoia classic The Stepford Wives (already a mediocre camp classic 1975 movie starring Katharine Ross), the saga of a lovely young woman who discovers, Rosemary’s Baby-like (another Levin source), that her husband is kind of a pig and her exclusive suburban neighbourhood is populated by vacuous femme-bots imagined as ideal wife-replacements by their pigs of husbands. Like the first film, an impossibly lovely woman is cast as the empowered lead to lend the premise a little more ironic horror, but Nicole Kidman, unlike Ross, is already an automaton and has been cast as such in films like To Die For and Eyes Wide Shut. The greatest special effect in Kidman’s career is her sometime ability to simulate warmth–something that’s not required in The Stepford Wives, and so again it would seem as though her involvement in this project makes a great deal of sense. Because of this, it’s sort of amazing how genuinely bad are the results.

The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)

June 10, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Vin Diesel, Colm Feore, Thandie Newton, Judi Dench
written and directed by David Twohy

Chroniclesofriddickby Walter Chaw David Twohy constructs films from ideas and images borrowed from the well of archetype–Shakespeare ("Julius Caesar" and "Macbeth" in particular), Greek theatre and mythology, Joseph Campbell by way of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg–and he sometimes does so at the expense of transitional scenes or traditional narrative sense. There's a gestalt to his work, if not much linearity, sparing no time for niceties like how a character arms himself, or how such nifty details as the hero's ability to navigate like a biological sextant comes into play, but in the case of Twohy and, in particular, The Chronicles of Riddick, the gestalt is enough. The picture is a survey of George Lucas's original Star Wars trilogy, of all four Alien films, of dashes of Jeunet and Caro's French phantasms, and of David Lynch's Dune, with–and I mean this in a good way–just a smidge of Flash Gordon factored in: a parade of black leather-clad grotesqueries inhabit a lushly imagined future (breaking records for lumber usage in its Vancouver construction) in a film that attempts to tell old stories in a new way and, for the most part, succeeds with an agreeable level of whiz-bang. Occasionally it succeeds brilliantly, as in a late shot of its anti-hero Riddick (Vin Diesel) slumped on a Giger throne before throngs of rubber jack-suited storm troopers, which stimulates not just for the audacity of its scale, but also for the comparisons it summons to the "Orestiea" and "Titus Andronicus."

Roswell: The Complete First Season (1999-2000) – DVD

June 1, 2004Posted in1990s, 2000s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Teen, Television, Thriller

Image A Sound A Extras B
"Pilot," "The Morning After," "Monsters," "Leaving Normal," "Missing," "285 South," "River Dog," "Blood Brother," "Heat Wave," "The Balance," "Toy House," "Into the Woods," "The Convention," "Blind Date," "Independence Day," "Sexual Healing," "Crazy," "Tess, Lies and Videotape," "Four Square," "Max to the Max," "The White Room," "Destiny"

by Walter Chaw What begins as something romantic and mysterious ends as something predominantly memorable for the impact it had on Dido's wan career. Charting the WB's "Roswell"'s downward trajectory from a piquant, lovely pilot to the worst of "The X Files" and "Dawson's Creek" is a fascinating, instructive thing to watch–not only for the schadenfreude of it all, but also for the way that corporate perception of what an audience purportedly wants invariably leads to production of the same kind of dull crapulence over and over again. (Though, in the WB's defense, a grassroots letter-writing campaign that saved the series from oblivion at least once indicates a fervid devotion to this kind of garbage.) In the fine tradition of making a self-pitying clone of "thirtysomething" for teen-somethings played by a cast of twenty-somethings, "Roswell" is "Sweet Valley High" mixed with the Troll Books variety of soft-core science fiction, making that "My So-Called Life" feeling of middle school alienation literal in its tale of three or four actual aliens getting teased by jocks in Roswell, NM. It's the love child of Robert A. Heinlein and Judy Blume, and it ain't pretty.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

May 27, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disaster Movie, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Dash Mihok
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Jeffrey Nachmanoff
directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Dayaftertomorrowby Walter Chaw Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow completes a trilogy for the German director in which he trashes New York City, revealing either a deep hatred of the United States or a shocking disdain for civil planning. Aliens and a radioactive Japanese iguana the culprits in Independence Day and Godzilla, respectively, Emmerich's cycle of NYC flicks continues the evolution of blame from extra-terrestrial to the whimsical side-effects of military testing to, with The Day After Tomorrow, the Bush Jr. administration. The picture is overtly political, going so far as to offer a Mutt and Jeff duo as his fictional executive branch, while less stridently it presents what is possibly the first semi-literal 9/11 film in its vision of Gotham devastated from without and all warnings ignored, its denizens putting aside differences to survive and its emergency workers heroic and iconic. To compare a modern Ice Age (repeatedly referred to as a permanent shift in climate (was it ever)) to 9/11 is inelegant but, in the long run, perhaps ideologically accurate.

Dracula: The Legacy Collection – DVD

May 27, 2004Posted in1930s, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Vampire, Werewolf

DRACULA (1931)
***/**** Image C Sound C|A (with Glass score) Extras A+
starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye
screenplay by Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Bram Stoker and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston
directed by Tod Browning

DRÁCULA (1931)
***/**** Image C+ Sound B-
starring Carlos Villarias, Lupita Taylor, Pablo Alvarez Rubio, Barry Norton
screenplay by Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Bram Stoker and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston; adapted in Spanish by B. Fernandez Cue
directed by George Melford

DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1936)
***½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill, Edward Van Sloan
screenplay by Garrett Fort, based on the story “Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker
directed by Lambert Hillyer

SON OF DRACULA (1943)
*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Lon Chaney Jr., Robert Paige, Louise Allbritton, Evelyn Ankers
screenplay by Eric Taylor
directed by Robert Siodmak

HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945)
½*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Martha O’Driscoll, Lionel Atwill
screenplay by Edward T. Lowe Jr.
directed by Erle C. Kenton

by Walter Chaw Tod Browning’s Dracula finds its way to the DVD format for the second time as part of a handsome “Legacy Collection” heralding the theatrical bow of the studio’s lead balloon Van Helsing, possibly denoting the first time that a cynically-timed archival video release was announced with pride and fanfare instead of slipped surreptitiously into the marketplace. Never mind that a purchase of the Legacy collection whole (essaying Dracula, The Wolf Man, and Frankenstein) proves to be far better for the soul than shelling out a few bones to catch Stephen Sommers’s latest assault on sense and cinema, even if doing so feels a little like letting Universal have its cake and eat it, too: There are worse things in the world than a mainstream shipwreck inspiring a vital resurrection.

Paycheck (2003) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 18, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: John Woo, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Michael C. Hall
screenplay by Dean Georgaris, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw At the end of John Woo's latest Hollywood misstep, Ben Affleck, as brilliant "reverse engineer" Michael Jennings, hefts two bags of manure on his back and stumbles around with them for a while, effectively defusing anything cogent I could say about Paycheck. It is worth wondering, however, why people like Affleck and Keanu Reeves are so attractive in science-fiction premises (Reeves even had a turn with the memory-loss high-tech agent thing in Johnny Mnemonic)–probably something to do with the idea of robots and minds wiped clean. The problem with Paycheck isn't really that it's not well thought-out or that it's possibly the first Woo action film to be genuinely boring from start to finish, but that Woo seems to have replaced his joy of genre (and genius within the medium) with a scrabbling desperation to manufacture what used to come naturally.

The Wolf Man: The Legacy Collection – DVD

May 6, 2004Posted in1930s, 1940s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Drama, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, Werewolf

THE WOLF MAN (1941)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy
screenplay by Curt Siodmak
directed by George Waggner

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943)
**½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles
screenplay by Curt Siodmak
directed by Roy William Neill

SHE-WOLF OF LONDON (1946)
*/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Don Porter, June Lockhart, Sara Haden, Jan Wiley
screenplay by George Bricker
directed by Jean Yarbrough

WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935)
*½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Henry Hull, Warner Oland, Valerie Hobson, Lester Matthews
screenplay by John Colton
directed by Stuart Walker

Extras A-

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Pity the poor Wolf Man. In ranking the unholy trinity of Universal monsters, he's the ugly stepchild, lacking both the popularity and iconic weight loaded onto stablemates Dracula and Frankenstein. As far as I know, no teenage outsider ever acted out by pretending to be a werewolf, nor does anyone make a metaphor of lycanthropy the way they do with Frankenstein's Monster. The Wolf Man is a beast without home or purpose, a welcome addition to monster tag teams but otherwise a second-tier entity who failed to capture the public's imagination as something to be taken beyond face value.

Godsend (2004)

April 29, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Robert De Niro, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Robert De Niro, Cameron Bright
screenplay by Mark Bomback
directed by Nick Hamm

Godsendby Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Godsend's spine-tingling set-up doesn't just trump its conclusion, it literally beats the hell out of it. The suggestion is that the clone of a dead child begins to have supernatural dreams at the age his host was killed–a premise that fosters consuming dread and marks potentially the best mainstream horror film since The Ring. More, the film's changeling child's dreams remind of the "School of Dead Children" arc from Neil Gaiman's late lamented "Sandman" comic, a connection made resonant by the fact that screenwriter Mark Bomback's next project is the cautiously-awaited adaptation of Garth Ennis's "Hellblazer" title (Constantine). What else to feel than admiration at chilling passages where the shade of the dead child, clad complete in death-day attire of favourite jacket and new sneakers, questions its clone on its identity and on the location of its parents? All that goes out the window, though, in favour of an all-too-familiar Frankensteinian "Abby Normal" brain-transplant-gone-awry intrigue that seems to have been tailor-made for above-the-title player Robert De Niro to have a few inexplicable actor's moments. What results is a complete betrayal of absolutely everything eloquent about the film's pitch–not a twist so much as a cheat of the worst kind, one from an altogether different movie at that: the revelation that the Wizard of Oz is Godzilla.

Hellboy (2004)

April 2, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Jeffrey Tambor, Karel Roden
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the comics by Mike Mignola
directed by Guillermo del Toro

Hellboyby Walter Chaw A bona fide auteur in an age of facile pretenders, Guillermo del Toro is the pulp genre’s Martin Scorsese, his films filtering devout Catholic imagery through a lurid colour palette and obsessed with insectile machineries and mentor relationships between boys and old men. Del Toro’s pictures are deeply personal explorations of faith, of redemption and resurrection–he made of Blade II a tale of the prodigal son, and now with Hellboy he’s crafted a story of an evolving passion.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

March 19, 2004Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

Eternalsunshinereduxby Walter Chaw Manny Farber wrote this about Orson Welles over fifty years ago: “Welles bequeathed to Hollywood, which had grown fat and famous on hurtling action films, a movie (Citizen Kane) that broke up into a succession of fragments, each one popping with aggressive technique and loud, biased slanting of the materials of real life.” During that same period, Farber referred to Preston Sturges as a filmmaker working eternally within “the presence of Dada and surrealism”–and it’s taken over fifty years, it seems, for the United States to produce what is at its essence the product of a marriage between Welles’s self-conscious audacity and Sturges’s common touch: Charlie Kaufman–more specifically, the Charlie Kaufman Screenplay.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

March 19, 2004Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, France, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

***/****
starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer
screenplay by James Gunn
directed by Zack Snyder

Dawnofthedeadby Walter Chaw Heretical to even suggest it, I'm sure, Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead surpasses the original in any number of ways. It gives the idea of consumerism run wild the short shrift that it deserves (and the cynicism that an intervening quarter-century demands), touching on the original's explanation of the zombies' affinity for the shopping mall and the human heroes' delight at their newfound material wealth before becoming a bracing action film that, like Marcus Nispel's reworking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the source of which didn't need updating as much as Dawn arguably did), is more firmly entrenched in the James Cameron Aliens tradition than the Seventies institution of disconcerting personal horror film. There's nothing like fat on the bone of this picture (something the original can't claim), providing a canny demonstration of how comedy and satire can work without descending into slapstick (no pies in zombie faces this time around), and of how great performances and smart direction can craft a piece that honours its origins while significantly upping the effectiveness of its themes and premise.

The Animal (2001) [Uncut Special Edition] – DVD

February 20, 2004Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D+
starring Rob Schneider, Colleen Haskell, John C. McGinley, Guy Torry
screenplay by Tom Brady & Rob Schneider
directed by Luke Greenfield

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's not much to say about The Animal that hasn't been said a million times before about a million other cheap and lazy comedies. If you're even moderately discerning, you'll be groaning at the story of yet another nerdy schlub who once again achieves magical powers and, sure enough, finally gets the girl of his dreams; you'll also be rolling your eyes at the old jokes, tired scatological references, and boring un-PC swipes that dot the narrative like bird droppings. I know that I'm groaning and rolling my eyes at the prospect of writing about them, because there's not much to be proved here that isn't blindingly obvious: that making a comedy is no excuse for taking a holiday from wit and intelligence, and that bad filmmakers are seldom as funny on screen as they seem to themselves between takes.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [Classic Double Feature] – DVD

February 16, 2004Posted in****/****, 1930s, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart, Holmes Herbert
screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by Rouben Mamoulian

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941)
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Donald Crisp
screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by Victor Fleming

by Walter Chaw Owing a tremendous debt to German Expressionism and the silent era that the cinema had only recently left behind, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a surprisingly disturbing and enduring take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark tale of the id. Opening with a point-of-view shot, something that the director referred to as a first in the American cinema, the prologue’s build to a medical amphitheatre reveals the connection between this film and Mel Brooks’s classic satire Young Frankenstein, illustrating that it’s as important a headwater of the horror genre as the Universal monster features. Mamoulian and veteran cinematographer Karl Struss (the DP on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise) themselves owe a great debt to Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, indulging in claustrophobic, expressionistic sets, long wipes, slow dissolves (in one case, extremely slow), extended floating takes, and matching shots that use statuary and illness to offset love and ecstasy. This Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fever delirium; it’s stagy, no question, exhibiting a distinct discomfort with dialogue as well, but its images, including Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde (the first stage of which resembles Conrad Veidt from Caligari), remain powerful seven decades later.

The Outer Limits: The Original Series – The Entire Second Season (1964-1965) – DVD

February 3, 2004Posted in****/****, 1960s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Outerlimitstuesdayby Walter Chaw After a tumultuous first season plagued by short-sighted censors, tight budgets, and ever-diminishing production schedules, embattled producer Leslie Stevens was replaced by “nuts and bolts” man Ben Brady while Joseph Stefano, in something of a show of solidarity (and that he had other projects to attend to), likewise stepped down to be replaced by Seeleg Lester. (DP Conrad Hall had already parted ways with the show towards the end of season one.) The benefits and pitfalls of such a traumatic upheaval are difficult to compartmentalize, but to me, the series went along for its last seventeen episodes with a pioneering spirit (something that most veterans of the production owe to Lester) similar to that of the first thirty-two. The too-brief second season run includes not only a couple of the best episodes of “The Outer Limits”, the origin of a future blockbuster lawsuit, and the canny recruitment of Harlan Ellison as sometime scribe, but also one episode that stands as arguably the best hour of television ever broadcast.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) [Special Collector’s Edition] – DVD

January 27, 2004Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Thriller

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan
screenplay by Nicholas Meyer & Denny Martin Flinn
directed by Nicholas Meyer

Trekvicapby Bill Chambers On the eve of a Klingon truce with the Federation, Spock (Leonard Nimoy), to Kirk's (William Shatner) dismay, has come out in support of said peace treaty, whose prevention would directly result in the extinction of the Klingon race. ("Let them die," Kirk, still mourning the loss of his son to the power-mad Klingons of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, barks at his Vulcan cohort.) Recruited to host an ice-breaking pre-conference dinner for Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner) and his Klingon crew aboard Enterprise-B, Kirk proves a shabby host, loading up on Romulan ale (illegal, don'tcha know) in some attempt to conceal, excuse, or liberate his prejudice. Later that evening, as Gorkon's vessel Kronos One is fired on by photon torpedoes sourced back to the Enterprise, two figures cloaked in Federation gear assassinate the chancellor; evil General Chang (Christopher Plummer, tarted up to resemble Fu Manchu*) wastes no time in pinning the coup on Kirk and Bones (DeForest Kelley), who are promptly exiled to the gulag of icy Rura Penthe.