An American Werewolf in London…Does it Hold Up?

For most fans of the werewolf subgenre of horror films, if you asked them “What’s the best werewolf movie ever made?” they would shoot back with one of two answers: “The Howling” or “An American Werewolf in London”.

Now, the latter of those two is highly regarded in werewolf movies, more so, actually than “The Howling”.  This, from what I can tell, is because the character of David in AWiL is more relatable than the protagonists of “The Howling.”

I was thinking about this the other day, as friends of mine have set up a Google + page that is devoted to werewolves, along with other fantasy creatures, and I was wondering to myself “Does An American Werewolf in London still hold up today?”

Given that the film came out in 1981 and is likely older than many of those reading this blog, I don’t think I need to worry about spoiling the film for anyone, however, in the spirit of fair play, please take a moment to view the film before you continue if you haven’t seen it yet.  I’ll wait.

Done?  Good.

So our film opens with David and Jack, best friends, who are back packing through the English country side and stopping off in a pub called the “Slaughtered Lamb” because it is the only establishment within walking distance.  Why else would you stop at a place called the Slaughtered Lamb unless it was literally the only place around?  They ask about some quasi-satanic art deco pieces in the pub and are promptly met with hostility.  Because if someone asks you about a protective sigil that wards off an actual mythical beast made flesh you should immediately treat them like an asshole and make them leave the only place they would be safe for the next twelve hours.  How dare they ask questions about stuff they know nothing about?

Well, treated like assholes, Jack and David decide to leave, despite the land lady asking the patrons to be less dickish and let them stay the night.  But no, they are kicked to the curb and told only “Stick to the roads, stay away from the moors.”

Because that’s easy when there is no physical difference between the two in the fog and dark.
Sure enough they find themselves wan

dering the dark moors in the fog and, if you read the title of the movie you went to see, you know what comes next.  Out of the night comes a monster that rips Jack apart and bites the ever-loving crap out of David.  Well not everyone in the pub is a dick because some of them come out and drop the monster with a few well-placed bullets.  I’m going to loop back around to this in a little bit because there is a BIG damn question here.

Three weeks later David wakes up and has only fuzzy memories of what happened, insisting that he was attacked by a large dog or wolf, which is true from his perspective.  Then Jack comes back, looking a little more…shredded than he used to. 

Ghost Jack explains that he’s “undead” (which…he’s not.  He’s a ghost.  Only David can see him, he can’t interact with anyone or anything…he’s a ghost) cursed to exist unless David dies because he’s carrying “the bloodline of the werewolf” what killed him.  Ghost Jack explains that if David doesn’t kill himself before the next full moon he’s going to turn into a werewolf and mindlessly kill people.  David passes this off as a hallucination…which from his perspective makes total sense.

While David’s doctor checks out “The Slaughtered Lamb” and tries to validate this “big dog” story, he’s stonewalled by the pub goers except one guy who actively tires to tell him about the werewolf and David’s horrific future, but is cut off because the notion of a transforming blood born ailment shouldn’t be general knowledge.

David puts the moves on, and succeeds in getting in with a pretty nurse who lets him crash at her place after he’s released from the hospital.  Is that a thing that happens?  Was it just the late 70’s to early 80’s where you could take home someone you knew for a handful of days?  Anyway, Ghost Jack comes back, looking deader than ever, and continues the warnings.  David brushes off the ghost and goes on with his life while Alex (said nurse) goes to work.

What comes next is probably the most famous scene of the whole damn movie.  This has been considered the benchmark of werewolf effects for the last 30+ years and has been done and re-done so many times.  David painfully transforms into a werewolf and frankly whether you watch the movie proper or not, go to YouTube and check out the transformation sequence because damn is it intense.

This results in the deaths of six people, and David waking up naked in wolf enclosure.  David is now convinced of his curse and does start to try and kill himself, but chickens out.  He’s then lured into an adult theatre (sure, he was “lured” there) by Ghost Jack who, holy cow he is decomposing fast.  Anyway, Ghost Jack and now the ghosts of his victims all try to convince him he needs to die, but nobody owns a watch and David transforms again, this time unleashing furry fury into a densely populated area and even biting the head off the detective from earlier in the film in the process.  He’s then riddled with bullets and dies after Alex briefly calms him because Beauty and the Beast is a thing.  We end the picture on a shot of David’s naked and bloodied body.

And that’s it.  No end credits scene, not stingers, nothing…just dead werewolf man.  Nobody got “bitten but survived”.  This was intended to be a standalone film, but because it was so popular and a landmark in the genre, it did get a spiritual sequel by way of “An American Werewolf in Paris” in 1997 which was just garbage.

So after 30 odd years, how does the film hold up?  Well, the transformation sequence is what almost everyone remembers from the film and, it stands to reason.  It was a really well done, visually arresting sequence.  We’d never seen anything like it before and frankly we haven’t seen anything that matches it since then, so there is a lot of nostalgia tied into the movie based entirely on this one sequence.  The film does have more than its fair share of plot holes, though.

Let’s start back at the Slaughtered Lamb” where we find out that 1) Werewolves are a thing in this universe that people know about.  2) There are apparently ways to ward them off.  3) They are no harder to kill than say a particularly large dog.  They don’t use any special bullets to kill it, just regular old ammunition.  This is established because, at first I thought they went after the first werewolf with silver rounds, but at the climax of the film police gun down David-wolf with regular ammunition.  So these folks who were living in fear of this monster for quite some time could have just busted out with their guns earlier and ended the whole cycle before David and Jack blundered into their pub.  Basically the whole start of the movie hinges on the fact that these pub goers are lazy as hell.

Let’s talk about poor old Jack on this one.  He explicitly states that he has to walk the earth until the werewolf’s bloodline is ended.  Okay, but if that bloodline is carried from the previous werewolf into David, shouldn’t David be getting visits from the left over victims of the first werewolf?  The curse, as Jack explains it, hinges on the bloodline being active.  Where are the previous ghosts?  Did they rot away?  Was Jack the one person the previous werewolf killed?  My peeve here is that the curse on Jack is actually woefully under-defined.

But those are nit-picks, and they don’t make it a good or bad movie.  As I was writing this review I wanted to actually kind of pull this movie apart.  I recalled that the final monster effects didn’t match up to the quality of the original transformation effects, or that the look of the final monster didn’t mesh with the elements we saw during said transformation.  I remembered a lot of black hair during the transformation and the final beast being mostly gray.  I also remember that there wasn’t a lot of expression in the monster’s face and that his movements looked a lot like a guy in a suit.

Then I had to remember that 1) Memory is never perfect and 2) this was 1981.  The latter allowed me to cut some slack on say the guy in the suit or the constant rage face and stone still lips, but the former really came into play because as I researched I found that there was a lot more gray hair during the end of the transformation than I remembered.  Elements of the transformation did in fact match up to the final monster and while the effects weren’t perfect, they were far better than they had any right to be.

So…does it hold up?  Yeah, as well as any 80’s era movie holds up.  Not as good as some, but better than most.  If you haven’t seen it, I’d highly recommend checking it out.  It adds some stuff to the werewolf mythos and doesn’t play strictly by old movie rules (silver bullets were strictly a movie creation, never in old lore).

Should you check out the sequel?  Absolutely not, it’s terrible and not in a so-bad-its-good way.

Thanks for reading

Why Can’t Hollywood Make a Good Fantastic Four Movie?

 

Hollywood’s approach to making films based on the Fantastic Four have come across with the same skill, poise, savvy, and success as a toddler with a chain saw.  Even when they go the thing really going, only disaster followed.  But why?  What about this classic comic book series has made it so hard to translate onto the big screen successfully?

For the approximately six of you reading that have no idea about the sordid film history of the Fantastic Four, it may shock you to learn that there are actually four adaptations of the comic.  The first came by way of B movie legend Roger Corman in 1994 when Constantin Films were desperately trying to hold onto the film rights to the comic book.  The film was not great to say the least, and it was never intended to be released, only serve as a place holder to show they were doing something with the film rights lest they lose them.  They later gave the rights back to Marvel and they were then sold to Fox.  Just sit on that for just a second…the first time a film was made about the Fantastic Four was for a project that was never meant to be seen by human eyes. 

This led to Fox’s adaptation of the comic book in 2005, which actually did a decent job as far as an origin story.  It hit all the right beats you need for an origin, but lingered a bit too much on the “origin” part, took too long to get to the point of the film, and featured a lack luster villain.  But the movie made enough for a sequel two years later, one that featured the Silver Surfer and a planet eating cloud.  If that sounds like it should be exciting, it’s because it should and they somehow managed to stomp the excitement out of it.

This brought on a “gritty reboot” of the franchise.  This is where the “toddler with a chainsaw” analogy really comes into play because the movie feels like said toddler hacked it apart and tried to put it back together with modeling clay.  While in the 2005-2007 films the characters seemed to like each other begrudgingly, the 2015 reboot made you wonder why they would ever be in the same room with each other.  “Fan4stic”, the title alone should have been our first clue about the disjointed mess audiences were about to endure, and an entire article alone could be made about how bad it was.  In fact, there are plenty of articles, movie review, blogs and vlogs that cover it so we’ll just leave it as “it was really really bad” and move forward.

                But why?  Why has this failed four times in a row?  It has been strongly suggested that the source material was just bad, but if the source material was really bad, why have they been a grounding force in Marvel Comics since 1961, only losing their title in 2015 due to low sales.  54 years does not indicate bad source material.  Even still the characters live on in other books.

No, the problem is that Hollywood, and specifically Fox Studios, do not know how to tell the Fantastic Four’s story.  There is no question that Pixar/Disney’s Incredibles is an excellent Fantastic Four film, I said it when I first saw the movie, and people are still saying it today.  That’s because The Incredibles remembered something that Fox forgot, that the characters ultimately need to love each other.  Even when they are getting on each other’s nerves, they need to love each other.  There is a reason they are called the “First Family of Comics”, because they are a family that cares for and looks out for each other.  Secondly, the movies spend to long trying to tell you where the Fantastic Four come from and not enough time telling you what they do.  These characters challenge the unknown by means of cerebral sci-fi high adventure.  Think “Dr. Who” meets “The Incredibles”.  That’s the kind of story that needs to be told to get the comics to fully come alive on the big screen.  Not the tangled mess that is bogged down in power swapping, Jessica Alba’s underwear, or scowling at the camera.  This is a comic book series that features shape shifting aliens, a tyrannical dictator who uses magic mixed with science, a giant purple man that eats planets, interdimensional travel,…even Moleman could be made into an interesting film.  The problem with the source material isn’t a lack of information, there is actually too much to squeeze into a single film.

Movies feel the need to over emphasis a character’s back story.  You get it every time you hear “With great power comes great responsibility…”, “I’m alone in the universe…”, “It’s my fault, it’s my responsibility…” or “Martha!”  With that obsessive need to tell us where the character came from, it cuts out time to tell the story itself.  What could be told in a brief flashback or a side conversation ends up taking the first thirty to forty minutes of the film, and another 15 minutes in the sequel.  The story of the Fantastic Four is not about four people getting hit with cosmic radiation and getting powers from it.  It’s about a family with superpowers going on adventures and making a difference in the world.

So, from the outside looking in, how do we fix this?  How can we get the Fantastic Four back on track?  Step 1: Give the rights back to Marvel Studios.  You’ve had your chance Fox, you broke your toys, go play with the X-Men.  Step 2: Stop trying to make movies about them.  Trying to squeeze a Fantastic Four adventure into a 90 minute movie is like trying to fit 30 pounds of anything into a 20 pound bag, or me trying to fit into my pants from high school again.  At best, it’s going to be awkward and uncomfortable, at worst a button is going to fly off and kill someone.  Step 3: Make a TV series.  Recently we saw Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist grace Netflix and at least three of those shows were pretty damn good.  That shows Marvel knows how to make a TV show.  Agents of Shield is still going strong, and the Inhumans, Defenders, and the Punisher are on the horizon ready to make an impact.  Fantastic Four would be an excellent addition to this small screen sub universe of the Marvel Cinematic juggernaut, by bridging the more family friendly fare of the movies with some of the darker elements the television shows offer up.  Further, it doesn’t matter if the stories intersect with the overarching cinematic universe because they can just hop into another dimension and piddle around there.  Or use them to fill in blanks in the movies.

The ultimate problem with all of this, however, lies in the company’s belief in the property.  The Fantastic Four will return…someday, and when they do we can pray that someone competent is running that ship.

Season 1 Round Up: Preacher

     

On the heels of the, apparently, very popular television series “Lucifer” comes the hard hitting small screen adaption of a very adult oriented comic book about a tough but spiritually lost country preacher Jessie Custer.  Now I’m not particularly inclined to the “binge watching” epidemic that is apparently sweeping across our planet, but this series’ first season I did check out in, what we shall call “rapid succession”.  Does that mean I liked it?  Well, yes and no.

While “Preacher” is based on the comic book series by Garth Ennis, with art by Steve Dillon I can at best say that it is loosely based on the source material.  It pulls from the material the basic characters, such as Jessie, Tulip, Cassidy, and Arseface, but sets out to tell its own story of manhandled redemption.  Probably the most important aspect of any series is getting characters that you can connect with, relate to in your own way.  Everyone going into this series is probably going to have their favorite characters, but that doesn’t mean that these characters are “good people”.  In fact, a big part of the series is peeling back layers and finding out that characters you thought were one way end up being very different from preconceived notions.

For instance, lets briefly examine Emily Woodrow, a single mother of three children, who is a waitress, the church organist and church book keeper and basically Jessie’s keel, keeping him in line (mostly) with his pastoral duties.  On the surface she is apparently the best person in a town full of pretty nasty people.  Then you find out that she’s stringing along the town’s milquetoast mayor so that he’ll baby sit for her and satisfy her sexual needs while making sure he understands that they are, at best “friends with benefits”.  Then she sends him to his death by mauling from a vampire.  Bear in mind, said mayor isn’t a great person, but still, for the second highest ranking person in the local church, this seems kind of harsh.

Flip to the other side of the coin with one Odin Quincannon who is without a doubt one of the worst possible specimen of humanity to date.  He is the highest ranking person in the town, and he rules the roost with childish fury.  He is a straight up psychopathic lunatic with no redeeming qualities.  Except, as the season unfolds you discover that his entire family was killed in a freak accident while vacationing in Europe.  His…entire…family.  The final shot we have of him in the season is of him cradling a mock-up of his daughter he made out of meat.  This man is broken on a deep psychological level and if you imagine losing your past and your future in one quick moment, you can kind of understand why this guy came unspooled. 

A large portion of this season deals with this kind of dynamic, where people you thought weren’t that bad end up being kind of horrible, and the horrible people end up not being as bad as you thought.  The series tries, sometimes clumsily, to balance the character dynamic within itself, but again, that may be the point of the writers, that within people in general, this balance is clumsy at best.

Dominic Cooper headlines the series as Jessie Custer, the wayward titular preacher who has been given the power of “Genesis”, an ability to inflict his will on others with his voice.  I was pleased to see how Dominic handled this because this could easily be something the studio placed on the effects department alone, but Cooper embellishes the moments where Jessie uses his power with posturing and facial expressions that sell that he’s letting something else take over.  When he really sells it is when it seems like Jessie is abusing the power, but his expressions leave the viewer to wonder if Jessie is using Genesis, or if Genesis is using Jessie.

Jessie is clearly the hub of the series.  Everything revolves around him, but if Jessie is the hub, then the forces that hold it together are Joseph Gilgun as Cassidy, Ruth Negga as Tulip, and Ian Colletti as Eugene.  The character of Tulip in the first two thirds of the series starts to really grate on the viewer, at least for me, and she just comes across as a stubborn irritant.  This is later paid off on by explaining her sordid backstory with Jessie and how they came to be at odds.  I don’t necessarily feel this excuses her behavior, but it certainly informs it.

Eugene, which fans of the comics will know as “Arseface” due to an unfortunate encounter with a shotgun, is actually the nicest guy in town, and offers the most candid understanding of the faults of others.  This is due to him being the town’s outcast, treated as a monster for something he supposedly did (check out season 2 for details).  Eugene is too good for this town and it’s simple as that.  While the town of Annville has turned normal people into monsters, this monstrous looking young man proves to be the one good thing there.  Which, I have a theory, is why the people of this little slice of purgatory really don’t like him.  He’s better than they are.  He is a more decent person than they are, and that bothers them.

Then you have my, hands down, favorite character Cassidy, the hard drinking, hedonistic, drug abusing, self-deprecating vampire.  Again this is a monstrous character that partakes of horrible things but ends up being one of the most decent people in the whole town.  He admits that he’s not the best person, that he’s done terrible things, and unlike a lot of the other characters who straddle this good/bad line (cough-tulip-cough) he actually regrets some of the bad things he’s done.  Even as a blood guzzling creature of rage and murder, he’s not that bad of a guy.  And that’s not saying “Well compared to this guy or that lady, he’s not THAT bad.”  He helps out Jessie in a bar fight without being asked to step in, he protects Jessie when he’s incapacitated, and he’s constantly trying to get Jessie to be the better man. Cassidy is a good guy who does bad things.

When you strip away all the supernatural elements from the story of Preacher, you really are left with an analysis of the choices of complex people and the elements that fashion their decisions.  Everyone ultimately needs something.  Cassidy needs people to understand and accept him.  Eugene needs people to forgive him, but for it to be on their own terms.  Tulip needs closure so she can begin healing.  Jessie needs direction a purpose in his life.  That, my friends, is a congregation of real people.

So did I like it?  Well, I liked elements of it.  If you are looking to it for an insight into the minds or the actions, or spiritually of church going members of society, you will find it very pessimistic, and as a cradle Christian and self-described prodigal son, that kind of hurts my feelings.  Not so much that it’s wrong, because while sometimes way over the top, it’s not 100% wrong, but it’s pessimistic.  Everything is portrayed in such a way that you wonder if its ever going to be set right, so gritty and grimy that it obscures any chance of hope.  A major part of the problem is the town’s preacher, as he’s actually really bad at his job for the first half of the season.  If you want to get a glimpse of a small town church, do not look here.  This is what a church looks like when it has no leader.  A flock with no shepherd, no one to guide it or protect it, will drive itself into hell while singing hymns.  Obviously I liked some of the characters, but will those characters be strong enough or well-rounded enough to get me to come back, to spend my limited personal time to watch the show again?

We’ll see.  Thanks for reading.

Wonder Woman: Is this a New Era?

So over this past weekend I took my wife to see “Wonder Woman”.  In theatres!  I know that shouldn’t sound as exciting as it does, but when you have a fixed income and 4 lovely children, you tend to Netflix or Red Box a lot of your movie viewing.  Which, if you noticed, is why a LOT of my movie reviews happen after the films have left theatres and sat on the shelf for a bit; well there’s that and the fact that it gives me a little more freedom to talk about endings.

So what about “Wonder Woman”?  First let me take you back in time to 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”.  Without diving too much into that film we can all agree that movie had its flaws.  One thing that was almost unanimously agreed upon as done very well was the introduction of Wonder Woman.  Her role was small but pivotal and her action sequences got audiences almost out of their seats.  With that in mind, that powerful response fueling the development of the character, it would seem that a solo adventure for the Amazon princess would be a no-brainer for Warner Brothers.

But Diana Prince’s journey to the big screen is nothing if not a difficult one.  For the longest time “authorities” on box office touted that a movie based on a female superhero lead would not make money.  The problem was that, they weren’t exactly wrong.

Here is a brief chart of the most notable superhero films with female leads since 1984.  Why did I start at 1984, you ask; because that’s the first instance of a major studio producing a female superhero movie  It all starts with Supergirl  The graph below shows in blue the budget for the films, in millions of dollars, and the red shows the box off returns of those films, again in millions of dollars.  The odds were not in Wonder Woman’s favor.

Now with all this against her, how did we get Wonder Woman onto the big screen?  To answer that we need to first look at another major comic book movie studio: Marvel.  With the advent of the Avengers, and Black Widow’s major role in the film, fans started clamoring for her to get her own solo adventure, much like literally everyone else on the Avengers.  Notice that I only selected 6 movies for my graph?  That’s because those movies are pulled from the pages of established comic book studios, which have a fan base the film studios could appeal to and work up from.  And most of them tanked.  The only one to pull up any money was Elektra and it was savaged by the critics, which torpedoed it from ever getting a sequel.  So where were the fans?  Studios believed that, based on these numbers fans were not going to come out to see these movies.  So what changed?

Again, it all starts with Supergirl.  In 2015 CBS and Warner Brothers brought the girl of steel to life on the small screen.  This was a testing ground for how popular a production centered on a female superhero could be, and it worked.  Through careful crafting of a quality product, Supergirl soared through the ratings.  For its second season it moved to the CW where it joined their television superhero universe and branched out into stronger, darker stories.  Suddenly studios had numbers in droves about how fans wanted to see superhero productions featuring strong female leads.  That combined with the strong positive response Wonder Woman got from “Batman v Superman” and suddenly the studios had something they could bank on.  Now it’s fair to say that the seeds of Wonder Woman were planted all the way back in “Batman v Superman” which is great but you know that they needed those Supergirl numbers to pull the trigger on it.

In the summer of 2017 Wonder Woman rocketed onto the big screen and, as you can see the fans responded.  With a budget of $149 million Wonder Woman dominated the summer block buster scene, raking in $435.2 MILLION after being in theatres for only two weeks.  $103 million of that came on its opening weekend alone.  The second weekend (when I got to see it) it dominated the box office easily brushing aside Tom Cruise’s “The Mummy” for top spot.  To put that in perspective, not only did a superhero movie featuring a female lead earn the triple digits for millions on its opening weekend, it took out Tom “Summer Block Buster” Cruise on its second weekend in theatres. 

But I know what you’re thinking; “Michael, talk about the damn movie already!”  Okay, no.

Gal Gadot was amazing in the film.  She was powerful, she was vulnerable, she was funny, and she was deadly as hell.  She was Wonder Woman.  Chris Pine as Steven Trevor was great.  His timing was on point, and his chemistry with Gadot was excellent.  The supporting cast was terrific, and I would love an opportunity to see them together again.  Saïd Taghmaoui to me was a particularly excellent addition.

There is an implied sex scene in the film, and the final fight left a lot of questions for how the action went down in “Batman v Superman”, but the final product was fantastic.  Not only did it give us a broader picture of this amazing character, it also helped fill in some blanks for why she does certain things in Dawn of Justice.  Like “Why was she so willing to work with Bruce Wayne at the end?” and “When she looks at Lois mourning Superman’s death, why does she look to the sky?”

I am actively not telling you about the plot because I think you should go see this for yourself.  It is worth it.

 

Thanks for reading.

"There's Nothing Funny About a Clown in the Moonlight..." A Look a Pennywise

Let’s talk about it.  I mean…”It”.  “It” was a best-selling novel by horror guru Stephen King which hit the shelves in 1986 and was spun into a very well-known miniseries in 1990 on ABC, and this is where the concept of “It” became ingrained in the consciousness of American horror fans.  I remember watching "It" air back in 1990 and it quickly became a Halloween staple for the station for years to come.  The miniseries explored the interpersonal relationships amongst preteens as they dealt with a supernatural nightmare that was threatening their hometown.  The story is actually split into two parts, with one half told as flashback to the time when the main characters were children fighting off the monster, and into their adult lives as the monster comes back once again to threaten them.

Already I can tell my grammar checking software is going to hate this piece.

I’m explaining all this to you because in 2017 we are due to get a remake of “It”.  This of course will include a brand new version of the central character of the film, Pennywise the Dancing Clown.  Even the most casual horror fans will recognize this infamous nightmare, originally brought to life by Tim Curry for the miniseries, and the knee jerk reaction will be that there is no way anyone could compare to Curry’s performance. 

 

 

This isn’t without precedence because Curry has always been an A list performer, a living legend in cult classics, and he’s going to naturally be very difficult to top.  What compounds the problem is that most people saw “It” originally when they were very young.  The show came out 26 years ago and the people who grew up watching Curry’s Pennywise will have that performance firmly implanted in their brain boarded up with only the most impenetrable of nostalgic feelings.

Now, as of this writing I have not found an actual trailer for the upcoming 2017 version.  I’ve only seen the promotional material circulated by Entertainment Weekly of Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise.

Judge for yourself

 

Both the original television series and the book state that It has been terrorizing the citizens of Derry, Maine for generations, arriving on earth in that spot prior to colonists coming over from Europe.  Somewhere along the way, It decided that its prey of choice would be children and somewhere along its time on earth adopted the form of Pennywise the Clown, among numerous other disguises.  Now I did some digging to see if there was some historical significance to the form of the clown, even reaching out to my best friend and Stephen King expert, William Dilbeck.  Is there some in-story historical significance to the clown?

“No, not really, but the clown is memorable.  Mike Hanlon never left Derry, and he collects stories from the old people in town.  In one of these stories, this old man talks about how this gang gets shot to death in the middle of town, and he remembers seeing this clown floating just outside a window, taking pot shots at the gang with a rifle.”

He went on to point out “The clown might represent It’s sinister intent, and well, it never hurts to have an iconic look.  It mostly hunts children, though, and I believe that it uses this as his camouflage.”

Thanks Will.

So it seems Stephen King may have had the famous quote from Lon Chaney in mind when writing Pennywise "There's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight."

That kind of brings us back around to the design of Pennywise for both the television series and the film.  I’ll do a side by side.

 

Designers discussed that the look of the costume is very much inspired by the renaissance period, indicating that It’s knowledge of human events extends far outside Derry, Maine even if It can’t influence those events.  One would think that if It could extend its influential reach beyond the confines of Derry, It would be far more powerful.

The overall weathered, otherworldly appearance of the 2017 Pennywise costume also makes it stand out apart from characters like Jared Leto’s and Heath Ledger’s respective Jokers, as well as the multitude of clowns featured in Rob Zombie’s horror films.  No, this Pennywise definitely stands out, even against his 1990’s counterpart.

Curry’s rendition of the character was far more in keeping with modern interpretations of clowns, with a baggy, brightly colored full body suit, white fluffy ruffles, and outwardly pleasant demeanor, which would later give way to It’s predatory nature.  The 2017 version on the other hand immediately comes across as threatening and unsettling and I can’t imagine this being an effective lure for anyone.  Even people without a crippling fear of clowns would be sent screaming into the hills if they saw that coming at them.

But on the flip side, Tim Curry’s Pennywise can be equally unsettling not strictly by how he looks but more about where you see him.  You see him in the drainage gutters, in the woods, in boiler rooms, outside windows, in places that you aren't supposed to see clowns.  If you saw a clown at a circus or a birthday party, that’s one thing.  You’re technically supposed to see clowns there.  If you see a clown standing across the street, no matter how nice he looks, he’s not supposed to be there and that makes him automatically threatening,  more so if he starts beckoning you over.

So does the 2017 version work?  Well that greatly depends on what they do with him.  Are there going to be scenes where he looks more cleaned up, less threatening, or is he always going to look like he hitchhiked across state lines?  The reason I ask is because if there is a dichotomy in his look, clean giving way to sinister, then that allows a lot more freedom in how effective he can be as a horror icon.  If he’s always going to look like that, then he’s going to lose his effectiveness very quickly.

Either way “It” is going to hit theatres in September of 2017 so let’s hope it lives up to the legacy set down by the original.

Thank you for reading and thank you Will for your input in today’s post.  Please check out his book series, and have a great day.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Off-Dead-Lakehaven-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00JLPG8HE#nav-subnav

Have We Seen Affleck's Batman Before?

Over the Christmas holiday I was lucky enough to have some old friends over to my house.  Inevitably we delved into discussions about comic book based movies.  Now whether you love it or hate it, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” did in fact happen and it was a game changer.

One of the things it did was offer us introductions to characters that did not cover their origins stories.  Obviously Henry Cavill’s Superman got his introduction in the previous film “Man of Steel”, however we meet both Batman and Wonder Woman without the usual tacked on exposition about how they got their superhero starts.  During the opening sequence we are treated to a flash back of Batman’s basic origins, the death of his parents, but that wasn’t so much to explain his origin, but rather set up a character arch later in the film.  What it left out was the years of training he did to become the Dark Knight.  For that matter, the film left out the greater majority of his superhero/vigilante career.  Dialog in the film indicates that this is twenty years after Bruce dawned the iconic cape and cowl.  Twenty years.  That’s a heck of a place to jump off from.

Admittedly we have more than enough film, and a television series, to cover Batman’s formative years, but as we were discussing the topic we started speculating that maybe we’d seen this version of Batman before.  Maybe, just maybe, we did get to see his origins.

My friend Will (see the shameless plug below) postulated that this was the very same Batman we were introduced to in 1989’s “Batman”.  He cited that the psychologies, methodologies, and in some cases the weapons he used were very similar.  The Michael Keaton Batman, for instance, did not shy away from killing henchmen, and certainly didn’t shed any tears over the death of supervillains.  For that matter, his vehicles are dripping with machine guns, another strong similarity between the two.

But there is a major problem, and that is how old Bruce Wayne looks in the film.  Granted they did try to “age up” Ben Affleck, but he still looks very much the 44 years old he actually is.  If anything they made him a believable 44 years old.  That would have made him 17 during the events of 1989’s “Batman”.  Michael Keaton, while a great actor, does not look 17.

A second hiccup is how the public perceives Bruce Wayne.  In the Burton Era films, “Batman” and “Batman Returns” Bruce is not a public figure.  In the first film Alexander Knox, a seasoned reporter who apparently has lived most of his life in Gotham doesn’t recognize him at his own fund raiser, in his own mansion.  The “file” on Bruce Wayne at the Gotham Gazette, apparently the premier newspaper for the city, is barely a few pages deep.  There isn’t any indication that this has changed much by the time “Batman Returns” rolls around.  He’s still a mover and shaker in Gotham, but nobody is surprised when he doesn’t show up for major events.

The third and final nail in the coffin is that the first film firmly roots itself in 1989.  I'll be honest, I wanted this theory to be true, I really did, but I kept coming back to the Joker blasting the musical stylings of Prince through the museum as he and his henchmen destroy priceless pieces of art.  Again, that would make Ben/Bruce 17 during the events of the film.

However I did notice something very important, and that is that the follow up films “Batman Forever” and “Batman and Robin” do a complete tonal shift.  They are almost the exact opposite, thematically speaking, than those of the two previous films, almost as if they took place in a separate universe.

I’d long held that had it not been for the performances of Pat Hingle’s Commissioner Gordon and Michael Gough’s Alfred, there would be nothing to connect the series at all.  But even there, we can see a deviation.  In “Batman” and “Batman Returns” Commissioner Gordon is a competent policeman.  He knows what he’s doing and is good at his job.  Suddenly in “Batman Forever” he’s more bumbling, less sure of himself, and this gets worse in “Batman and Robin”.  Again, almost like it’s not the same character.

My theory is that “Batman Forever” and “Batman and Robin” take place in a universe apart from the Tim Burton films.  Call it the Schumacher universe, and the Schumacher universe began approximately twenty years ago prior to the events of “Batman v Superman”.

This places Ben/Bruce being in his early twenties when he becomes Batman, which is far more reasonable.  Further, the Schumacher universe Bruce attends public functions and is well known to the populace of Gotham, just like our current Bruce Wayne.  Now let’s look at some facts surrounding this universe:

Batman in “B v S” and “Suicide Squad” has knowledge, if not direct interaction with meta-humans like Killer Croc.  This was established in “Batman and Robin” where the first proper meta-humans, people with actual powers, first appear in the form of Poison Ivy, Bane, and to an extent Mr. Freeze.

More importantly there is a Robin established by both sets of films.  Chris O’Donnell plays Robin in both “Batman Forever” and “Batman and Robin”, and we see a heavily, if not fatally damaged Robin suit in a glass case in the Batcave in “B v S”. 

 

The suits look remarkably similar, as if one is the more advanced version of the other.  But this isn’t Chris O’Donnell’s Robin.

 

This is.  By the time “Batman and Robin” rolls around we see Dick moving closer to his Nightwing identity, adopting a costume more closely suited to that role.  That leaves his old costume open for a new Robin to take, a new Robin like…Jason Todd.

We’re never told in “B v S” which Robin wore that damaged suit, but we are pretty clearly told that it was damaged by the Joker himself.  I mean, look at it.  However if we follow that this is the Schumacher version of Batman then it’s probably not Dick’s suit, as he wasn’t last seen wearing anything like that.

But that brings up another good question: Who is the Joker in “Suicide Squad”?  If we follow that this is the Schumacher universe, and that Tim Burton’s films took place along a different timeline, then it’s safe to assume that this universe just has a different Joker.  One thing that was pretty good about Schumacher’s films is that, with the exception of Bane, his origin stories for his villains were pretty comic book accurate.  Like, scarily accurate.  He had Two Face actually scarred during a trial with acid, Riddler being an insane lunatic with an OCD, Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze the victims of accidents…all ripped from the pages of the comics.  So for this universe to have a Joker changed by a vat of chemicals, as alluded to in “Suicide Squad” it makes perfect sense.

There are a few hiccups in this theory.  For one there is the ages and performance styles of Alfred and Commissioner Gordon.  Played beautifully by Jeremy Irons, Alfred is very young compared to his Schumacher Universe counterpart, and J.K. Simmons who is set to take over the Gordon role in the upcoming Justice League film couldn’t play Gordon as incompetent if he tried, and he shouldn’t because it would deviate too far from the theme of the film.  But these are side characters and can afford to be reinterpreted from film to film to film.

The real hiccup is one single line from “Batman and Robin.”

 

You thought I was going to say “bat credit card” didn’t you.  Admit it, you did.  That’s fine.  I could imagine 23 year old Ben Affleck Batman whipping out a Bat Credit Card.  It works.

No, this line comes after a dust up between the titular characters of the film and Batman is lamenting for his solo days.  It’s a problem since “Superman” would have been 14 when this line was spoken, certainly not running around in a cape and tights.

However he was probably running around.  We establish in “Man of Steel” that Clark goes on a soul searching quest, one to find his place in the world.  Its implied that he starts this journey as a grown man, after the death of John Kent, but this is Superman we are talking about.  As a teenager he could have wandered the United States as easily as the average 14 year old could walk down the block to his friend’s house.  Further, its established that he has saved people as a kid.  He wouldn’t be doing this with a side kick in tow, and he’d probably be doing his good deeds as far from Smallville as he could reasonably get to avoid people connecting him to the Kent farm.  He’s superfast, roughly the size of a man, and never sticks around for thanks when he does something good.  The legend of a “Superman” would certainly crop up and become part of modern folk lore, like Bigfoot.  “…Superman works alone.”

This could be hinted at during Lois’ conversation with the in-custody Superman.  At this point she’s already figured out who he is and what he did around the world incognito, and now she’s face to face with him with a big “s” on his chest.  It would finally click with her that he’s this modern mythical figure, and why out of the blue the word “Superman” escapes her lips.  That would be how Batman knows the name “Superman” but then reacts badly to the presence of an actual “Superman”, because it’s solidified in his jaded, 20 year crime fighting veteran that people aren’t doing good things and disappearing into the shadows, that they are so self-serving that they had to be rescued by an alien.

At least that’s my theory and like every film theory it relies on circumstantial evidence and some mental gymnastics, but that's part of the fun of film theories.  They are intended to get you thinking deeper about the films you watch, and hopefully this one does that job as well.

 

Thanks for reading.  Please check out Will's book at:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Off-Dead-Lakehaven-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00JLPG8HE#nav-subnav

 

What is Krypton Actually Made Of?

 

Ever wonder where 1978’s “Superman: The Movie” got its iconic imagery of planet Krypton?  Fans of the Christopher Reeve helmed series can see it in their heads, the white rocky surface of the planet.  This is translated directly in the film when Kal-El erects the Fortress of Solitude on Earth.  This iconic vision of the Fortress is carried over into multiple other series, including “Superman: The Animated Series”, “Justice League”, “Smallville”, and “Supergirl”.

Growing up a fan I just figured the Fortress looked that way to blend in with its arctic environment, which is probably true but then I ran across a thing about Batman, and how much it would cost to become the Dark Knight.  It listed the price of Kryptonite as $25,000.  Obviously a fictional substance, you can’t really purchase this radioactive rock from beyond the stars, however I was bored and had the internet at my disposal and started looking up shopping for kryptonite.  Then I got to thinking about the actual element krypton, and looked up how much it would  cost to purchase the very earthly substance. 

Krypton is a rare noble gas, and is colorless, tasteless, and will asphyxiate you if you try to breath it raw.  So, don’t do that.  But I also found out what it looks like in it’s solid form…

 

Yeah, exactly.  It’s a white crystal.  Know what also is a white crystal?

Yeah, all of Krypton, including their technology.  I couldn’t find anything that definitively said the production team used the element of krypton as inspiration for their design of the planet itself, but is sure seems like they were at least influence by it.

This crystalline structure was probably used so they could better translate kryptonite onto the big screen.  It makes more sense, thematically if not scientifically, to have kryptonite be a glowing green crystalline substance if the planet that it came from is made from a white crystalline substance.  The fact that krypton itself is a white crystal may have been intentional or a happy coincidence.

Either way, if you follow the logic that the planet Krypton was made from solid krypton, then you can purchase a non-radioactive piece of Superman's home world on eBay for somewhere between $10 to $40, depending on what form you are looking for.  Probably best not to try and  make it radioactive yourself, because radiation is bad.

 

Thanks for reading!