Star Trek Into Darkness is a movie about which I find it difficult to be objective. I have tremendous affection for the ’60s TV show, and so adored what director J.J. Abrams did to revitalize Captain Kirk and crew in his 2009 Star Trek movie reboot that the four-year wait for a sequel felt interminable. There are other films I’m anticipating this summer, but Into Darkness was number one with a photon torpedo in terms of my level of interest.

And I’m going to need to see it a second time to be sure how I feel about it.

There’s certainly a lot to like. The old/new cast are back, full of youthful exuberance and familial banter. From the start, they’re the fully-integrated ensemble that the original TV actors only intermittently became.

Chris Pine’s Kirk may be the center of the action, but Zachary Quinto’s Spock effortlessly carries the film’s emotional weight. The core of the ’60s series was a triumvirate with Kirk at its head, flanked by rational Spock and emotional McCoy, but I’d argue that the nuTrek dynamic places Spock in the middle, with Kirk and Zoe Saldana’s Uhura each appealing to different aspects of his human half. The affection between the three fuels Into Darkness even more than its over-complicated, conspiratorial storyline.

There are big laughs and spectacle aplenty. It looks and sounds fantastic. For the first two-thirds, it’s as good a Trek as we’ve ever seen on the big screen.

It’s the final third that left me pondering the whole, and I’m afraid that the rest of this review crosses the Neutral Zone into massive spoiler territory. So, if you don’t want to know more, go no further than the U.S.S. Enterprise spiraling out of control…

For the past couple of years, IDW has published a comic book of the continuing voyages of the nuTrek crew. Early issues were fairly straightforward retellings of ’60s episodes, with minor divergences demonstrating the rippling of the timeline caused by the arrival of future villain Nero in the 2009 film.* As the comics have progressed, the changes have become more pronounced and the stories, while still obviously inspired by specific incidents from the TV series, play out very, very differently.

And that’s what happens in Into Darkness. Except when it doesn’t.

The first rumors about the secretive sequel’s plot involved Khan, the genetically-modified ubermensch played memorably by Ricardo Montalban in the 1967 installment “Space Seed” and the 1982 film The Wrath of Khan. I immediately thought, “Oh, God, no.” Retelling past stories is fine in a monthly comic book, less so in a film franchise with chapters four years apart. Furthermore, both the 2009 movie and its predecessor, Star Trek: Nemesis, already seemed like bald attempts to replicate Khan’s revenge-driven villainy.

There was a final consideration: The Wrath of Khan is largely seen as both the dramatic and emotional high point of  the Trek films. A remake was unlikely to live up to it.

Despite attempts at misdirection and ever-wilder theories about other returning foes,** it turned out to absolutely no one’s surprise that yes, Benedict Cumberbatch’s “John Harrison” is really Khan.

And for a while it works. As with recent issues of the comic book, the storyline is more “inspired by” than “remake.” This Khan has a new backstory and motivation. I was starting to believe that they might almost do the unthinkable and make him Kirk’s stalwart ally against a common foe.

But once Khan does a heel turn and seizes control of a powerful Federation starship, we’re back to Wrath of Khan 2.0. Even some of the dialogue is cribbed from the previous film. The difference here is that it’s Kirk who performs the act of sacrifice to save the Enterprise from destruction, with Spock left to mourn outside a radiation-proof door.

Reversing the roles is sort of clever, but it’s not enough to save the scene from feeling like a lesser imitation. We know that Kirk’s not going to die, and not just because he has script immunity. We were shown the solution–the regenerative power of Khan’s blood–in the first act. The stakes just aren’t there.

Fortunately–aside from an ill-considered shout of “Khaaaaaaaaannnn!”–the rest of the movie plays out differently, with Spock and Uhura tag-teaming the villain in an exciting climax set in future San Francisco.

Perhaps now that the production team have gotten out their remake ya-yas, the next time we’ll finally go where no Star Trek film has gone before.

*While both the films and comics suggest that the timelines of old and new Trek began to diverge when Nero killed Kirk’s father, I’d argue that Nero arrived in an already-altered reality. The changes in costumes, technology and even species (the reptilian Gorn in the canonical Star Trek video game appear nothing like their classic counterparts) strike me as more than reasonably can be pinned on the “butterfly effect” created by the destruction of the U.S.S. Kelvin. (On the other hand, the inclusion of models of the Phoenix from First Contact and Jonathan Archer’s Enterprise suggest that much of this new timeline’s history played out as before.)

**The goofiest was the fan theory that John Harrison was one of the androids seen in 1967′s “I, Mudd.” I can see where they got the idea, as con man Harry Mudd’s daughter showed up in the comic book prequel; it’s her commandeered ship that Kirk pilots on the Klingon homeworld in Into Darkness. The theory was that the android’s pseudonym was a bastardization of “Harry’s son.” Urg.

Dave Sci-Fi reviews, Star Trek

Much of what I have to say about special effects master Ray Harryhausen–who died today at the age of 92–was already covered in this post from 2009, so I’ll wait here ’til you get back.

…

I can recall one time–I’m guessing that it was sometime around 1978–sitting down with a big sheet of paper on a kitchen table and meticulously drawing a mural that included at least one monster from every one of Harryhausen’s films. I thought that it was pretty good at the time. I wish that I still had it.

Growing up a fan of monster and sci-fi flicks, Harryhausen loomed large. It wasn’t just because of his talent or because of the near monopoly of his chosen profession he enjoyed throughout the ’50s and ’60s. He made quality fantasy films, and he made a lot of them. After apprenticing on 1949′s Mighty Joe Young, he worked on fourteen more, from 1953′s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms to Clash of the Titans in 1981. Twelve of them were with producer Charles H. Schneer, whose own contributions should not be underestimated. If there was a science-fiction or fantasy spectacle made during the middle of the 20th Century, odds are it either came from producer George Pal–who also started out as a stop-motion animator–or from the team of Harryhausen and Schneer.

Harryhausen wasn’t just the special effects guy for hire, he was the one dreaming up the action set-pieces around which those stories were built. Admittedly, the scenarios tended to be episodic, with dramatic scenes existing mostly to fill the time between monsters. But what monsters! The seven-headed hydra, the cyclopean centaur, the tragic Venusian Ymir, and the vicious dinosaur Gwangi were only a fraction of his large and varied menagerie.

Ray retired after Clash of the Titans, and never returned to filmmaking. I’m sure that he could tell that the days of the lone animator meticulously animating puppets by hand over a period of months would be ending, due in no small part to the incoming generation of people that he had inspired.

These days, there are vast hordes of anonymous effects artists filling out the endless credit rolls of our modern blockbusters. And this is not a knock on them, but none of them can ever be Ray Harryhausen. For a time, he wasn’t just one of a few, he was one of a kind.

Dave Movies obituaries, Ray Harryhausen

A couple of months ago, I read Playing at the World, a history of early wargaming and its evolution into Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a massive brick of a book–700+ pages in an ant-sized font–and almost too definitive. Still, if you want to truly understand from where this hobby sprung, you need to seek it out.

I came away from it with a much greater appreciation for D&D co-creator E. Gary Gygax, who–if not the sole progenitor of the role-playing game–was clearly the chief architect of the classic dungeon crawl. But what impressed me most about this account of Gygax was his work in classifying and codifying the monsters of our shared mythology.

Allow me to backtrack a bit. I’d been doing some research into creatures of legend in an effort to create a bestiary for the Dungeon World RPG. My first step was to consult my treasured copy of Mythical Monsters. Published in 1973 by Scholastic Books, I bought this cartoon guidebook in grade school and have kept it to this day.*

It drew heavily on Jorge Luis Borges’ 1957 work Book of Imaginary Beings, so I sought out that volume as well. From it, I learned two important things:

• Many mythological creatures took no definitive form. Accounts of their appearance and attributes varied wildly depending on who was telling the tale.**
• Pliny the Elder would believe pretty much anything. You could walk up to him and claim that a hippopotamus breathed poisonous gas and foraged for pearls at the ocean’s bottom, and he’d write it up for his Natural History, no questions asked.

“No! Really! You say that one look into its eyes would kill you stone dead? Yet you’re still alive and telling me this? Why, I believe every word of it!”

Returning now to E. Gary Gygax, it’s well-known that he drew on many sources in developing his extensive list of dungeon denizens: Tolkien, Conan the Barbarian, Ray Harryhausen films, comic books and dime store toys. But as Playing at the World describes, Gygax went one step further than Borges: he pinned down these mutable myths. He distinguished the cockatrice from the basilisk, the gorgon from the medusa, the goblin from the kobold. Much of what we think we know about the catoplebas, the peryton and the manticore came by way of the Monster Manual.

As a fan of all things dark and dangerous, I tip my flagon of ale to you, Gary, for your role in preserving and cataloging our heritage of horrors.

*Unfortunately, in scanning the artwork for this article, I broke the binding of my beloved 40-year-old paperback. You may now feel sorry for me.

**Reading the wild descriptions of beings widely agreed upon as purely fanciful, I was struck by how similar they were to those found in the core beliefs of accepted, mainstream religion. Which of these is the myth?

• “(It) was larger than a mountain. Its eyes shot forth flames and its mouth was so enormous that nine thousand men would fit inside..the beast had three gullets; all vomited forth inextinguishable fire.”
• “(I) saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns…the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion…”

Trick question. They both are.

Dave Games Dungeons & Dragons, monsters

I am not about to get up on my high horse about the intrinsic value of independent film. I like soulless, studio-driven, explosion-delivery systems as much as the next popcorn-muncher. But it’s fun to be swept along in the joy expressed by an indie filmmaker pursuing something he or she loves, financial compensation be damned.

Last week I was introduced to The Ghastly Love of Johnny X, one of the least commercial–and most joyful–films I’ve seen in some time.

It achieved notoriety by being the lowest-grossing film of 2012, though that’s a technicality. According to director Paul Bunnell, after winning an audience award at the Kansas International Film Festival–which is apparently something that exists–it received the prize of a one-week run at a single Kansas theater, where it made $117. Admittedly, there weren’t a lot of people at the midnight screening I attended, but surely we doubled that gross.

Johnny X is a pastiche of ’50s drive-in fare, specifically 1959′s Teenagers from Outer Space. But it’s more ambitious and entertaining than that low-budget junk, a semi-musical with song stylings ranging from surf guitar to rockabilly to Sondheim.

It concerns a gang of alien punks, led by the eponymous Johnny, who are “sentenced to Earth.”  (The Grand Inquisitor is genre veteran Kevin McCarthy, wearing a Devo hat in his final performance.) In addition to his non-comformist ways, Johnny is being punished for his theft of the powerful Resurrection Suit. Oddly enough, he still has it when he’s sent to Earth, but it’s best not to think about that.

His on-again, off-again girlfriend is Bliss, played by De Anna Joy Brooks, who steals the show with the vamp number “These Lips That Never Lie.” She grabs the suit and runs off with a soda jerk, with the Ghastly gang in pursuit.

Reggie Bannister (from the Phantasm film series) shows up as a club promoter looking to score with a concert by legendary rocker Mickey O’Flynn (Creed Batton, formerly of the band The Grass Roots) who is, unfortunately, dead. Did I mention that there’s a Resurrection Suit?

The Ghastly Love of Johnny X could’ve used a trim: at 106 minutes, it’s a good twenty minutes longer than the movies to which it pays homage. Still, the music is catchy and the whole affair is fascinatingly weird.

In a not-entirely-dissimilar vein comes The Whisperer in Darkness, the second feature film produced by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Like Johnny X, it was a long-gestating project kept alive by passion. And it too is an intentionally retro flick.

In 2005, the HPLHS released The Call of Cthulhu, their adaptation of the core work of horror author Lovecraft’s mythology regarding slumbering alien gods. In a clever conceit, they filmed it as if it had been a “lost” film produced in 1926, the year that the short story was published. As a silent movie utilizing impressionistic sets and low-fi special effects, it effectively disguised its low budget and amateur crew.

For their follow-up they went bigger.  The Whisperer in Darkness was published in 1931, so they intended to approach it as a sound film of the same era as the early Universal Studios horrors. And while Cthulhu was a brisk 47 minutes, Whisperer more than doubled that at 104.

In one sense, it’s less successful than its predecessor: as a 1931 pastiche, it fails. Keep in mind that ’31 was the year that the Bela Lugosi Dracula hit theaters. Dracula, for all its cultural influence, is crude and stagy, with sparse musical accompaniment provided by a couple of classical music pieces, notably “Swan Lake.” Whisperer appears considerably more polished, and features a full orchestral score of the type that wouldn’t be introduced until two years later when the original King Kong debuted.

Unlike the intentionally-jerky stop-motion animation employed for Cthulhu, the filmmakers this time opted for CGI. It’s an understandable decision, as the monsters are on-screen quite a bit and would’ve taken months to film by traditional methods. Yet, despite an attempt to “dumb down” the effects to make them appear more like stop-motion, they’re simply much smoother than would’ve been possible two years before (or really, twenty years after) Kong.

Most damning of all, it’s in widescreen. While that format existed in the early ’30s, it didn’t come into common usage until 1953, when it was seen as a way of bringing television viewers back to the theaters.

Aside from the opening titles, the entire film looks much more like something that would’ve emerged from the sci-fi boom of the ’50s. And honestly, that’s okay. The HPLHS might not have achieved their stated goal, but they made something that’s as good as some of the better genre flicks of the mid-20th Century.

Matt Foyer is appealing as the central character Albert Wilmarth, who travels to rural Vermont to investigate a farmer who believes that he has been beset by buzzing aliens emanating from a nearby mountain lair. The stories of the Mi-Go are just folklore, right? Right?

Whisperer incurs the potential wrath of Lovecraftians by extending the film past the end of the short story. The original tale concludes with a twist that would normally ring down the curtain on Act Two. Instead, there’s an action-packed third act which sees Wilmarth infiltrate the Mi-Go caves and attempt to escape their wrath in an old plane. Ultimately, it goes to a place no less bleak than Lovecraft’s own writings.

The only real downside to it is a mustache-twirling human villain who wears a cultist get-up that charitably can be called “unfortunate.”

Still, grouses about the authenticity of its alleged time period aside, it’s still a fine film straddling the line between fan effort and something more professional. I hope that the HPLHS will tackle The Shadow Over Innsmouth next!

Dave Movies H.P. Lovecraft, reviews, The Ghastly Love of Johnny X, The Whisperer in Darkness

It occurred to me that I’d built up a backlog of half-formed blog posts. Not half-written, mind you. In most cases, they hadn’t proceeded much further than “Hey! This would be a good idea for a post!” Maybe a bit of research and scanning was involved. As the weeks passed and the original inspirations for these still-born musings grew ever distant, I found myself thinking “Is it worth going back at this point? Am I feeling it anymore?”

Then I thought, “Fuck it, you self-absorbed fuck.” So, look forward to some of these wonderful bursts of insight, coming soon to an RSS feed near you.

But first, an update on that whole Bevheads thing from a few weeks ago. A reader pointed out that some of my old web pages had been archived on the Wayback Machine. Here’s my original homepage, circa 1997. Here’s the Bevheads site as the crawlers found it in 1999. (Some of the photos are missing, but the text is still there.)

Then last week I heard back from the blogger who wrote that lovely tribute to Bevheads. She went as far as to write a follow-up post!

Meanwhile, the real Gates McFadden continues to post her own action figure photos to her Tumblr feed. Tiny Bev* has been on a European holiday for the past couple of weeks, but the entry that really amused me was this nightmare sequence featuring various Beverly Crusher merchandise, some of which I used to own.**

*McFadden refers to her plastic avatar as “1/8 Gates,” which only makes sense if the actress is 3 foot, 4 inches high. 

**I sold off the collector’s plate, but I still have the mug.

Dave Website Beverly Crusher, Bevheads, blogging about blogging, Gates McFadden

Laid low today with the head cold that’s been going around, I was able to watch the final two episodes of Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated live. This last week has seen the show carry through with its crazy-as-a-soup-sandwich take on the venerable kids’ franchise.

Remember last week, when we learned that Scooby-Doo was descended from interdimensional aliens? And he visited the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks? Well, this week’s run kicked off with the entire Scooby gang venturing into that same sinister Red Room to meet up with the dancing dwarf, played once again by Peaks‘ Michael J. Anderson.

Oh, and later this week, this happened…

Yes, that’s Scooby-Doo blazing away with arm-mounted gatling guns. And check out the weaponized Mystery Machine.

The whole thing wrapped up in apocalyptic fashion, with a tentacled, Lovecraftian entity collapsing the town of Crystal Cove and eating…well, pretty much the entire supporting cast. If all of this seems rather dark for a show about a mystery-solving Great Dane, that was rather the point. The metaplot of the series was that the entire town–including and especially the various “four investigators and a talking animal” teams throughout the centuries–was tainted by this ancient evil.

It occurred to me about midway through this week that by turning the Mystery Incorporated kids into the latest iteration of an archetypal monster-hunting team, the writers were treading close to The Cabin in the Woods. I began to wonder which of them was The Virgin. (My conclusion: Scooby.)

While the ultimate ending leaned heavily on the reset button–which, come on, it had to once the whole community was fed to a titanic octopus-parakeet–it was a satisfying wrap-up that set those meddling kids back to the beginning and firmly onto the path they’ve traveled since 1969.

Dave TV Scooby-Doo, The Cabin in the Woods, Twin Peaks

We all pay tribute to the fallen in our own ways. My way to honor the memory of Roger Ebert is to offer you this opportunity to watch Infra-Man, the only film that he retroactively rewarded an an additional half-star.

The first segment will play in the window above, but here’s the entire thing.

Dave Movies Infra-Man, Roger Ebert

My Facebook news feed was in overdrive yesterday with the passing of film critic Roger Ebert. An Urbana native, he maintained close ties to the community and sponsored an annual film festival that became the biggest event* in our twin cities.

I had the opportunity to meet Roger in person a couple of times, most recently in 2000 when we trekked up to Chicago to record an interview with him for the movie review show that I used to produce.

By that time Ebert had spent many hours in front of television cameras, and was, of course, entirely professional. As someone who grew up watching the original Sneak Previews on WTTW-TV, I found it impossible not to be awed.

A year or two after this interview, I began to be puzzled and annoyed by Ebert’s reviews. He would fixate on picayunish flaws.** He would serve as an outlier on films as widely-praised as the 2009 Star Trek reboot and as thoroughly panned as Nicolas Cage’s Knowing. And then there was his stubbornly ignorant stance on the question of whether video games could be considered art.

Of course, the reason that his opinions perturbed me far more than those of, say, Richard Roeper was the recognition that he was our preeminent film critic–arguably our preeminent critic, period. What he said mattered, even if I thought it was dead wrong.

And few people loved movies more, or did more to promote the appreciation of film, than did Roger Ebert. He might have hated, hated, hated certain films, but that burning rage was borne out of his beliefs that movies could and should be more. He will be missed.

Another great who passed on yesterday was a legend of the Golden and Silver Ages of comic books, penciller Carmine Infantino. His first story for DC Comics in 1947 introduced the Black Canary, a villainess who eventually became one of the industry’s best-known superheroines.

But it was his work on the Silver Age version of The Flash that made his reputation. Infantino was superb at selling the incredible velocity of the crimebuster, depicting him as a series of red-and-yellow after-images.

Later he was the regular artist of Marvel’s Star Wars comics, drawing most every issue during the years between the original film and the release of The Empire Strikes Back.

Infantino’s death is the severing of one of the few remaining ties to comics’ early days.

*The next Ebertfest is less than two weeks from now. No one has said whether they will continue beyond 2013, but I suspect that, given Roger’s failing health, contingency plans must have been considered.

**Really, there were plenty of good reasons to dislike The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but Ebert’s criticism was mostly about its inaccurate depiction of Venice. In a movie in which Mr. Hyde and Captain Nemo fight Professor Moriarty.

Dave General Carmine Infantino, obituaries, Roger Ebert, The Flash

I swear that the programmers at Cartoon Network suffer from ADHD. Shows will disappear in mid-run, pop-up five months later at a different time and day, then inexplicably vanish again with several episodes still unaired. It’s frustrating, and doubly so if the series in question has an on-going story arc.

I’ve written before about Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated, which earlier this week reemerged from a forgotten closet at Cartoon Network headquarters to finish out its long-neglected run in a weekday afternoon burn-off slot. It should wrap up next week, unless the head of programming spots a shiny object.

Perhaps the very qualities that made Mystery Inc. such a compelling series for older fans of the characters are what kept it bouncing around the schedule. It broke from the standard Scooby formula in favor of a two-season, 52-episode long storyline.* It romantically involved Velma and Shaggy, had Daphne (and later Velma) temporarily break from the gang, and revealed that Fred’s adoptive father was a villain who’d blackmailed his birth parents (who were part of a previous Mystery Incorporated team) into giving him up.

Even more remarkably, it introduced elements of real danger. A couple of supporting characters have been killed (off-screen, but still) by the sinister machinations of Professor Pericles, the talking parrot who was the real brains behind the earlier incarnation of Mystery Inc.

Okay, I realize that I have just typed the phrase “the sinister machinations of Professor Pericles, the talking parrot.” This ain’t exactly House of Cards. Yet, the notion that something going out under the Scooby-Doo banner has a murderous bird in it is strange and wonderful.

And then, yesterday, this happened.

Scooby-Doo visited the Red Room (aka the Black Lodge) from Twin Peaks. Okay, it was a dream, but so was the original Red Room. And as the scene involved a metaphysical entity speaking to Scoobs through his dog girlfriend,** I’m willing to accept that yes, Scooby-Doo was in the Black Lodge. Agent Cooper and BOB were presumably in the next room over.

And what was discussed? Oh, just that the reason certain dogs (and parrots) can talk is that they are the descendants of the Anunnaki,*** extradimensional spirits who can only physically exist  by inhabiting the bodies of animals.

Mind. Blown.

Okay, maybe I do understand why this didn’t fly at the Cartoon Network. But that anyone ever allowed it to happen in the first place is as peculiar as any ghost encountered by those meddling kids.

*Thanks to the delays, said storyline will finish out three years to the day from when it began.

**Again, I totally get how ridiculous this seems when I type it out.

***The Anunnaki are a “real” thing, in that they feature in real-world crackpot theories regarding the rogue planet Nibiru (also namechecked in Mystery Inc.) and the end of the world. 

Dave TV Scooby-Doo, Twin Peaks, WTF

Life is rough for those who work retail in Gotham City. One moment you’re waiting on a customer, the next moment you’re pinned to the ceiling by a giant umbrella while trained puffins steal the day’s receipts.

Things are even worse if your establishment happens to fit into the theme of one of Gotham’s many colorful crooks. Hands down, the absolute worst place to work is the Laughing Catfish Puzzle Store, 222 Iceberg Road, located between the Gotham Arboretum and the abandoned Wonderland Hat Factory. Turn left at the Arkham Asylum exit, you can’t miss it.

Dave Comics Batman, worst jobs in the multiverse