Okay, I think that I’m going to have to officially call “bullshit” on the possibility of there ever being another film in the cult favorite Evil Dead series. For years, the excuse has been that director Sam Raimi is too busy with the Spider-Man franchise to make a modestly-budgeted horror film. And yet, here is Drag Me to Hell.

Not that I’m complainin’. It’s great to see Sam Raimi back to his roots, and even if it doesn’t quite match the manic glee of Evil Dead 2, I can’t recall the last time I had so much fun being scared.

Drag Me to Hell is an old-fashioned tale with a bit of modern relevance. A young bank officer played by Alison Lohman, seeking to show a bit of spunk in hopes of winning a promotion, turns down a loan extension for an old woman behind on her rent due to medical expenses. Except that Granny Deadbeat is a gypsy, and she places a horrible, demonic curse on Lohman’s character. The loan officer has three days to dispel the evil before being, well, dragged to Hell.

What ensues owes more than a little to 1958′s Night of the Demon (aka Curse of the Demon). Both films rely heavily on suggestions of monstrous forces at work in the form of sinister winds and strange shadows. In fact, unlike the earlier film, Drag Me to Hell never actually shows its devil. 

That’s not to say that Hell is always subtle in its scares. This is a Sam Raimi film, and like Evil Dead 2, it is painted in buckets of ichor. (Amazingly, it won a PG-13 rating. I guess as long as you don’t show boobies, you’re golden.) And if I do have one criticism, it’s that it goes for the “boo!” moment a little too often. 

Still, it’s also like Evil Dead 2 in that it’s all so over-the-top that it’s hard to get too grossed out. Raimi’s love of the Three Stooges makes its presence known from time to time, most notably in the shape of a falling anvil.

Oh, and then there’s the bit with the goat. You’ll know it when you see it.

One thing that impressed me was that so many of its scares take place in broad daylight. It’s one thing to frighten someone alone in the dark with only an unreliable flashlight, another to manage it on a nice, sunny day.

The other way in which Drag Me to Hell resembles Night of the Demon is that it deals with a curse which can be physically passed from person to person. Lohman’s character, ever more desperate, begins to seriously consider whom she might herself consign to Hell. And there are several strong contenders. 

What I found most interesting about Drag Me to Hell is my own reaction to Lohman’s moral choices. She starts off such an appealing character that I was initially inclined to forgive her tossing an old woman out of her home. A moral lapse to be sure, but an understandable one given the circumstances. And besides, the old gypsy is so loathsome, vicious and relentlessly cruel in her retribution that it’s hard to give her much sympathy.

Yet, Lohman continues to make questionable choices. (You’ll know that when you see it as well.) And she never accepts responsibility for her actions until it’s far, far too late. Maybe these weren’t worth a one-way ticket to Hades, I pondered, but I began to think that perhaps the old lady had a point.

Drag Me to Hell is a fun night of terror. With Raimi’s trademark camera tricks, a wonderful musical score by Christopher Young, and one truly angry goat, it left me hoping that this won’t be the last word in horror from our old friend Sam.

Dave Movies Drag Me to Hell, gypsies, reviews, Sam Raimi, The Devil

I suppose that it’s telling that I’m only now getting around to my take on Terminator Salvation, despite having seen it more than a week ago. It’s certainly not the disaster that I feared once the name “McG” entered the conversation, but it did leave me wanting more. Like someone to care about.

The first time I saw The Terminator, I was tantalized by the brief visions of the future war against the machines: gritty resistance fighters duking it out with floating hunter-killers atop a field of human skulls. That’s one reason that I was disappointed in Terminator 2*, as it not only trod the same modern-day ground as the original, but it appeared to close off that 21st century timeline. And it’s one reason that I liked T3 more than most people, because that film’s concluding minutes all but guaranteed that the next one would be set in the killing fields.

So, 25 years later, we’ve finally reached the future. And it’s not quite as cool a place as I’d hoped.

Don’t get me wrong: the tech on display is amazing. The chase scene involving a fifty-foot robot and self-aware motorcycles is alone worth the price of admission. If you’re there for the explosions, you’ll get your fill.

The core problem is John Connor. We know that Connor is vital to the future of mankind. Why? Because we’ve repeatedly been told so. The thing is, the same seems to true for everyone, including Connor himself; he’s the savior because they’ve been told he’s the savior, not because he’s done anything to deserve the distinction. He appears to be one more grungy cog in the resistance machine, albeit one with his own radio show. 

Granted that the movie, in the person of the inevitable Michael Ironside, does call him on this. But one important thing lacking from Terminator Salvation is the moment where he steps up to become the leader of men we’ve been told about, the role for which his mother trained him.

Neither the script nor actor Christian Bale bring anything to the character to make the audience care about John Connor beyond his alleged destiny. He’s Batman without Bruce Wayne; all gruff and little charm.

In addition, for much of the movie he’s overshadowed by a new addition to the franchise, a mysterious man named Marcus whose secret was thoroughly spoiled by the film’s promotion. Marcus is a cyborg precursor to the Arnold Schwarzenegger-bot of the earlier installments, and as such he instantly becomes more interesting than Mr. Growly.

The plot itself presents another problem. At first glance the central dilemma is an interesting one: Conner must rescue the young Kyle Reese, the man who he will eventually send into the past to become his own father. The trouble is that somehow Skynet is somehow aware of Reese’s importance as well. I don’t think that anyone ever explicitly says that the machine intelligence knows the exact nature of the relationship between Reese and Connor, but it knows enough to target Reese for termination. The extent of Skynet’s knowledge becomes a big issue when it’s revealed the computer is using Reese as the bait to lure Connor into a fatal trap; why not simply kill Reese and rewrite Connor out of existence in the first place?

Also, after The Matrix: Revolutions, did we need to have another dystopian future supercomputer present itself as a giant Wizard of Oz head? Would a machine bent on eliminating humanity have the need to interact with humans in such a manner?

In the end, perhaps the biggest flaw is that Terminator Salvation appears to be marking time. The humans win a victory, but it’s clear that the war is far from over, and we’re still a movie or two away from completing the paradoxical circle set up back in ’84.

One thing that I really did like about Salvation was that its “final boss” was Arnold himself–or at least a digitial reconstruction of him. It’s a fitting acknowledgement that for all of the fancy hardware of the sequels, the most impressive thing is an Austrian bodybuilder.

* I’ve never shared the geek love for T2. Cool morphing tricks aside, too much of it was shoot the robot, reload, repeat…for two-and-a-half hours. Despite the presence of a character with knowledge of Skynet tech, no one ever considered a plan that didn’t involve futilely shooting the robot again. The plucky heroine from the first film became a raging psychotic, and the young John Connor was a twerp. Last, but by no means least, I was annoyed by the conceit that crippling a bunch of policemen was an acceptable alternative to killing them, given that nothing the cops could bring to bear against Arnold would have stopped him from calmly walking over and taking the guns from their hands.

Dave Sci-Fi reviews, Terminator

I had a chance to reconnect with a bit of my childhood on Monday, courtesy of the Sci-Fi Channel’s Land of the Lost Memorial Day marathon. They ran all 43 episodes in chronological order, and while I missed most of the first season, I was able to settle in for nearly the entire second season’s run.

Land of the Lost premiered in 1974, and was highly unusual compared to other Saturday morning fare. Produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, best known for acid-trip phantasmagorias such as H.R. Pufnstuf and Lidsville, it was a full-blown sci-fi adventure. The Krofft brothers hired Star Trek scribe David Gerrold (“The Trouble with Tribbles”) to flesh out the concept. In turn Gerrold commissioned scripts from fellow Trek talents D.C. Fontana, Margaret Armen and Walter “Chekov” Koenig, as well as established sci-fi authors Larry Niven, Ben Bova and Normal Spinrad. (Theodore Sturgeon wrote a second season episode, but that was after Gerrold had moved on.)

Gerrold was responsible for much of the quirkiness of the series. Rather than a lost island or other terrestrial locale, he set it in a “pocket universe” with three moons in the sky. This otherdimensional world was so small that its single river looped back to its own beginning. In one famous scene, the Marshalls (a family trapped in the Land after plunging over a waterfall and through a “time doorway”) stood atop a mountain and peered through their binoculars…only to see themselves from behind!

The Land of the Lost was both prehistoric and alien, with a mixture of dinosaurs, ape-like Pakuni and lizard/insect creatures known as Sleestaks. Strange “pylons” dotted the landscape, leftovers from the technologically-advanced Altrusian race that devolved into the primitive Sleestak. These pylons controlled weather, time and whatever else the writers felt would cause the most trouble for the Marshalls.

Land of the Lost was pretty ambitious in terms of its production values, with makeup effects by Michael Westmore and stop-motion dinosaurs by the Oscar-winning team of Gene Warren and Wah Chang. The show even hired a linguist to create a language for the Pakuni. And yet, like ’70s-era Doctor Who, it often bit off more than it could chew, as its cheap studio sets and cheesy video effects clashed with Warren and Chang’s detailed miniatures.

The end result was both nearly unwatchable and utterly fascinating. On the unwatchable end of things were the performances of the main cast. During the show’s initial season, I found myself watching competing dino show Valley of the Dinosaurs because I could. not. stand. Kathy Coleman as Holly Marshall. She got a little better as the series progressed, but not much.

But what made it fascinating was the at-times unfathomable strangeness of it all. The first season ended with a Niven/Gerrold collaboration named “Circle,” which was meant to give the series some closure while allowing for further adventures. In it, the Marshalls learn that the only way for them to use the time doorway to escape the Land of the Lost is if three other people replace them (according to the “law of conservation of temporal momentum,” no shit). And the three people they choose are…themselves! The episode ends with one set of Marshalls exiting the Land as the others plunge down the waterfall to repeat their adventures. Or something. It was all rather brain-melting at the time, and people are still debating the paradox.

My favorite episode is a second season entry called “Gravity Storm.” It features the Zarn, a snarky, alien scientist who is composed entirely of lights and is physically hurt by human emotions. His attempt to use his spaceship’s gravity drive to blast off from the Land dangerously increases everyone else’s weight and threatens to tear apart the pocket dimension. When the Marshalls complain, he sics a robot dinosaur (named “Fred”) on them. Amusingly, it’s one of the stop-motion model armatures outfitted with light-up eyes, but the effect is oddly creepy.

In the third season, the wheels came completely off the wagon. Rick Marshall (the dad) abruptly left the show, to be replaced by “Uncle Jack.” A massive earthquake changed the topography and released such unlikely creatures as a two-headed dinosaur and a fire-breathing dimetrodon. And then Medusa, the Abominable Snowman and the Flying Dutchman showed up.

In hindsight, I can’t help but feel that Land of the Lost has more than a little to do with the recent prime-time series Lost. Both shows are about people trapped in a small, isolated location. Both greatly exceed their mandates by introducing ancient advanced technology, time paradoxes and complicated physics. And both have Sleestak. (Oh, you didn’t notice the Sleestak on Lost? Guess you’ll have to stay tuned to season six!)

Dave Sci-Fi brain-melting physics, Land of the Lost, Saturday Morning TV, Sleestak

I’m still trying to get a handle on what Twitter is good for, so I spent much of yesterday tweeting the Sci-Fi Channel’s Land of the Lost marathon. In the service of “repurposing content,” I’m placing a transcript of my wit and wisdom about All Things Altrusian below. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which episode is which.

Dave Sci-Fi Holly's pots, internet b.s., Land of the Lost, the Zarn, Twitter

The rights holders of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are trying to launch a feature film reboot, minus creator Joss Whedon and any of the supporting characters from the Buffy and Angel TV series.

This is going to sound hypocritical, given that I’ve just been talking up the V remake, but I think this is a terrible idea. In my view, there are two huge differences between Buffy and other recently-relaunched properties such as V and Star Trek. 

First, it’s too soon. V ceased production in 1985. There’s an entire generation that’s likely never even seen it. It’s more complicated with Star Trek: the franchise ground to a halt a mere four years ago with the cancellation of Enterprise, but it’s been 18 years since the final film featuring the entire original cast. 

Buffy went off the air a mere six years ago, and its spin-off Angel followed in 2004. Buffyverse alums (among them Sarah Michelle Gellar, David Boreanaz, Michelle Trachtenberg, Alyson Hannigan and Eliza Dushku) permeate current pop culture. Unlike the original Trek actors, they’re still young. Launching a remake when many fans are still holding out hope for an unlikely but not yet unreasonable renuion of the TV cast is perilous.

Second, the filmmakers have not reckoned with the rabid fervor of the Whedonites. They’re on a first name basis with Joss. And, despite Dollhouse, they haven’t yet suffered the disillusionment that Star Trek and Star Wars fanboys eventually felt with both Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas. Mark my words, reviving Whedon’s baby without his involvement will bring down a swift and merciless wrath. Hell, it’s been a couple of hours since I read the story, so it’s probably already well underway.

Dave TV Buffy the Vampire Slayer, fanboy entitlement, Joss Whedon, monumentally bad ideas

I’m on Twitter. (name: thielavision) Now what?

Dave General internet b.s., things I will regret later

Here’s a full-length trailer for the V remake. It hits all the right notes. Still lacking the rodent-eating, but I imagine that they’re saving that for the actual show.

And here’s another preview which, while shorter, features a bit more action:

My personal expectation level has been upgraded from “guardedly optimistic” to “when’s this thing gonna premiere, already?”

Dave Sci-Fi anticipation is makin' me wait, trailers, V

This morning, ABC announced its 2009 – 2010 schedule, and one of its midseason shows is a new adaptation of the ’80s series V: the one about the alien lizards who come here to steal our water and to put us on their menu. Among the geek-friendly cast is Elizabeth Mitchell (who just got killed off on Lost), Laura Vandervoort (Smallville‘s Supergirl) and–playing the leader of the Visitors–Morena Baccarin (who played a space hooker on Firefly).

Now, I’m something of a V fan, in that I had one of the first websites devoted to the series back in the Wild West phase of the Internet. Truth to tell, it was really because I was itching to do a website about something, and I figured that since I had access to a bunch of V ephemera, I might as well make it about that. 

V captured my imagination during my college days, coming at a time when, quite frankly, there was little sci-fi on the tube and virtually nothing of quality. Back then, you took what you got. Still, the original miniseries came out of nowhere, delivering good shocks, a decent allegory about the possibilities of fascism in America, and a whole lot of soap opera shenanigans. (The latter wasn’t all that unwelcome; I can appreciate a bit of soap in my drama.)

While the follow-up miniseries (V: The Final Battle) lacked the show’s creator Kenneth Johnson, it contained enough of his original concepts to be watchable fun. The ensuing weekly series was pretty damned stupid, but again, it was 1985 and you took what you got.

Johnson has tried (and so far failed) to launch his own sequel/remake. The closest he’s come so far was a novelization of his script for V: The Second Generation. 

Instead, the new V has been handed over to an entirely different production staff. Predictably, the old-school fans have already decried it as a mockery, with the inevitable nickname VINO (“V In Name Only”).

As for me, I say “Bring it on.” Sure, it’s entirely possible that it will hew more closely to the terrible weekly series that ended the franchise back in the ’80s than to the original miniseries. But I think there’s ample evidence to suggest that it’s not the worst thing in the world for someone to take a fresh look at an old, somewhat cheesy sci-fi show (see Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who). Hell, would even the most ardent Star Trek fan suggest that particular franchise’s best days were the ones in which Gene Roddenberry had the most influence? (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, plus the first two seasons of The Next Generation.)

I’m looking forward to V, if only because it’s entirely likely I’ll get to see Morena Baccarin eat a guinea pig. That’s just how I roll.

Updated: A couple of clips from the pilot have been posted online. No guinea pigs (yet), but looks promising.

Dave Sci-Fi fanboy entitlement, V

As I reached the halfway point of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it began to dawn on me that I’d been tricked. Oh sure, there were the promised undead and even some bonus ninjas, but I realized that perhaps 95% of the time, I was, in fact, actually reading Pride and Prejudice. The real one. 

It may surprise you that I–a 20+ year public TV veteran–have not only never read any Jane Austen, but never even watched a for-real TV or movie adaptation all the way through. I’m pretty sure that Clueless and Bride and Prejudice don’t count. 

I don’t have a problem with romances. Granted that I prefer a romantic comedy to a straight-up love story, but I’m enough of a lovestruck fool that I can appreciate a bit of sentimentality. Especially if the actress is hot.

What I don’t like are romances in which the obstacles standing in the way of true love are entirely self-imposed. I mean the sort of stories in which the lovers in question could easily find true happiness if only they could get over themselves/their honor/their social class. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an excellent example. Lots of people were swept away by its tragic, doomed relationship. I, on the other hand, was just pissed off. I spent most of the movie mentally shouting, “For crying out loud, just shut up about your damned destiny and kiss her!”

Similarly, I couldn’t stand the ’80s TV show Beauty and the Beast. If you don’t recall that one, it was about a district attorney played by Linda Hamilton who fell in love with a broody, bestial, underground dweller played by Ron Perlman. The title sequence’s tag line went something like “We can never be together, but we’ll never be apart.” See, apparently it just wouldn’t do for a district attorney to be seen with someone who looked like Ron Perlman, only with fangs and a bit of a mane. And so began an endless “oh no, we mustn’t” faux-mance, never mind that Linda Hamilton was living in New York City, where there are plenty of real-life people scarier-looking than Ron Perlman. Really, all they had to do was give “Vincent” a haircut, a manicure, a bit of dental work and a decent tailor, and those two crazy kids could’ve been happily having litters of kittens.

In my view, true love doesn’t let shit like that stand in the way. If you’re really mutually head over heels, you make it work. And if you don’t, or won’t, you need to shut the hell up about it.

Which brings me back to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or, as I think of it, Pride and Prejudice (with zombies). There’s a point about 200 pages in at which it’s very clear that all of the interested parties have realized their mutual interest, and all that’s standing between them and the words “THE END” is an awful lot of yakking about social standing and what the neighbors will think. Hungry undead or no hungry undead, I found myself skimming ever more quickly through the last hundred pages.

I’m certainly glad that if I had to read Pride and Prejudice, it was the zombie variant. It’s just that even the zombies weren’t enough.

Dave Books books i've read, in need of a good editor, Jane Austen, zombies

The biggest fans of the new Star Trek film must surely be the tourist board of Riverside, Iowa, who just found their attempt to brand their hometown as the birthplace of James T. Kirk rendered canonical. And as a bonus, the U.S.S. Enterprise itself was built there. High fives all ’round, Riverside.

The promos proclaim “This is not your father’s ‘Star Trek.’” They’re right. If you’re a young adult moviegoer, this is your grandfather’s ‘Star Trek.’ What’s now unspooling in multiplexes across the country is the purest distallation of  Trek since the original series went off the air in 1969.

If the sold-out crowd at Friday’s 7:15 show was any indication, Star Trek may finally be cool. When it was over, the audience burst into spontaneous applause. My wife applauded. And then she said, “They need to do another movie right now.”

From the nearly pitch-perfect casting to the sense of wonder, whimsy and–most of all–fun, this is the Star Trek movie I’d been waiting for since the noble-but-bland premiere of 1979′s The Motion Picture. It may not have had quite the emotional wallop of The Wrath of Khan, but that had the benefit of the original, beloved cast.

One thing I really liked about the new film is that it gave everyone something to do. The old show was very much built around Kirk, Spock and McCoy; we never found out what made Uhura or Sulu tick. Here, Uhura was very much a major character. And Chekov–Chekov!–got one of the best moments with his last-second transporter rescue. While Chekov the Whiz Kid was a new take on the character, I found that it gave him a great hook.

Two aspects of the plotline that initially gave me pause were the time-travel element and inclusion of a Next Generation-era villain. My hope had been that the film would take the Casino Royale approach and simply start the series over from scratch. However, I suppose it’s necessary to throw this sop to the Trekkies: that the old continuity really “happened,” and may even still be happening, albeit in a parallel reality. 

Plus, there was plenty of fan service on display. We finally got to see Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru “no win” scenario. (Possibly my favorite scene; Chris Pine nailed the old, cocky Kirk.) We got Captain Pike…in a wheelchair, no less. We got green Orion women. We even got a tribble.

That said, the film made it clear that nothing will ever be the same again. By making a major deletion to the makeup of the Federation, they’ve loudly announced things are going to be different, and that we’d all better stop worrying about the “canon.” (I will admit that I’m somewhat glad that I learned about this particular spoiler in advance, as I’m enough of an old-guard Trekkie that it might have thrown me if I hadn’t been prepared.)

Okay, I’m going to get a few quibbles out of the way. I did find some of the comedy to be perhaps a bit too slapstick, especially Kirk’s big hands and the Scotty-in-the-pipe sequence. I’m not sure why the upper decks of the ship look like an Apple store but the engine room looks like a boiler, complete with riveted girders. And the writers seem to have no sense of outer spatial relationships: Vulcan is only a 10-minute warp flight from Earth, and the ice planet Delta Vega appears so close to Vulcan to be one of its moons. And just how far away was the Enterprise when Scotty executed that mid-warp transport? It had presumably been warping away from Delta Vega for hours by that point in the narrative, and thus far, far too far for even the most Scotty-riffic transporter use.

However, that really is pretty minor stuff compared to what’s great about the film. There were terrific performances by Zachary Quinto as Spock and Karl Urban as McCoy, plus good work from pretty much everyone else. While Ben Cross didn’t really do it for me as Spock’s dad, I thought that his relationship with Spock was well explored, and liked that we finally got a sensible explanation of why he married a human woman. (Two of ‘em, actually, and the second one brought a tear to my eye.)

In the end, what I love about this Star Trek is that finally takes the franchise back to its roots. The later generations of Trek had their pleasures, but Kirk, Spock, McCoy and company were the template. It’s great to have these characters back, not as aging, increasingly unlikely action stars, but in the prime of their careers with nothing but an unknown future ahead of them.

Also, Starfleet miniskirts. Glad to have those back as well.

Dave Movies booty call, freakin' awesome, reviews, Star Trek