Tomorrow the film Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter arrives at the multiplex. It’s an adaptation of the book of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith, who stuck zombies into Pride and Prejudice and kicked off a wave of decreasingly-imaginative* literary/horror mashups from the “two things” school of humor. This one is from the parallel subgenre that replaces fictional characters with historical figures.**

And it makes me angry.

Not because it’s dumbing down the movies. (Remember, I saw Transformers.) Not because it’s a one-night concept that’s right there in the title. (I also saw Snakes on a Plane.) And not even because the filmmakers appear to be taking it entirely too seriously.

It’s because it posits that the Civil War was fought because Abraham Lincoln wanted to stop vampires from creating a nation in which they could own a self-perpetuating blood supply. You know, blacks.

Look, I don’t think (very many) people are going to walk away from this film believing that it’s actual history. But there are still plenty out there who choose to believe that the Civil War was about “states’ rights,” instead of being about people who fucking wanted to own other people.

To the extent that Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter allows them to further distance themselves from the bubbling black heart of our nation’s history, fuck it.

*Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters? Really? Really.

**Queen Victoria, Demon Hunter. Jesus. Oh, no, wait…Jesus is in Grahame-Smith’s Unholy Night.

Dave Movies Abraham Lincoln, fuck you, vampires

The last two years have been fatal for Doctor Who actors from the Jon Pertwee era of the show. First Nicholas Courtney, then Elisabeth Sladen. Now comes word that actress Caroline John died earlier this month at the age of 71.

Unlike Courtney or Sladen, I think few people will argue that Caroline John’s no-nonsense scientist Liz Shaw was the beating heart of the show. She was a case of the producers trying to have it both ways by portraying a highly competent researcher who nonetheless wound up wearing miniskirts and fetching coffee for the Doctor.

She was unceremoniously dumped after a single season in favor of Katy Manning’s Jo Grant, whose miniskirt-wearing and coffee-fetching were untainted by book learning and were therefore no challenge to Jon Pertwee. Still, Liz Shaw’s single season–which included such classic stories as “Spearhead from Space” and “Inferno”–was one of the best of the original show’s run, and Caroline John managed to make a lingering impression despite her short time.

Dave Doctor Who Caroline John, obituaries

My anticipation of the Alien prequel/not-a-prequel Prometheus was tempered by a nagging doubt. Did I really want to know more about the gigantic “space jockey” briefly glimpsed at the controls of the horseshoe-shaped vessel with its cargo of alien eggs? Much of what makes the first half of Alien so effective is its unfathomable otherworldliness. And yet, after five sequels of (mostly) diminishing returns, the only aspect of the Alien universe still worth exploring is surely this mysterious third race.

As information about the secretive Prometheus project trickled out, it was clear that–despite director Ridley Scott’s protests to the contrary–it really was an Alien prequel. The space jockeys and their horseshoe ship featured prominently in the commercials. And the spectacular crash scene seemed to promise that by the end of Prometheus the tableau would be in place for the later visit of the ill-fated crew of the Nostromo.

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD. DO YOU WISH TO SELF-DESTRUCT? (Y/N)

Except…as the Onion’s A.V. Club points out, it drives right up to the edge and then veers off. This isn’t the same planet from Alien, even though it too orbits a giant, ringed world. And this isn’t the same ship, even if it looks identical and winds up in a similar state as the original derelict. It’s frustrating. If Prometheus truly wasn’t intended to set the table for Alien, then why does so much of it play out in exactly the manner one would expect from a direct prequel?*

These defeated expectations are only part of the reason I feel a bit let down by Prometheus. Some of this film’s mysteries seem less deliberately unexplained than not thought through. If the “Engineers” (the new name of the space jockeys) really were pointing us toward a specific star cluster, why was it one of their military bases and not their home? The Earth pictographs suggested a then-harmonious relationship between humans and their creators. If it was a trap from the get-go, why bother? Why not just drop a cargo of biogenetic death on us thousands of years before we achieved interstellar travel?

The actions of the scientific expedition were equally baffling. It’s one thing for the crew of a space tug to go around foolishly poking things with a stick, another thing entirely for a group of scientific experts. It’s not just that these people had never seen an Alien film, it’s that they lacked even a sensible hesitation about touching things that are literally oozing with dark portents. Look, I am not a biologist, but I’m pretty sure that if I encountered a snake with a vagina for a head that was rearing up and hissing, my first inclination would not be to try to pet it. And folks, just because the air is breathable does NOT mean that you remove your helmet and take in a big lungful of extraterrestrial pathogens. Really, these people simply could not leave shit alone.

I’m not going to be totally down on Prometheus. It was gorgeous to look at and full of foreboding.** The callbacks to the original Alien were appreciated.*** And Michael Fassbender was fascinating to watch as David the android. I’d likely see Prometheus 2 just for more of his character. But if you’re an Alien fan, temper your expectations and be prepared for a lot of idiotic behavior.

*I believe that the ties may have been much more explicit in early drafts. An alleged synopsis, leaked to the web and quickly denied by the studio, reads suspiciously like a rejected draft, going so far as to play up the “Paradise” angle that Ridley Scott has mentioned in recent interviews.

**So full of foreboding that it plays like the first half of Alien stretched out to feature length.

***The kidney bean-shaped corridors of the so-called “pyramid” recalled set designs from the original derelict ship. The pyramid itself appeared to be based on an H.R. Giger painting of an alien “egg silo” cut from Alien before filming took place. Oddly, it also resembled one of Giger’s designs for the aborted Dune movie of the 1970s.

Dave Sci-Fi Alien, Prometheus, reviews

Like a lot of other boys growing up with an interest in things science-fictional, I was inexorably drawn to the works of Ray Bradbury. Bradbury wrote a lot about ghosts, rocketships and Martians, as well as the joys and horrors of growing up and growing old. I remember devouring my paperback copy of “R is for Rocket” in the back seat of my dad’s car on our yearly trips out west. To be sure, Bradbury was the biggest influence on my early attempts at short fiction, with TV’s The Twilight Zone a close second.* For many years, I claimed Something Wicked This Way Comes as my favorite novel.

During my year in Los Angeles, I attended the 70th birthday party of sci-fi fan extraordinaire Forrest J. Ackerman. Well, not so much “attended” as “crashed.” Carrying an oversized latex bust of Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. It was that kind of time for me.

Anyhow, there was Ray Bradbury. I stood across the lobby outside the hotel ballroom where the dinner was taking place, watching him talk to whom I presumed to be other sci-fi luminaries. And as much as I wanted to go up and tell the man what a profound impact he’d had on me, I was just too chickenshit to step forward. I greatly regretted the missed opportunity…even going so far as to later draft a “love letter” of sorts that I never actually sent.

Sometime in the mid-’90s, I was watching Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, a TV series featuring an irreverent roundtable of celebrities, experts and comedians. And I was floored by what was coming out of Ray Bradbury’s mouth: vile, sexist talk about women. I’m not certain whether this was the infamous occasion on which Bradbury defended alleged serial sexual abuser Robert Packwood by saying (I’m paraphrasing here) “who hasn’t pinched their secretary?” but it would’ve been around the right time. I was horrified. This was the man who wrote such beautiful, lyrical prose? Who taught me about the eternal rains of Venus and the dangers of stepping on butterflies?

That disillusionment had subsided a few years later when Bradbury arrived in town for a lecture/book signing  at the University of Illinois. After his talk, I was once again in a position to crash the afterparty.** This time there would be no regrets; at a quiet moment, I sat down near him and struck up a conversation. I don’t recall all of what I said. I suppose that I told him about my previous near encounter. I know I asked him if there were any recent sci-fi films that he felt lived up to those he’d enjoyed in his youth (Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

Here too I found myself wondering whom this Bradbury-shaped person really was. He had veered off onto an anti-technological track, proclaiming at one point that no one ever made a friend via a computer.*** It was unsettling. I thought, “This Luddite is the person who wrote so passionately about tomorrow?”

Somewhere along the line Bradbury took a hard turn to the right, politically.**** He went so far as to vociferously claim that his best-known novel, Fahrenheit 451–the story of futuristic book-burners that has inspired librarians for decades–was never about censorship at all. It was about the dangers of television. Okay, sure, Ray. Please back away from the typewriter.

Ray Bradbury’s death earlier this week was the coda for those who most shaped my love of literary sci-fi, the A, B, C of Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. I wish that I was truly sad about it. I feel that the man whose visions I found so inspirational vanished into the Martian desert years ago.

For the final thing that Ray Bradbury taught me was the importance of never getting to know one’s idols.

*Surprisingly, Ray contributed only one story to TZ, “I Sing the Body Electric,” and it was not one of their better outings.

**Associating with news people doth have its privileges.

***Decidedly not true, in my case. The first time I got laid was with someone I met over a computer. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. She lived in the dorm next door; the computer was how she chose to introduce herself. But I digress.

****Comics writer/historian Mark Evanier’s own obituary of Bradbury offers some similar observations on the unpleasant turn he took in his later years.

Dave Books obituaries, Ray Bradbury

It’s a funny thing to care about, but I was relieved to read that actress Christina Applegate will be part of the cast for the forthcoming Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. The teaser trailer for the long-delayed follow-up to Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy showcased the four male members (erm) of San Diego’s Channel 4 News Team with no sign of groundbreaking newswoman Veronica Corningstone. I had become concerned that the sequel might regress to the all-men’s club at the start of the Ron Burgundy saga, that the filmmakers might presume that all their audience wants is more of the childish misogyny of the days before the News Team learned the important lesson that Women Can Be Anchors Too.

Okay, I know how this sounds, but bear with me. Even an absurd comedy factory like Anchorman had a heart. A hero’s journey, if you will. And I hate when the makers of a sequel toss away whatever personal growth its characters experienced in the initial installment.

Case in point: Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery. Mrs. Thielavision and I were among the relatively few people who actually saw this Mike Myers film on its initial theatrical run. (We had free passes, so we thought “what the hell.”) And what may be hard to remember after the excesses of its sequels is that the first Austin Powers was at times a rather sweet little fish-out-of-water story in which–just like Ron Burgundy–a loathsome relic of a past era learned to appreciate that women aren’t merely there to be conquered. By the end, he and the luscious Vanessa Kensington were happy newlyweds.

Until the second movie blew her up.

The very first scene of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me picked up with the honeymoon, and the revelation that Vanessa was actually another of Dr. Evil’s mechanical assassins. She short circuited and exploded, leaving Austin heartbroken–for all of a couple of seconds–before he happily realized that this meant he was single again! And that wrapped it up for poor, unmourned Vanessa.

I get that these are movies that are not intended to be taken seriously. The Spy Who Shagged Me even hung a lampshade on the nonsensical nature of Vanessa having been “a fembot all along.” But I recall being bothered by the cavalier manner in which the sequel shed itself of her, and not just because I enjoyed the sight of Elizabeth Hurley in silver lamé. I thought, “Hey, didn’t the last film want us to actually care about these two? If their relationship was so instantly disposable, why did it take up so much screen time? Why not just be a straight-up joke machine?” In other words, don’t spend one movie telling me something is important to turn around and tell me that it never mattered in the first place.

Which is why I’m perhaps a little too pleased by the return of Veronica Corningstone. If she is immolated in the first scene, I’m gonna be pissed.

Dave Movies Anchorman, Austin Powers, things that no one else cares about