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Solomon Kane Movie Needs More Solomon Kane

Solomon Kane Movie Needs More Solomon Kane

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solomonkaneposterThe sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane is my favorite of Robert E. Howard’s serial characters: a fascinating mixture of obsession, religion, righteousness, history, and dark fantasy awesomeness. However, it’s the character I love, not necessarily the stories in which he appeared. With the exception of “Wings in the Night,” the Solomon Kane stories are mid-range pieces in Howard’s canon, not at the consistent level he delivered later with Conan, King Kull, or many of his one-shots. Solomon Kane appeared early in Howard’s short professional pulp career, with the first published story in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales. Perhaps if Howard stayed longer with the Puritan hero while his storytelling skills increased, he might have equaled the Conan series in quality.

But a great character is always an excellent starting point to make a great movie, and in concept a Solomon Kane film should be an easy third-base hit for any talented filmmaker. The 2009 British-French-Czech Solomon Kane, which finally received its limited U.S. theatrical release today (also on VOD if you can’t find a local theater), showed many hints of not only getting on third, but possibly stealing home. Tonally, it captures the 1930s version of Weird Tales. The violence is graphic and bloody without falling into the slapstick idiocy of Marcus Nispel’s Conan the Barbarian. The production design is top-tier for a mid-budget movie and feels saturated with the benighted European dreariness of Kane stories such as “Skulls in the Stars” and “Rattle of Bones.”

What the movie does not have: Solomon Kane. This tends to undermine most of the right steps the filmmakers take, as you might imagine.

It makes no difference if audiences know the first thing about the character of Kane or even know the name Robert E. Howard. The film’s failure to exploit what makes Solomon Kane so fascinating spills over into the story and pacing. Solomon Kane is an origin tale that stretches out for a hundred minutes — an origin for a character who doesn’t even need an origin. As James Purefoy’s voiceover at last declares Solomon Kane’s intentions to battle evil wherever it lies, and the hero leaps onto his horse decked with the swirling black coat and the wide-brimmed slouch hat, the audience will be primed to see this strange avenger work his bloody craft. But then the director’s name appears and the end credits start. Sorry folks, movie is over.
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Pet Shop of Horrors

Pet Shop of Horrors

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pet-shop-of-horrorsOriginally a series of short stories appearing in manga (Japanese comic book) anthologies, Pet Shop of Horrors premiered on the Tokyo Broadcasting System as a series of short animated clips in 1999. Viewers would see a two-minute piece (usually between music videos or short films) every few days until an entire episode was completed. Four whole episodes were broadcast before the animated series was discontinued. The collected episodes were released in North America in 2000 by Urban Vision.

The set up of each episode begins in Chinatown (we’re never told what city, but an educated guess would be Los Angeles). A secluded pet shop, run by the mysterious Count D, purports to sell “love, hope, and dreams” to its varied clientele in the form of exotic pets. Each customer must sign a contract promising, among other things, to not show the pet to anyone else. The consequences of breaking any of the terms of the contract are dire. Among the pets sold in these four episodes are an evil rabbit (don’t laugh … it’s Watership Down-style evil), a gorgon, a mermaid, and a kirin (an ancient creature that grants wishes at a terrible cost). It’s clear that the Count also sells plain old dogs and cats; but he seems to reserve the exotic beasts for those clients in need of a blood-soaked moral lesson.

The series is like a cross between The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt, with Count D acting as both narrator and instigator of these bizarre little tales. A subplot running through all four episodes concerns police detective Leon Orcot, who knows that something unseemly is happening at the pet shop, but of course doesn’t guess at the supernatural. He provides the perfect foil/audience for these stories and, as the series moves on, begins to go to the count more as an informant than a suspect. It’s easy to imagine an awkward friendship emerging between the two characters, had the series been allowed to continue.

While I’m normally a bit of a purist (maybe snob) about dubbing, the English voice cast for this series was simply amazing. John DeMita plays Count D as an androgynous male without ever slipping into any sort of effeminate parody.  He’s a thin ghost in a kimono whispering hideous secrets. Alex Fernandez plays Leon Orcot as a tough cop who is neither stubborn nor dull-witted, an intelligent detective who can adapt to the fantastic dramas of the series. The commentary track has a wonderful and funny conversation between DeMita, Fernandez and Jack Fletcher (voice director for the English adaptation of the series) and is one of the best I’ve ever heard.

The series only ran four episodes and came out more than a decade ago, so it was never terribly popular in the United States; but if you can find a copy, pick it up. Just creepy fun.

Dredd Sentences You to a Bloody Good Time

Dredd Sentences You to a Bloody Good Time

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dredd2012posterThe Charge: Attempting to re-start a film franchise about a classic comic book character.

The Verdict: Guilty.

The Sentence: Director is hereby ordered to make more Judge Dredd Movies.

Any Last Words: I am the law.

The upcoming re-make of RoboCop now feels even more unnecessary than it did before. Dredd has just handed us an over-the-top violent buddy cop SF flick that fills up that niche for the next year, maybe two. Dredd is an old-style Paul Verhoeven film in feel, although missing much of his satirical glee, and hits perfect for a September action movie, trading in any “mainstream” credentials for hard-R blood and guts on a narrow budget. It’s a wet blast for action fans and dark SF junkies.

You may recall a similar film, Judge Dredd, from 1995, which starred Sylvester Stallone as the dispenser of justice in the fallen future. Based on the character created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra that appeared originally in the UK anthology magazine 2000 AD, the Stallone movie was a big-scale epic aiming for broad appeal to become a summer blockbuster, hence the inclusion of a comic sidekick played by Rob Schneider and the sanding away at the harsher elements of the setting. Because of Stallone’s celebrity status, he spent much of the film without the Judge’s eye-shielding helmet on, which the character never removes in the comics. I haven’t seen Judge Dredd ’95 since it was in theaters, but I do recall enjoying it.

I can’t imagine I would feel the same way about Stallone’s colorful but silly film if I watched it today, and this new take on Wagner and Ezquerra’s character has crushed any wish to revisit it. Costing a tight $45 million (pocket change among today’s blockbusters), the British/South African production Dredd sticks closer to source material and ditches any compromise for the general audience: it is authentically brutal dystopian action that works on the simple plane of crunchy ultra-violence.

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Goth Chick News: The Creature Had Good Taste and So Does Tim Burton

Goth Chick News: The Creature Had Good Taste and So Does Tim Burton

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image0021As it may have been with you, for me it all started with the original Universal Studios’ monster movies.

By “it,” I mean a lifelong fandom of the black and white, the subliminal scare, the camera angles and the long shadows; the classics created not because they were drenched in buckets of gore and nauseating realism, but because, as Bela Lugosi said in Ed Wood:

They were mythic. They had a poetry to them

Sigh.

Naturally, meeting someone associated with one of these films is the Goth Chick equivalent to winning the lottery; especially as those individuals who still are around to meet often do not venture far from the sunny and warm climates where they have retired.

Last weekend, Christmas came early when two of my all-time favorites from vintage Hollywood horror found their way to Chicago to attend The Hollywood Show.

Ms. Julie Adams, whose very presence and bearing makes you want to call her ma’am, is best known to many for her portrayal of bathing beauty Kay Lawrence in Universal’s 1954 classic The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Admittedly, my knowledge of Ms. Adams’ fifty-seven year career was extremely limited which she teasingly pointed out.

I wasn’t just the bit of cheesecake in the Creature movie you know. I actually worked with Elvis too!

Correct on both counts.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Hunger Games and the SAT

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Hunger Games and the SAT

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The cheap shots are kind of tempting — analogies, or allegories even, about the SAT as a form of gladiatorial combat. Some of my students do experience the test that way. Certainly the SAT has become a fasting ordeal, now that it’s four hours long and still allows only one break long enough for scarfing down an energy bar. But I’m not enlisting the aid of Katniss Everdeen to fight the College Board over its test. Odd as it sounds, there are some admirable, humane aspects to the SAT in its current incarnation. I’ve just started using the Neo-Roman culture of Suzanne Collins’s Panem setting to work to take the fear out of Latin-derived vocabulary words.

One of the pleasures of the Hunger Games trilogy for adult readers is the subtle thread of Roman influence on the world-building. It’s completely lost on the narrator, who has been raised in extreme poverty and educated only far enough to serve a dictatorial state. Since Katniss can’t comment on the classical echoes, and doesn’t need to understand them to navigate her world successfully, teenage readers who haven’t been offered much history earlier than 1776 can get by all right, too. They hang on in the wake of Katniss’s enormous personality and follow her through fire and storm to the end of the last volume. My students do get all the big themes and moods of the story, and all the wild action. The little grace notes that genre readers smile over, well, left to themselves, my students just shrug and treat them as non-specific markers of Panem’s otherness.

Consider the Cornucopia.

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Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: The Expendables 2

Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: The Expendables 2

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001_expendables2_posterTwo years ago I walked out of a theater showing The Expendables, shaking my head in mild bewilderment. I don’t just have a high tolerance for ‘80s action cheese; I actively embrace it. I was nearly as excited about the release on Blu-ray last week of Death Wish 3 as I was about Jaws’s simultaneous hi-def debut. (Well, not really, but that’s my way of drawing your attention to what an over-the-top great/stupid movie we have in Death Wish 3.) But 2010’s The Expendables pushed none of my buttons. It was dull, the action flat, and Stallone seemed to think audiences would care about the tangled romantic lives of his and Jason Statham’s characters (at the expense of the rest of the cast). Stallone also seemed ignorant of the premise’s goofy appeal and played too much of it straight. The film ended up wasting most of the names on the marquee and couldn’t live up to its modest goals. It was also badly tarted-up with occasional post-production blood to get an R rating after it was shot for PG-13. It was a misfire for what looked like a simple shot.

Yet it made enough money for them to take a second shot, and when I left the theater after seeing Expendables 2, I felt they hit the target. I won’t go so far as to say “they got it right,” because “right” isn’t something a movie like The Expendables 2 would even know how to define, but the folks aboard this go-round sure “got it better.” It’s the best dumb fun movie of the summer for fans of the old-school testosterone action pics.

Here’s all you need to know about what kind of movie the filmmakers on Expendables 2 have put together: During the finale and within the space of thirty seconds, there are three lines quoting The Terminator, a line from Die Hard, and a reference to Rambo. Chuck Norris strides onto the screen through a haze of combat dust to the whistling strains of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Stallone grunts “Rest in pieces!” after he and company shred some fools with a rain of bullets. Dolph Lundgren plays the brains of the team. And Jean-Claude Van Damme is the villain.

How much more of a review do you need after that? The Expendables 2 is utterly silly, and everybody seems aware of it and rides the wave of ludicrous puns and over-the-top action with bloody smiles. Between making the two films, someone must have gotten the memo that the whole concept is actually a gag.

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Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: The Bourne Legacy

Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: The Bourne Legacy

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bourne-legacy-posterThe Bourne Legacy, Paramount’s attempt to extend their successful Jason Bourne franchise — based very loosely on the novels of Robert Ludlum — does give the impression of the first film of a trilogy. It feels like The Bourne Identity (2002), the inaugural movie of the Matt Damon trilogy: it’s a starting point with some excellent sections, but also the nagging sense that all the finest moments are yet to come. Overall, there is something slight about the enterprise, making it a minor disappointment for a film I hoped would salvage August. Will Expendables 2 be this year’s “August Surprise”? I never thought that might be a possibility at the beginning of the season.

Doug Liman directed The Bourne Identity, but it was Paul Greengrass sitting in the folding green chair for the next two films, The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and it was his work that shoved the series into the high octane world of dazzling foot pursuits, close-quarter pummelings, shaky-cam car chases, and earnest people trying to get control of the world by walking fast while talking on cell phones. And audiences loved it. Those two films are the defining spy movies of the decade, easily besting the re-boot of James Bond (in the Jason Bourne mold, natch).

The Bourne Legacy, under the direction of Tony Gilroy, who wrote all three previous entries and made an impression as a director with Michael Clayton in 2007, collects the elements that made its predecessors work: whipcrack action with jittery cameras, raw global espionage, and top-level actors playing the gray-shaded manipulators attached to their phones and computer displays. What it doesn’t have is a compelling enough character story at the center to hold it together, or a resolution that satisfies beyond the need to signal a sequel.

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The End of the World and Everyone Knows It

The End of the World and Everyone Knows It

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on-the-beachI’ve always had a hankering for apocalyptic fiction. It probably goes back to the original Planet of the Apes being one of the first big-screen movies I ever experienced, though I was too young to appreciate or remember more than a flash or two — “Daddy, why is is that monkey riding a horse?”. I was probably asleep by the time Heston knelt in the sand in front of the Statue of Liberty. Does that still count as a spoiler? Nevertheless, it seems to have left an impression.

Recently, there’s been a boomlet of what I call full-stop apocalyptic movies. What I’m talking about is the sort of movie where everyone, and I do mean everyone, dies at the end thanks to some earth-ending cataclysmic event. No escaping to another world on a spaceship ala When Worlds Collide (or getting picked up by a Vogon construction fleet). Nope, the curtain comes down on everything and everyone in one dreadful, final coda.

You have to be in the right sort of mood to enjoy this kind of thing. I find a largish whiskey helps. While it sounds bleak, as an author or dramatist, the idea isn’t without merit. We’re all going to be face-to-face with death at some point. In this sort of story, all your characters are going to be meeting death at about the same time. The interest comes in seeing how each recognizes, struggles against, and eventually experiences their final moments, singly or together.

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Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Total Recall (2012)

Black Gate Goes to the Summer Movies: Total Recall (2012)

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totalrecall2012posterIn a charming case of movie irony, the new Total Recall has already been mostly forgotten, even though it only came out on Friday. The Dark Knight Rises, in its third week, handily crushed the Len Wiseman-directed remake. I’m writing this on Tuesday, and it already feels as if the movie was never even released: it was a dream implant that never took, and the original memory of the 1990 Paul Verhoeven-Arnold Schwarzenegger Summer blockbuster has already taken back all the cerebral space. Nonetheless, I’ll still perform this brain autopsy on Total Recall ’12 to see why no one bothered to show up except for people writing reviews.

If you were to pick the right approach to remaking 1990’s Total Recall — aside from simply not remaking it all — you would want to try it “straight,” focusing in on the everyman aspect of a protagonist in a cyberpunk future who discovers that his whole life is a false memory implant, and in truth he’s a dangerous double (possibly triple) agent. It is, after all, a nifty SF-noir concept, delivered courtesy of the Philip K. Dick short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” and refashioned into a feature film concept by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who also created the original screenplay for Alien.

And this re-make of Total Recall does that: it plays the movie as a straightforward science-fiction adventure film done in the current style. But… it was handed to Len Wisemen to direct. And he turned out the same film he always turns out: broadly competent but utterly dull, slick, superficial, and ultimately disposable. Producer Neil Moritz, responsible for the “Fast and Furious” franchise, should probably shoulder a good part of the blame as well, because the by-the-numbers execution here is what he does best unless he gets a director who clicks with the material.

Despite publicity hand-waving about “going back to the literary source,” this certainly isn’t a remake like the Coen Brothers’ True Grit. Len Wisemen’s Total Recall does a beat-for-beat copy of the plot of the 1990 film with a few background substitutions and a number of bizarre moments of meaningless karaoke imitations (the three-breasted prostitute, the “two weeks” lady at the security station, ripping out an implanted tracking device), but with all the fun drained from it and slathered over with the same polished SF glean seen on movies since the early 2000s. Fans of the original will find themselves bored to the point of wishing the whole thing was a memory implant gone wrong — a schizoid embolism! — and viewers who have never seen the original will yawn over watching the same old junk they’ve slogged through for years… only with even more lens flares!

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Three Hobbit Films for the LOTR Fans = Trouble

Three Hobbit Films for the LOTR Fans = Trouble

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ew-hobbit-bilboFans of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings should be thrilled that The Hobbit, originally planned as two feature films, is now slated for three.  More Tolkien on screen is a good thing, right?

Surely yes, if what we are getting is indeed more Tolkien. But Jackson’s “bridge” film is not going to be more Tolkien, but more Jackson. And that is not necessarily an encouraging thought.

Due to contractual issues with the Tolkien estate — Jackson is unable to use material from The Silmarillion, The History of Middle-Earth, or Unfinished Tales — this “bridge” film will come from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. Jackson wrote on his Facebook page:

“We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance. The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth.”

The appendices are certainly a mine of information, but the stories they tell are scattered, patchy in places, and not written as straightforward narrative. To bridge the events of The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings in a film that neatly connects a series of disparate dots, Jackson must fill in gaps, construct dialogue from scratch, and so on. And that could spell trouble.

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