Black Gate

Good afternoon, Readers!

Last week, I headed out to the Mayfair Theatre in Ottawa (Canada) for a screening of the film Level 16.  An aside, the Mayfair is a quaint little theater that has been in operation since 1932. The interior doesn’t seem to have been changed since it’s early days, and the in-house film graphics haven’t changed since the 70’s, I’m certain. Anyway, I figured I could turn the visit into a film review. For true transparency’s sake, I have to state that my flatmate and good friend worked on this film. I guarantee you, though, that I’m being as impartial as I can about it.

Level 16 is a sci-fi thriller (stronger on the thriller than science fiction, though there is enough of the latter to qualify, even if it’s mentioned only briefly) set in a “post-apocalyptic” world (there are reasons for those quotation marks, I promise you). From IMDB:

Sixteen-year-old Vivien is trapped in The Vestalis Academy, a prison-like boarding school, keeping to herself and sticking her neck out for no one. Until she is reunited with Sophia — the former friend who betrayed her. Together the girls embark on a dangerous search to uncover the horrifying truth behind their imprisonment. Soon running for their lives, the girls must save themselves or die trying.

This is a female-led production; a female writer and director (Danishka Esterhazy) with female leads, Vivien and Sophia, brilliantly portrayed by Katie Douglas and Celina Martin respectively.

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Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu

We live in a movie-saturated society, so much so that a real film fanatic may occasionally experience a blurring of the line between everyday reality and cinematic fantasy. In the middle of spinning an anecdote to an acquaintance, such a person may have to stop himself and say, “Oh… wait a minute now. I wasn’t the one who made the Enquirer the biggest newspaper in the country and then went on to build Xanadu. That was Charles Foster Kane!”

Well, maybe things rarely get that extreme. But sometimes, one kind of reality actually does impinge upon the other kind, and you experience a moment in your waking life that has come straight out of a celluloid Hollywood dream. Let me tell you what I mean.

John Huston’s 1941 film The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite movies. It may be blasphemous to say so, but in some ways I consider it superior to Dashiell Hammett’s brilliant novel, as Huston’s screenplay wisely omits the book’s only misstep, a bizarre dead-end subplot involving, of all things, the Fat Man’s daughter. Back in those long-gone days when the advent of the VCR suddenly freed us forever from the tyranny of station scheduling (days I look back on with nostalgia, now), The Maltese Falcon was the first videocassette I bought, the first movie I had to own. I can’t even begin to estimate how many times over the years I’ve seen it.

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The ABC Movie of the Week (a beloved American institution on a par with Turtle Wax, disputed Florida elections, and SPAM, and whose history I detailed here) was, during its six season run from 1969 to 1975, a veritable goldmine of cheesy science fiction, mystery, and horror stories… only there were some MOW’s (for you members of the Netflix generation, that’s the acronym for movie of the week) that were a bit better than cheesy, and a rare handful were even better than that — that were, in fact, damned good. At the pinnacle of this admittedly rather small mountain stands The Night Stalker, which chomped its way into millions of unsuspecting living rooms on the evening of January 11th, 1972.

The Night Stalker was produced by Dan Dark Shadows Curtis and scripted by Richard Matheson from an unpublished novel by Jeff Rice. After the show became the highest rated made-for-television movie yet broadcast at that point, the novel found its way into print and it became apparent why it had been unpublished — it’s not very good. (It also bears an uncanny — shall we say, almost supernatural — resemblance to a much better book, Leslie Whitten’s little-known and underappreciated 1965 novel, Progeny of the Adder. Just a coincidence, I’m sure…)

The Night Stalker is the story of a serial killer on the rampage in Las Vegas, except that at the time, the term “serial killer” had yet to be coined by FBI agent and profiler Robert Ressler; he came up with it a full two years later. That’s how long ago 1972 was.

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One of the most fascinating crosses for me is when science fiction and religious faith hang out. Star Wars is deeper for the faith of the Jedi. Worlds like Altered Carbon are starker and more desolate with their utter materialism. One of my favorite mixes of science fiction and religion is Battlestar Galactica, both the original series with its angels, and the 2003 reimagining with its robotic religious zealots.

I hadn’t watched Battlestar Galactica in about half a dozen years, but as I make my way through the project of trying to watch some of the top drama on TV, I wasn’t surprised to find Battlestar Galactica on a New York Times list of top 20 dramas since the Sopranos and I decided to watch it again.

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