Review: Timestalkers

This is a fun one for all the sci-fi nerds out there. Just let me emphasize that, by "fun," I don't mean "good."

Timestalkers is a cheesy 1987 made-for-TV movie about a history professor and Old West hobbyist (William Devane, almost completely miscast) who, after the death of his wife and son (the boy from Who's the Boss), finds himself recruited by a time-travelling fashion model (Lauren Hutton, sadly wearing a cap over her tooth-gap) to help her stop the assassination of some 19th century person to further the vague career goals of her deranged, homicidal ex-colleague (Klaus Kinski, looking like Doc Brown's psycho brother).

Kinski and Hutton alternately employ unnecessarily gaudy time-travel technology to make the plot appear to develop. Even before this, however, we are treated to "flashbacks" from Devane's antiquing road trips that depict what Kinski is (simultaneously?) doing in the Old West. The part that's by turns endearing and irritating is that each flashback is accompanied by an explosive screen effect and the stolen sound of a TIE fighter cannon firing.

Review: The Terminators

Every time I start one of these obviously-terrible titles on Netflix Instant, I battle with a sense of dread, asking myself "Am I about to waste an hour-plus of my life?" In the case of The Terminators, I'm happy to respond to myself, "Not entirely," mainly because they had the good sense to cast A Martinez.

For those of you who think that's a typo, A Martinez is his actual screen name. He's a well-known soap actor, and was on One Life to Live during the short cluster of years that my wife was following the show. His acting style has always been understated and detached in a kind of tough-guy fashion, and it's even more the case in The Terminators—yet not carrying the undercurrent of boredom you might expect from a real actor, like Martinez, reflecting on his presence in an Asylum movie. It's frankly a bizarre performance, but intentionally so, and I'm giving The Terminators a whole half-star just for the fact that his cop character turns out to be an android. It's a pretty well-handled reveal in a film of this calibre, and it's quite nice to see a real actor make a deliberate acting choice like that in the sort of movie where deliberate acting choices are infrequent.

Review: Lincoln

What fascinates us so much about Abe Lincoln? It can't just be the pivotal times he lived in—otherwise we'd be just as fascinated by Truman, and we're not. It can't just be his assassination, either, though its circumstances were certainly more dramatic than others.

I think it's his weirdness. You look at this guy, you learn about what sort of life and attitude he had, and to think of him as "Savior of the Union" inspires a certain cognitive dissonance. Had the Civil War been further delayed, he might have ended up as merely an oddball presidential footnote. Instead, America's favorite president is this cadaverously gaunt hillbilly who—in an illustrative early scene in Spielberg's Lincoln—tells depressing jokes to citizens visiting his office.

I was surprised by how affecting Daniel Day-Lewis's performance here was. I went in figuring it was going to be stellar, and as so rarely happens, my heightened expectations were met. Lincoln tells some four or five stories during the movie and they're among the best moments. His "now, now, now" speech (glimpsed in the trailer) really hammers home the stakes of the plot. He's the kind of Lincoln that makes you think, "I don't really even care anymore how historically accurate this is; he's just awesome to watch," like the audio-animatronic Lincoln from Disneyland, only less terrifying.

Review: Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth

Horror films can be fun, or scary, or sometimes both. Really great horror can either focus on one (The Shining) or aspire to both and succeed (Evil Dead II). Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was trying for scary, to be sure, but the efforts at "fun" were so imbalanced that I remain unsure how much of it was intentional. And while I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any fun during Hellraiser III, the problem was that those moments were clustered largely toward the end, and failed to fully compensate for the earlier tedium.

Like the first movie, Hell on Earth introduces us to a single relatable character (Terry Farrell, Deep Space Nine's Dax, playing a TV reporter) and a broadly unpleasant supporting cast. Most unpleasant of all is the rich nightclub owner J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt, who my spidey-sense tells me has edited his own Wikipedia page). Monroe acquires a mystical pillar containing Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and one of those puzzle-boxes around which the first two movies revolved. Naturally, they don't stay in the pillar for long (though considerably longer than we viewers might expect/wish). The carnage that eventually ensues surpasses either of the previous films, and the justification for Pinhead's much more active lifestyle here seems to be that, at the end of Hellbound, Pinhead's essence was separated from that of his original human self, WWII officer Eliot Spencer. Thus, without the moderating influence of Spencer, Pinhead's much more Pinheady, I guess.

Review: Thunderball

I can't be the only hardcore MST3K fan who occasionally enjoys undertaking side-by-side comparisons of MST-ed features with the decent and/or popular mainstream films they're trying to be like.

MST-ed Feature	Decent and/or Popular Mainstream Film It's Trying to Be Like
Warrior of the Lost World	Mad Max
Time of the Apes	Planet of the Apes
Gorgo	Godzilla
Cave Dwellers	Conan the Barbarian
Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell	Conan the Barbarian
Outlaw of Gor	Conan the Barbarian
Space Travelers	Marooned

Operation Double 007 (a.k.a. OK Connery, a.k.a. Operation Kid Brother) isn't the only MST experiment from the '60s that tries to cash in on the Bond franchise, but it is the most directly comparable, and Thunderball is the specific Bond outing it's most directly comparable to—because both films have the same actor, Adolfo Celi, playing the villain. Double 007 also features Bernard Lee (the original M) and Lois Maxwell (the original Moneypenny), playing vague versions of their Bond franchise characters who recruit Neil Connery, playing the brother of their "top agent." (Yeah, it's weird.)

R.I.P. Roger Ebert

I woke up this morning to the news that Roger Ebert has died. To the vast public recognition of his impressive life and career I will add only this: that since I was a boy, his was the one and only face of film criticism. (Sure, Gene Shalit had what we'd call today a stronger "visual branding," but Ebert's reviews had more substance.) I was sad when Gene Siskel died and I'm sadder now.

The Onion A.V. Club has a very good piece collecting thoughts from their staff.

Review: Argo

I haven't yet seen any of the other Best Picture nominees for the recent Oscars, so maybe they're all kind of lackluster, but I find it slightly strange that Argo won.

I say "slightly" because it does relive a tense historical moment that would be well-remembered by Academy voters, and it does celebrate the power of Hollywood to make a difference in the real world. So maybe it's not so strange.

Yet Argo feels dry and workmanlike compared with other films of its type. I may have been spoiled in a sense, because years ago I read the article on which the screenplay was based. But considering the setting, it should've felt more thrilling than it did.

Not that it was entirely free of thrills. A lot of credit goes to the actors playing Argo's "house guests," escapees from the stormed U.S. embassy; their edginess is continually palpable, and to the script's credit, Ben Affleck's stoic CIA character handles their anxiety with a minimum of cliché.

Affleck deserves credit too. The excellent cast manages to make their characters feel real, as historical dramas require, and Affleck does it as well as the more seasoned screen standbys here (Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, and the indispensable Alan Arkin).

Review: The Norseman

Once in a great while, a motion picture comes along that reminds you of why you watch movies of its type—a transformative cinematic experience that leaves you wondering why it took you so long to get around to seeing it. Such a film is 1978's The Norseman; not since Citizen Kane have I seen a film that left me feeling this way—and that it lacks a Wikipedia page seems a travesty to me now.

Why, you ask?

Review: The Paper

Ah, '90s ensemble dramedies. I've seen so many of you, and you are all so similar, that it takes getting through half of one of you before I can tell whether or not I've already seen you specifically. The only way I could have been more confused on this point while watching Ron Howard's The Paper would have been if one of the Three-Name Marys was in it (e.g. Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Mary-Louise Parker, etc., and if you're planning to start a '90s-style alt-rock band, yes, you may call it Three-Name Marys.)

Indeed, I wasn't completely certain I'd seen The Paper before watching it the other day until I got to the Jason Robards scene, close to the end. That probably doesn't reflect too well on the story.

Review: Mega Piranha

If you're actually reading this rather than scrolling past it, you're doubtlessly asking yourself the same question I do whenever I see one of these Asylum cheapies on Netflix Instant:

"Is it fun-bad, or just bad-bad?"

I'm happy to report this one is solidly in the former camp. You get:

• A ridiculous story involving exponentially-growing piranha developed by well-meaning scientists whose goal was…to feed the poor? Maybe they left out the rest of that line of dialogue ("…to the piranha").
• Has-beens and Never-wases as our leads: '80s pop star Tiffany, one of the Brady kids as the senator, a villain who periodically forgets what kind of accent he's supposed to have, and a (snicker) Navy SEAL hero who I can only assume is a stunt actor. We'll call him Sgt. Meatface, because it suits him.
• Truly laughable special effects—as in, not just groan-inducingly bad. You'll blurt out in astonished, yelping laughter just like you did in Birdemic, although not as often. (Don't think for a moment that Mega Piranha out-Birdemics Birdemic.)
• Whimsically obvious errors like the Venezuelan junta (look, I don't know, ask them) driving SUVs with California plates.

Review: Skyfall

You may have heard that Skyfall is one of the better Bond movies. I agree, though the breathless praise it seemed to garner inflated my expectations a little too much. But I found myself ruminating about the entire history of the franchise while watching Skyfall (a natural reaction, and one the filmmakers clearly meant to instill), which led me to a hypothesis.

I would like to posit, here in my first Bond review for this blog, that the rubric for determining whether a Bond movie is "one of the good ones" consists of only two essential and fairly straightforward criteria:

Review: The Paper Chase

1973's The Paper Chase is a drama set at Harvard Law School, and despite its setting (and age), the film is relatable if you have ever:

• been in an academic pressure-cooker intense enough to make fellow students turn against you
• had a teacher who you simultaneously admired and feared.

While I never had aspirations to go to law school, I've been in both of those situations a few times (and once, both at the same time, and why yes, it did suck), and I did enjoy the one law class I took; thus, I was more engaged by The Paper Chase than I expected. (I also kept myself amused by imagining a friend of mine in the protagonist's place who has identical hair, often identical attire, a similar smile, and even had that 'stache for a time.) I have to guess that actual law students would find it scarily accurate, even if their study time is now dominated more by computers than giant stacks of identical-looking books. (Do they still even have those? Are they just props for commercials now?)