Showing posts with label Movie Reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movie Reviews. Show all posts

Monday, November 14, 2022

The Texas 27 Film Vault


I only recently discovered this show, which ran on Saturday nights from 1985 to 1987 on Channel 27 in Dallas. Unfortunately not much of the show survives, but there are some clips on Youtube (like this one above), and I’ll link to them in the post. 

So basically The Texas 27 Film Vault was a locally-produced “horror host” program, more notable than most because it was a precursor to MST3K with its sarcastic vibe and its elaborate host segments. Obviously The Texas 27 Film Vault never achieved the fame of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it did at least precede it; the show was already off the air before Joel Hodgson and crew began MST3K on Minneapolis public access in 1988. 

While the vibe might be the same, what elevated MST3K from the other horror host shows was that Joel and the Bots inserted themselves into the films, riffing on them; other horror hosts had done similar things in the past, but usually for just a random joke. None of them had done anything on the level of MST3K. The Film Vault is only similar in its high-concept setup; whereas Joel, per his show’s story, is a janitor who is sent to a satellite to watch “cheesy movies” with a pair of robots and riff on them (all for science, of course), in The Film Vault we have a pair of hosts who live in a massive vault beneath Dallas and whose job it is to protect cheesy movies.

But here’s the thing. I discovered MST3K around the summer of 1991; I was flipping channels one Saturday afternoon and came upon what I thought was a rerun of Dynaman, a show that had played on the TBS (or was it TNT?) show Night Flight some years before. Dynaman was a redubbed Power Rangers-type show from Japan, the dubbers – some of whom were from The Kids In The Hall, I seem to remember – giving the shows surreal/goofy plotlines. But in reality what I’d stumbled upon that Saturday afternoon was the MST3K episode Time Of The Apes…yet another Japanese production, but this one a Planet Of The Apes ripoff. And the comedians weren’t dubbing it – they were appearing in silhouette in the lower right corner of the screen and making fun of it. 

Needles to say, I became a fan…and even though I have tons of MST3K DVDs and episodes recorded on tape from back in the day, I still haven’t seen every episode. And most importantly…to this day I have never watched one of the host segments. I always skip right through them (and when the show was “live” on TV I’d surf other channels). The Joel years, the Mike years, it makes no difference. I find the host segments on MST3K irritating and unfunny, and I just want to watch the movie riffing. 

It’s the complete opposite scenario with the The Texas 27 Film Vault. In this case, I want to see the host segments and I’m not that interested in the featured films. This is because, instead of going for the goofy vibe of the MST3K host segments, the Film Vault crew went for more of a surreal, action and horror-themed setup, with the hosts blasting machine guns at giant rats and stop-motion dinosaur things. The special effects were very impressive for a locally-produced show in the mid-‘80s…indeed, the host segments in The Film Vault look even better than the professional productions MST3K featured in its latter Sci Fi channel years. 

This comes down to the show’s special effects guy, Joe Riley. When I saw his name upon discovering The Texas 27 Film Vault it really took me back – when I moved to Dallas in 1996, public access was still a thing. I soon discovered a show called The Hypnotic Eye, in which a one-eyed puppet hosted a gonzo program of Japanese monster movies, old commercials, random features on local areas of interest, and etc. The show was created, produced, hosted, and everything else, by someone named Joe Riley. Now at the time I briefly got involved with Dallas Public Access courtesy a friend named Taylor Hayden, who did his own show on there: Voodoo Plastic Arm. This show was nothing like The Hypnotic Eye, just Taylor and a random selection of local wanna-be actors doing skits (or “sketches,” as Taylor insisted on calling them). There was no theme to the show, but sometimes the skits got surreal. 

However, Joe Riley himself was a fan of Taylor’s show, and indeed snippets of Voodoo Plastic Arm can occasionally be seen on The Hypnotic Eye (for example the sixth episode; that’s Taylor at the 2:36 mark). I recall Taylor told me that he never actually met Joe Riley; Riley contacted Taylor via the Dallas Public Access community board and asked for Taylor’s permission to include some Voodoo Plastic Arm bits in his show…and of course Taylor said sure. 

Actually now that I think of it, both Taylor and I did briefly meet Joe Riley. It was at the Crystal Awards in the summer of 2000…the Crystal Awards being for Dallas Public Access. I think both Taylor’s and Joe Riley’s shows were up for “Best,” and of course The Hypnotic Eye won. I was only there because I’d written a few “sketches” for Taylor’s show…none of the ones featured in The Hypnotic Eye, though (my one chance at fame, blown!). As I recall there was a big group there with Joe Riley…in fact he might have been wearing a costume, I can’t really remember. I know I have the event on VHS somewhere. 

Well anyway I went into this digression because Joe Riley’s work is key to the high-dollar look of The Texas 27 Film Vault; there’s some cool stuff in the video above, from miniature work (including a Ray Harryhausen-type monster and a guy flying across the massive vault in a jetpack helicopter) to submachine guns that blast real fire. What makes this all the more impressive is that Riley was only 22 or 23 years old at the time, but he was capable of all these effects. Also key to the look is the set design of Ken Miller, who apparently killed himself in 1988. And speaking of which, Joe Riley himself came to a too-soon end; he died in 2007, still living here in Dallas, and he was only in his early 40s. 

Pretty much all I know about The Texas 27 Film Vault I learned from Balladeer’s Blog. Proprietor Balladeer has done a huge amount of research on the show, and even interviewed co-host Randy Clower, who per the credits wrote and directed most episodes, if not all of them.  Also the credits of the show are a lot of fun, poking fun at the people involved.

Speaking of Randy Clower, he appears to be the “RooMan296” who has created a Youtube Playlist with selected clips from The Texas 27 Film Vault, including a full episode of the show. I haven’t watched all of the uploads on the playlist yet, but one that deserves mention is the 1st Rat Attack clip, which is a compilation of host segments from two episodes in which hosts Randy and Richard, as well as the other “technicians” in the vault, go up against invading rats in a storyline that predates Aliens. But talk about super-random: a little halfway through the clip, sci-fi author John Steakley shows up, sporting a copy of his novel Armor. That paperback was ubiquitous in the ‘80s; as a sci-fi geek kid I recall seeing it everywhere, though I never read the book. 

That’s another thing that separates The Texas 27 Film Vault from Mystery Science Theater 3000: it has a bigger cast. Not only that, but there’s some definite “eye candy” in the Film Vault; with pretty women often posing as egregiously as possible in the background (not that I’m complaining). Some of the humor is also more risque than MST3K; as I say, it was certainly a more “adult” or at least “mature” show, and it easily could have become huge if it had been picked up for syndication or gotten onto cable. But if it had, it’s interesting to wonder if MST3K would’ve ever happened. 

Well anyway, this is a somewhat random post, but given the Halloween season I thought it might be a bit topical. Here’s hoping more footage is found and put up on Youtube – I think the show’s pretty great, and plus it’s a nice reminder of the lost art of original programming on local television. (Me personally, I grew up with Count Gore Vidal/Captain 20 out of Washington, DC.)

Thursday, May 5, 2022

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 17

Jim Kelly movies: 

Black Belt Jones (1974): This was to be Jim Kelly’s big role after his starmaking turn as Williams in the previous year’s Enter The Dragon. Robert Clouse again directs, but this time the film is a Blaxploitation joint with a comedy overlay. It’s still the ‘70s, though, so there’s a bit of blood at times and some random nudity. Oscar Williams handled the script (as he would for the execrable sequel, more on which below), and it seems like a clear attempt to launch Kelly as a new urban action hero. I believe Black Belt Jones did fairly well, but as it turned out this would be the only time Jim Kelly would carry a major studio film. 

As a kid I was of course familiar with Kelly, having first watched Enter The Dragon as a teen, but I didn’t discover Black Belt Jones until the summer of 1994, when I was 19 and came across the video in a Suncoast Video store (remember those?). To say this movie had an impact on me would be an understatement. Actually – it would be the theme song by Dennis Coffey (miscredited as “Dennis Coffy” in the closing credits) that had the biggest impact on me. I would watch the video just to hear the “Theme From Black Belt Jones,” and even recorded it directly onto audio tape so I could play it. I even did dumb faux-movie commercials in the campus studio and would use Coffey’s theme song on the soundtrack. As far as I’m concerned, this unjustly-overlooked track is the best song in the entire Blaxploitation soundtrack canon. Many years later I finally found a good-quality copy of it on Harmless Records’s Pulp Fusion: Revenge Of The Ghetto Grooves; “Theme From Black Belt Jones,” by the way, was never released on a Coffey LP (a 7” single – now grossly overpriced – was released on Warner Records in 1974, whereas Coffey’s albums at the time were released on Sussex), and there was never an official soundtrack release, though a bootleg came out on vinyl in 2000…recorded directly off the VHS. Luichi DeJesus, who the following year would handle the kick-ass vocoder-heavy soundtrack for Pam Grier’s Friday Foster, did the actual score for Black Belt Jones; Dennis Coffey only did the theme song and the “love theme” which plays during the ultra-bizarre “mating” sequence that occurs late in the film. 

Well, enough about the soundtrack. The movie itself also made a big impact on me. That summer of 1994 was somewhat special to me. I seem to recall spending most of it drinking and watching kung-fu movies with my college friends. Now that’s the life! We watched Black Belt Jones several times; this was also at the time that I was becoming obsessed with the early to mid 1970s. I was born in 1974, the year this film came out, and Thomas Pynchon writes in his novel V something to the effect that many people are destined to become obessed with the era in which they were born. Well, that summer was when it started for me…but then, at the time the entire ‘70s obsession was in full swing. The Beastie Boys of course were at the center of that, with their “Sabotage” video being a faux-‘70s cop show and ‘70s references throughout their albums (including a Dennis Coffey reference in their 1992 B-side “Skills To Pay The Bills”). To this day I’m still fascinated by this era, and what’s funny is that 1994 is now longer ago than the ‘70s were when I first watched the movie – at the time, Black Belt Jones had only been released 20 years before. But man, as hard as it is to believe, 1994 was 28 years ago! WTF!? Now that I think of it, there might be some kid out there now who was born in ’94 and is thus obsessed with the early ‘90s, the poor bastard... 

I watched that video untold times, but at some point lost my copy – I seem to recall someone “borrowed” it. It wasn’t until 2010 that I watched the movie again; this was when Black Belt Jones was finally released on DVD, along with two other Jim Kelly films (plus one with Rockne Tarkington, the actor who was originally set to play Williams in Enter The Dragon). Seeing the movie in remastered widescreen was almost like seeing it for the first time, but man I still remembered all the lines, all the story beats. Hey listen, I should talk about the movie and cut out the navel gazing. So look, no one’s going to say Black Belt Jones is a classic. But I love it. And watching it again the other day (still no Blu Ray release, though), it only seems to have gotten better with age. Clouse and company were very right to get rid of the grim and gritty vibe typical of Blaxploitation and go for more of a good-spirited vibe. This is a fun movie, and Kelly carries it well. He sort of plays a less cocky version of his Williams, from Enter The Dragon, but he still has a bunch of smart-ass lines. Who exactly “Black Belt Jones” is, though, is pretty much a mystery; and yes, that’s his damn name. I mean he’s referred to as “Black Belt” for cryin’ out loud. Well anyway, when Black Belt Jones isn’t having white girls jump on a trampoline by the beach or kicking it in his ultramod bachelor pad (which is also on the beach), he seems to do odd jobs for the government. Or at least some agency. When we meet him, he’s busy protecting some dignitary from would-be assassins. Later in the film, though, he acts more in his personal interests than in any government or law enforcement capacity. 

An interesting thing about Black Belt Jones is how its template is so similar to just about any Chinese kung-fu movie you could name. I mean it’s literally about the bad guys trying to take over a martial arts school; that’s pretty much the plot for around a billion kung-fu movies. And man what a school this one is – it’s “sensei” is none other than Scatman friggin’ Crothers, playing the least believable karate master in film history. The movie never does make it clear whether Scatman’s “Pop” actually taught Black Belt Jones, but we do learn that the two men have some sort of a student-pupil connection. However, playing the emotional stuff is not Jim Kelly’s forte, so this isn’t much played up on. The convoluted story has it that the Mafia is leaning on black criminal Pinky; they want a particular building in Pinky’s domain, the building with Pop’s karate school, so Pinky and crew start leaning on Pop. Robert Clouse must have taken to actor Malik Carter, who plays Pinky; Carter even gets an “introducing” credit at the start of the movie. Several scenes are given over to Carter so he can chew scenery as the outlandish Pinky, sometimes strutting and rapping about his awesomeness. While Clouse might have seen a future star in Malik Carter, it was not to be; he only acted sporadically after this, his last role being the “night guard” in Stallone’s Cobra (1986). (I discovered this myself before the Internet Movie Database existed; I saw Cobra on cable TV not long after I got the Black Belt Jones video, and just about freaked out when I recognized none other than Pinky himself as a security guard – even though he was only on screen for a few seconds and didn’t have any dialog.) 

When Pinky leans a bit too hard on Pop, things quickly escalate. But even here Black Belt Jones does not become a violent revenge thriller a la Coffy. As I say, Jim Kelly’s Black Belt Jones never really seems to give a shit; Pinky’s plot just gives him another opportunity to “be busy lookin’ good.” Actually that’s a Williams line, but it also describes Black Belt Jones. Kelly is very much on form in this picture; he so outmatches his opponents, never tiring even after hordes of them come at him, that it almost approaches the level of a Bruceploitation movie – like Bruce Le, the fake Bruce who starred in the most loathsome Bruceploitation movies of all, where he’d fight like a thousand people and never even break a sweat. At no point does Black Belt Jones seem in trouble, even in a part where Pinky’s men capture him and attempt to beat him to death, with the warning that if Black Belt fights back one of Pop’s students will be killed. I’ve always thought that the action highlight in the film is the one toward the end on the abandoned train; this is an excellently staged sequence, which still retains the goofy comedy overlay of the film (ie the twitching knocked-out thugs, as if Black Belt has given them nerve damage in addition to a sound beating). 

The film also has some of the best foley work ever. It’s totally exaggerated; every punch and kick is magnified on the soundtrack. The producers also add a weird “bone crunching” noise at times, which is so overdone it actually can raise your hackles. It gives the impression that Black Belt’s just ruptured someone’s innards. But my favorite sound effect of all in the entire film is when Sydney, Pop’s estranged daughter (played by a fierce Gloria Hendry), bitch-slaps Black Belt before their weird mating ritual on the beach. Gloria Hendry delivers lines with aplomb throughout the film, bad-ass lines that she serves up more convincingly than even Kelly does. And they’re wonderfully un-PC, too, like when she calmly tells one of Pinky’s men, “I’ll make you look like a sick faggot.” She’s got a great one before she bitch-slaps Black Belt, too; when Black Belt tells her he “takes” what he wants, Sydney responds, “My cookie would kill you.” You can check this scene out here – listen to that bitch slap! And this mating sequence deal, scored by Coffey’s “Love Theme From Black Belt Jones,” is a bizarre bit that features Black Belt and Syndey chasing each other around the beach and beating each other up as foreplay. There’s a random bit, in an altogether random scene, where they come across a fat hippie strumming his acoustic guitar along the beach, and the two sadists smash the guitar up; you can see this at the end of the clip I linked to above. Folks, the fat hippie looks so much like Wayne’s World 2-era Chris Farley that you almost wonder if the dude traveled back in time – he even has the same overdone reactions as Farley when they grab his guitar. 

The climax is underwhelming after the fight in the empty train; it’s pretty goofy, too, with a seemingly-endless tide of thugs coming out of the soap bubbles to be knocked out by Black Belt and then escorted into a sanitation truck by Sydney. And yes, soap bubbles; the final fight occurs in a car wash that’s gone haywire. Also here one will spot a cameo by Bob Wall, who played a sadistic henchman in Enter The Dragon; here he plays a geeky Mafia chauffeur. I’m cool with the underwhelming climax, though, as it retains the spirit of the overall film. It’s the dialog that’s key for me; I could quote this movie all day, from the kid’s “She was bad! She was good!” when referring to Sydney’s karate skills to Black Belt’s triumphant, “Let’s go to McDonald’s!” after foiling Pinky. And of course, Black Belt’s “Batman, motherfucker!”  Clouse and crew keep the action moving, with a lot of fun sequences, like when Black Belt employs those white trampoline girls on a heist. It’s a little bumpy at the start, though; I mean I don’t watch a movie titled Black Belt Jones and expect to see Scatman Crothers arguing with his heavyset girlfriend. (A scene which regardless features more wonderfully un-PC dialog, ie “I’ll slap the black off you!”) Once Gloria Hendry shows up it’s as if the movie takes on a new drive, and she acquits herself well in the action scenes, really selling her punches and kicks. 

I’ve gone on and on about Black Belt Jones but I feel like I really haven’t said much about it. I’ll just leave it that it’s a fun movie, and I bet it was fun as hell to see it on the bigscreen in 1974 – I can just imagine a pack of inner-city kids enthusing over it in some theater on 42nd Street. And the movie did well enough that it warranted a sequel, something I wasn’t aware of until the DVD release in 2010. And speaking of which… 

Hot Potato (1975): This movie was so goddamn stupid I scanned through it and didn’t even watch the whole thing; a half-assed movie deserves a half-assed review. Like Black Samurai, this is another one that has a copyright that differs from the release date; Hot Potato is copyright 1975, so far as the opening credits are concerned, but was apparently released in 1976. It’s also a sequel to Black Belt Jones, though you’d never know it. Jim Kelly plays “Jones,” apparently as in “Black Belt Jones,” but he’s never referred to by that name, and no other actors from the previous film are in this one. Indeed, absolutely no mention is made of that previous film. Hot Potato was written by Oscar Williams, who also wrote Black Belt Jones, but he directs this time as well. What a bad decision for the studio; Hot Potato makes Black Belt Jones look like Citizen Kane. It’s messy and chaotic, and I actually felt embarrassed for Jim Kelly. Whereas the previous film had an accent on comedy, it still featured some violent action and everything didn’t seem to be a joke to the characters. Not so here; the entire stupid movie is nothing but comedy, and unfunny comedy, to boot – like Jim Kelly and his colleagues watching a fat man and woman challenge each other to an eating contest, and the gross spectacle just keeps going on and on, complete with gut-churning overdubbed “eating” sounds. 

Kelly himself looks bored this time…he looks older than he did just a year before, and also for some reason he’s shaved off his sideburns. There are some parts I kid you not where he looks like ol’ Barry Obama – check out the final fight scene. It’s like Obama with a natural! I’m guessing at this point Jim Kelly must’ve realized his moment in the limelight had already passed him by; surely he had to realize this movie was a turkey. Maybe he did it because he figured the guy who wrote Black Belt Jones couldn’t do him wrong. Obviously he was proven wrong. Or hell, maybe Kelly just wanted a vacation in Thailand (the entire film takes place there – again, a far cry from the urban setting of the previous film). I also feel bad for the Warners marketing department, as they had to try to get people to pay to see this piece of shit. Well, I’ve spent enough time on this one…it’s lame, Jim Kelly’s barely in it (and when he is, he’s usually just standing around), and the focus is on lame comedy throughout. What’s crazy is, despite the suckitude, the film actually looks like a big-budget venture when compared to the cheap productions Kelly would find himself starring in next. Speaking of which… 

Black Samurai (1976): As with Hot Potato, this one has differing copyright and release dates – it’s copyright 1976, but seems to have been released in 1977. It certainly seems more “mid-‘70s” than “disco ‘70s.” Even though it isn’t a big studio production like his previous films, Jim Kelly is back to his old self in this one…you’d think it was actually shot before Hot Potato. Maybe he thought it would lead to a franchise – which the film should have. Well anyway, this is of course a filmed adaptation of Marc Oldens Black Samurai – specifcally, an adaptation of Black Samurai #6: The Warlock. While lots has been changed to accommodate the small budget (the entire second half of the film takes place in one location, for example, despite the globe-hopping of the source novel), the film is still faithful to the bare bones of the novel’s plot. And almost all of the characters from The Warlock are here, though in a lessened state: Synne, the hot-as-hell black beauty of the novel, has lost her silver hair; Bone, the hulking gay albino henchman, is a black guy (though it’s intimated in overdubbed dialog during the climactic fight that he’s still gay in the film); and most humorously of all, Rheinhardt, the werewolf in the novel, has been changed to…a midget. But then there were midgets throughout The Warlock, and sure, they were transvestite midgets who wielded whips and wore s&m getups, but at least director Al Adamson was still somewhat faithful to the novel with this change. 

But he made some strange changes which were not faithful to the novel. For one, Robert “Black Samurai” Sand (ie Jim Kelly) does not report to former President William Baron Clarke in the movie; instead, Sand works for D.R.A.G.O.N. (as in, “Enter The;” no doubt Adamson was trying to refer back to Kelly’s most famous movie). And whereas Robert Sand in the novels was a somewhat-terse badass who favored a samurai sword and a .45, the Sand of the movie is a James Bond wannabe, complete with a Thunderball-esque jetpack. He also drives a purple 1972 Dino Ferrari. But man, if Adamson had dispensed with this stuff, he might’ve had sufficient budget to do a more faithful adaptation of the novel. I mean for one thing, Sand uses his samurai sword in the novels, but here he mostly relies on his hands and feet; he shoots one guy with a revolver, and later in the film affixes a silencer to a .45 (for absolutely no reason, as he’s in the friggin’ jungle at the time), but he never fires it. And he only uses a samurai sword briefly in the climax – to cut the ropes off someone. My assumption is Adamson whittled down on the sword action because it would’ve cost more so far as choreography went; it’s much cheaper to have actors just pretend to be kicked in the face than to be chopped by a sword. 

But now let me tell you how I personally learned about Black Samurai, because I’m sure you all are dying to know. I grew up with an obsession for kung-fu movies, and the early ‘90s was a cool time for this because it seemed like a ton of them suddenly came out on VHS. I built up quite a collection, despite not having much money, and on one of the videos I got there was the trailer for Black Samurai. I no longer recall what kung-fu video in particular it was that featured this trailer, but it would’ve been something I bought in 1994. This trailer, which you can see here (it was also included in Alamo Drafthouse’s 2012 Blu Ray release Trailer War), made a big impression on me. At the time I was in college, and we’d often film impromptu kung-fu parodies or whatnot…I recall often mocking this goofy commercial, in particular the line “half the world’s out to kill him.” At the time I had no idea how Black Samurai itself could even be seen – all I had was the trailer on the video. Then in 2000 or so Black Samurai was released on VHS and DVD…but I quickly learned that it was edited, with the nudity and violence removed. Fuck that! It was also at this time that I learned of Marc Olden’s source material, and while I eventually got the actual books, I still never sought out Al Adamson’s film. Actually that’s a lie, as I’d read somewhere that in the ‘80s the film had been released uncut on VHS, but this video was impossible to find – at least impossibe for me to find. And now that I think of it, I’m assuming it was this ‘80s video release that was being advertised on that video I purchased in the early ‘90s. 

Well anyway, in one of those random flukes, Black Samurai was released on Blu Ray the other year as part of “The Al Adamson Collection,” and friends it’s the uncut version that was originally released in grindhouses and drive-ins in 1977. It was a strange experience to actually watch this movie so many years after discovering it via that trailer; I almost found myself getting misty-eyed, but that was probably the cheap blended whiskey I was drinking at the time. And booze (or drugs) would certainly be recommended for anyone who chooses to watch Black Samurai. But then, the movie isn’t that bad, even though people often rake it over the coals (just check out Marty McKee’s review at Crane Shot).  I mean yeah, it is lame, but it isn’t nearly as bad as Hot Potato. And hell, I’d still rather watch Black Samurai than The Eternals. Also, the movie is deserving of at least some respect, as it was the only film adaptation of a men’s adventure series in the ‘70s – the decade that saw a glut of men’s adventure paperbacks, and Black Samurai was the only one that made it to the big screen. 

I’d love to know what Marc Olden thought of the film. Many years ago his widow Diane told me via email that Olden never met Jim Kelly, “though he admired him.” I was bummed to learn that Olden never got a chance to meet the man who brought his Robert Sand to life. One thing everyone can agree on is that Jim Kelly was the perfect Robert Sand. Unfortunately Al Adamson and his screenwriters didn’t understand the source material, because Kelly, who didn’t have the greatest of range, could’ve easily handled the character as presented in Olden’s novels. Indeed, the Robert Sand of Olden’s novels doesn’t say much – but when he does says something, it’s pretty bad-ass, and then he gets to the ass-kicking. Kelly could’ve handled this. But given how he had all the best lines in Enter The Dragon, the directors of his ensuing films tried to replicate that, so the film version of Robert Sand is a blabbermouth when compared to the novel version. He also lacks the samurai training and mindset; indeed, “Black Samurai” seems to just be this Robert Sand’s codename. He’s basically just a regular movie spy, with all the customary gadgets, only one with a little more focus in karate. No mention is made of him being an actual samurai. 

It's been twelve years(!) since I read The Warlock, but so far as I recall the bones of the novel’s plot are here in the film. And speaking of which, I really enjoyed The Warlock, but am only now starting to read the series from the beginning…not sure why I took so long, but I think it’s because I was also reading Olden’s Narc series and just wanted to focus on it first. Well anyway, same as in the source novel, the plot hinges around black magician Janicot, the warlock of the original novel’s title, taking captive Toki, daughter of Sand’s samurai trainer Mr. Konuma. Adamson and team have changed the relationships a bit, but Toki is still Robert Sand’s beloved in this one – however as mentioned Jim Kelly didn’t have the greatest range, thus he never seems all that fired up about rescuing Toki. In fact, Toki’s practically an afterthought. Oh yeah, I recall Janicot ran a sideline operation in the novel where he filmed various noteables in his black magic sex orgies, using that for blackmail…none of this is in the film. Janicot has practically been neutered in the film version; Bill Roy’s portrayal of the character is more Paul Lynde than Anton LaVey. (Seriously, it would be easy to imagine this Janicot as one of Uncle Arthur’s “special male friends.”) He makes for a lame duck villain, and his “warlock” nature isn’t nearly as exploited as in the novel. 

But let’s talk about the boobs! Seriously though, this uncut version of Black Samurai has been lost for many, many years, but the topless gals are here in all their glory. Adamson strings nudity throughout the film, befitting a movie intended for grindhouse theaters; in particular we have a dazed-looking blonde who does a practically endless striptease halfway through the film, topless throughout (the camera cuts away for the big finale when she pulls off her panties, however). Marilyn Joi as Synne also gets her top torn off by Chavez, Latino thug who in the novel ran his own drug empire, but here in the novel is another of Janicot’s men. Actually he comes off as more threatening than Janicot himself. Oh but randomly enough…Adamson kept the “lion-men” in the movie! One of the more outrageous elements of an outrageous novel made it to the film; randomly enough, Sand at one point is attacked by a pair of black guys dressed up like the savages in a 1930s jungle movie. One of them he seems to relish in killing; I’m not sure if the bloody violence was cut from the previously-available versions, but here in this Blu Ray Sand makes a few bloody kills. For example he tosses a boulder on one of the lion men, and we get a closeup of the spouting blood as the lion man floats in water. 

The karate scenes are actually pretty good. Once again Kelly comes off as vastly outmatching his opponents, but there seems to have been an attempt at actually making him work for it at times. For example the fight with Bone (Charles Grant) is pretty good – livened up by some postproduction dubbing where the two trash-talk each other. Here Sand calls Bone all kinds of inappropriate-for-today gay slurs, adding to the over-the-top vibe of the film; making it even more crazy, the actors clearly aren’t saying anything to each other and all their dialog has been dubbed in after the fact…and since you hear their voices but their lips aren’t moving it gives it all a surreal, dreamlike quality. Unintentionally avant-garde, I guess. Also, Jim Kelly fights a friggin’ vulture, but it’s staged so ineptly that again you wonder why Adamson didn’t use the money for something else. And the fight with Janicot is so lame you wonder why they even included it. But Kelly really seems invested in the role, even if the production is meager compared to his previous movies – I mean we’re talking “boom mic audio.” 

Speaking of cost-cutting, Adamson saved on the soundtrack, too. Black Samurai does not feature an original score. Adamson instead uses what’s now known as “sound library” music, ie production music created by various labels for use in film, TV, radio, and etc. The “theme song,” for example, is actually “Flashback” by Alan Hawkshaw and Keith Mansfield. The song that plays throughout the endless stripdance sequence is “Soul Slap” by Madeline Bell and Alan Parker. Some years ago a blogger by the handle Fraykers Revenge created the soundtrack for Black Samurai, tracking down each song from his vast collection of sound library releases; unfortunately his blog is long gone, but perhaps the soundtrack is still available somewhere on the internet. 

I’ve been going on and on, but I’ve gotta say Black Samurai isn’t terrible. I mean Hot Potato is terrible. Black Samurai is actually watchable, and it’s at least good enough that you wish it was better – that it had more money for the setups and locations. Jim Kelly acquits himself well, proving he could carry a film…even when wearing a very un-Robert Sand tracksuit. There’s definitely a camp quality to it, which always helps. But then perhaps my positive sentiments are due to the uncut Blu Ray; I might be complaining just like every other reviewer if I was talking about the cut version that was previously available on the market. At any rate, it makes one sorry that there wasn’t a followup; the following year Kelly starred in another Adamson production, Death Dimension, and you kind of wish they’d just done Black Samurai II instead. 

Well friends, I was going to review more of Jim Kelly’s movies (he’s always been one of my favorite actors…I mean he’s the only guy in film history who could be in a movie with Bruce Lee and actually come off as cooler than Bruce Lee), but as usual I ran on so long that I’ll have to get to the others anon; Three The Hard Way, Death Dimension, Golden Needles, etc.

Thursday, March 3, 2022

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 16

The Eternals & Modern Hollywood (A Rant) 

The Eternals (2021): If a corporate Human Resources department ever made a big-budget superhero movie, this would be the result. It’s as if such minor things as creativity and storytelling took a backseat to checking off diversity and inclusion boxes; there’s so much “representation” in this film as to be ludicrous. And you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that this rampant diversity causes many, many issues with the movie, chief among them that there’s absolutely no unity among the titular Eternals, who seem like what they are: a bunch of actors from various racial backgrounds who have been thrown together by SJW Hollywood producers. There is zero connection between this execrable film and the original Jack Kirby comics…well, Angelina Jolie’s body does conform to a Kirby-esque mold, but we're not supposed to notice things like that. Comics have been entirely de-sexualized by Hollywood, unless of course we’re talking about the male characters, who per the norm get more naked than the women do…I mean we must always subvert the male gaze while appeasing the male gays. That’s pretty much as important to modern Hollywood as the diversity and inclusion. 

The film is a 2 and a half hour slog that does a piss-poor job of introducing an unwieldy cast of characters. I mean there are like 10 or 12 “main characters” in the film, meaning that they are all reduced to ciphers for the most part. However the only name you will remember is Sersi, as her name is repeated about a million times in the film. Surely this is intentional, given that Sersi is played by a Chinese woman (one who is apparently incapable of changing her expression…seriously one of the most wooden performances I’ve witnessed in a modern film), and The Eternals is directed by…you guessed it, a Chinese woman. Sure, Sersi was a statuesque brunette in the Kirby comics, but forget about that. So if literally every character says “Sersi” about twenty times each in the film, then surely that is only a good thing. We need to be reminded of her female empowerment at all times! How else would we know she’s so important? I mean are we to expect the plot to let us know, through organic storytelling elements? No, we don’t have time for a plot – we have an agenda to push! 

Now I harp on the diversity because it is the ultimate undoing of The Eternals, yet of course it is central to the objectives of the ideologues who made the film in the first place. The Eternals, we learn, have been together for untold eons, and one of the many, many half-assed subplots (half-assed because they’re rarely elaborated upon) is that they are a “family.” And yet in a real family – that is, not the leftist modern concept of a family, where your best friends and neighbors and pet dog are your “family,” but a real actual nuclear family – there is of course diversity…yet there is also unity. There is no unity among these Eternals. I mean Sersi and top tough guy Ikaris are supposed to be in love, with the filmmakers striving to create this epic, millennia-spanning love story between the two, yet the actors have zero chemistry, and the romance is forced. That said, I kinda appreciated how Sersi clearly digs white guys; there’s only one white non-Eternal male in the movie, and Sersi’s dating him, too. I’m surprised someone didn’t catch that in the preproduction stage and revise the character to be a person of color. 

There are only two white guys among the Eternals, and of course one of them turns out to be the villain. Because of course; who else would you expect to be the villain in an overly-“diverse” cast? Did you think it would be the deaf black girl? And speaking of which, yes, there is a deaf girl among the Eternals, but if you think about it, even that is stupid. Because another of the Eternals is a genius capable of inventing advanced technology…and of course he’s a heavyset black guy who is gay (and who takes part in “the first gay kiss in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” because that’s what we go to superhero movies to see, right?)…and yet somehow, despite existing for eons and eons and eons, this super-genius never considers creating a gizmo that would allow the deaf girl to hear and speak. I mean just give him another couple million years, folks! These things take time! 

And speaking of, uh, speaking, this brings me to another issue of stupidity: all the accents. So the setup is that the Eternals have existed together as a unit for millions of years, and have been on Earth since the beginnings of history. You’d think, after all that time, that Salma Hayek’s Ajak might’ve, you know, lost her Mexican accent. Same goes for the Asian Eternals, the Indian Eternal, etc. Even the few white Eternals have accents (with Angelina Jolie’s being humorously fake). I mean don’t you think they’d all have acquired accent-neutral speeking styes after, I don’t know, a couple hundred years or so? But then, Ajak already has a Mexcan accent when the Eternals arrive in the prehistoric era, before Mexican accents even existed, same as the others already have their accents, so I realize I’m splitting hairs. Actually I’m thoroughly splitting hairs, as everyone is speaking English, which itself didn't exist yet...but then if you think about it, it’s still ridiculous, because why would the Eternals each have a different accent if they were all created by the same Celestial?  This is another mystery the movie doesn’t bother to solve, let alone acknowledge, because it goes without saying that there is absolutely no ethnicity-derived humor in the film…modern Hollywood couldn’t even conceive of such a thing, anyway. But just imagine the fun someone like Mel Brooks could’ve had with this belabored “diversity” setup in a 1970s film…you know, back when Hollywood wasn’t straightjacketed by woke ideology.   

Man, I haven’t even gotten into the plot, but I don’t want to waste too much time on that. It’s sort of like if Lost had been condensed into a movie, with constant and seemingly arbitrary flashbacks to various events in the past, as we learn how the Eternals came to Earth in the prehistoric era and have stayed here all these centuries to fight the Deviants. All at the behest of their creator, a massive being known as a Celestial. (The Celestials are the only thing in the movie that actually resemble their Jack Kirby origins…and unsuprisingly so, given that they are CGI creations and thus couldn’t be “diversified.”) The Deviants are one of the countless stupid things in The Eternals, literally only showing up when the movie needs an action scene and then disappearing. But they’re just these demonic four-legged creatures, boring CGI monsters that bring to mind the similarly-boring CGI monsters of Justice League and The Avengers. One of them, apropos of nothing, morphs into a human-like appearance and makes random grandiose speeches which ultimately have zilch to do with anything. 

Oh, and the action scenes – they suck, too. They’re just chaotic sprawls of pixels as the various CGI creations face off against one another, with the actors occasionally striking lame “heroic” poses. And for that matter the filmmakers never can figure out the powers of the various Eternals, nor how they rank against one another. We’re told Angelina Jolie’s Thera is “the greatest warrior,” yet Ikaris (I’m too disinterested to look up the actor’s name) is most often described as the most powerful of the group. Huh? But then their powers seem to depend upon the lazy plotting; Ajak fights as good as the others in the flashback scenes before apparently forgetting how to use her powers in a sequence in the modern era. Oh, and that reminds me of another stupid part…so they have all these title cards, like “Mesopotamian Period” or whatnot, to let us know when the various flashbacks occur. Then, late in the movie, we get a title card informing us, “Five days ago.” Five days ago from when? The prehistoric era sequence? The part in 400 AD India? It was just so stupid and poorly thought out that it made me laugh…but then the stupid goofs, of which there were many, were all that did make me laugh. 

Another stupid thing is that, despite being ageless, these Eternals seem to have no appreciation of time. How would it feel to live for millennia, to see humans grow old and die? Hell if I know after watching this movie. You’d think that would be a chief concern for the story to convey, but nope. As hard as it is to believe, The Highlander actually did a better job of this. One of the Eternals even has a human spouse and a child…is this his first human family in the thousands of years he’s been here on Earth? Has he had other families who grew old and died as he remained ageless? How does he connect with his young son, knowing that he will outlive him? You will not find an answer to any of these questions in The Eternals. No, the bigger concern is the ideology – because, you see, the Eternal with a human family is the gay Eternal, who you betcha has a son he’s raising with his husband. What matter such trivialities as character development when you have an agenda to push? The guy even gives an impassioned speech about “never wanting to change a single thing” about himself. Even when the world is about to end, it comes down to identity politics.

There’s so much dumb shit in this movie I could write a book about it. I mean at the end – and there are no spoilers here, but at the same time who gives a shit about this stupid movie – the godlike Celestial who created the Eternals millions of years ago pops up and snatches a few of them off the Earth to give them a good talking to. Meanwhile, a few of the other Eternals have recently left the Earth to find more of their own kind. Yet the ones who left Earth are’t collected here by the Celestial in the climax. What, this godlike, omniscient and omnipotent being couldn’t find them? I mean all you have to do is hop on a spaceship and you can totally evade your omnipotent creator? It’s all just so fucking stupid and half-assed, and clearly has been turned out by people who have “greater” priorities than just delivering a good story. This is indicative of what goes on behind the scenes in modern Hollywood – story, plot, characterization, none of that matters now. It’s all watered-down bullshit by Twitter obsessives who want to ensure they check off all the right D&I boxes in their screenplays. I mean the only thing they missed in The Eternals is a trans character, but I’m sure they’re saving that for the sequel. “I’m no longer Ikaris…I am now Chickaris!” 

Early indications were that The Eternals would be a bomb, but I’m sure it’s gone on to do well in streaming and other stuff. Shame on anyone who paid to see it, though. I saw it for free via a friend who got it on Prime or something. Actually, I know pride’s a sin and all (or at least used to be), but one thing I pride myself on is that I haven’t given Hollywood a dime in at least a decade. I cut my cable, I don’t go to movies, I don’t buy Blu Rays or DVDs of new movies, and I don’t pay to stream anything. If just a million or so more people could do that, we’d bleed Hollywood dry in a year or two…and maybe then everyone making movies now would be fired and replaced by filmmakers who don’t make woke ideology their chief concern. Because folks, don’t expect Citizen Kane or Casablanca from the social media generation. 

But then that’s just my opinion! However I watched The Eternals with my wife, who as I’ve mentioned before happens to be Chinese. Also a literal immigrant, not a liberal immigrant (in the “we’re all immigrants” sense), who grew up speaking Cantonese and Malay and immigrated here when she was a teenager. So she’s a woman of color (she hates that term, btw) and she likes superhero movies, so you’d figure she’d be the prime audience for The Eternals. She thought it was stupid, too. Which pretty much says all there is to say about this dumb movie…it can’t even cater to the audience it’s trying to cater to. But then that’s what happens when you put ideology above creativity. On the other hand, The Eternals is no doubt the direction the Marvel Cinema Universe will continue to head, following its comic-book roots; comics too have been overtaken by SJW types who use the comics as a platform for their woke ideology

Like a certain guy once said, “Everything woke turns to shit,” and friends The Eternals is all the evidence you need.

Thursday, August 12, 2021

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 15

Even More Space Race Documentaries: 

In The Shadow Of The Moon (2007): Released theatrically in 2007, director David Sington’s documentary (produced by Ron Howard) presents the novel approach of having the lunar astronauts speak directly into the camera and tell us their story, with vintage film footage bringing their words to life. This turned out to be one of the best moon landing documentaries I’ve seen; it doesn’t have the visual sweep of Apollo 11, but it has the most heart of any of these documentaries, for it quickly becomes apparent that these astronauts were profoundly changed by their lunar experiences. As the onscreen legend tells us at the opening, the 27 Apollo astronauts who voyaged to the moon between 1968 and 1972 are the only human beings in history to have actually visited another planet. And it is very compelling to watch them, older now and with decades to reflect on their experiences, as they tell us of what they encountered and how it changed them. In this regard the film pairs perfectly with Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary For All Mankind; there the astronauts also told us their thoughts, but their voices were never credited, and everything seen was archival footage. Here we see them and hear them, and it makes for absorbing viewing. 

But this is not to detract from the film footage. Sure, it doesn’t have the epic visual majesty of Apollo 11, but there is a lot of great material here. And as with For All Mankind, Sington has assembled many of the Apollo astronauts. Neil Armstrong is again a no-show, but Buzz Aldrin’s here, as is Mike Collins. Charlie Duke and Gene Cernan are also present; these two are almost the opposites of Armstrong in that they seem very willing to participate in these documentaries. Another interesting presence here is Edgar Mitchell, who I believe was sort of ostracized from the NASA world after his ESP and UFO interests became well known. In fact the following year the Discovery Channel released When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions (review forthcoming), a joint Discovery Channel-NASA production, and Mitchell’s barely a footnote in it, relegated to half-second archival footage. I’m glad he’s here, as I found his comments fascinating throughout; Mitchell, who died in 2017, would’ve certainly understood that in earlier, more magic-inclined cultures, he and his fellow lunar journeyers would’ve been seen as mystics of the highest order, given that they’d literally walked on another world. 

One of the great things about In The Shadow Of The Moon is that it shows how each of these astronauts have their own personality: Alan Bean comes off like someone’s slightly loony grandpa, Gene Cernan makes every statement as if he expects someone to chisel it in stone, Mike Collins is like the best friend you never knew you were missing, and Charlie Duke just seems happy to be there. In the celebrity lookalike contest, Buzz Aldrin here looks so much like Kirk Douglas that at first I thought it was Kirk Douglas in some sort of weird metatextual thing, and Jim “Apollo 13” Lovell looks a helluva lot more like Kevin Nealon than he does Tom Hanks. What I mean to say is, all these guys come off as just regular dudes, even Mitchell, and the way they talk so forthrightly directly into the camera you could almost get the impression that they’ve come over to your house to tell you about their moon adventures over a beer or two. 

Sington basically just lets the astronauts tell their stories and pieces this together into a running monologue. In other words, he doesn’t do much to mess things up, but I did feel that some of the shots and angles in these interviews were a bit too “art for art’s sake.” Like super extreme closeups of Mike Collins’s eyes while he’s listening to a JFK speech, etc. Sington’s use of archival footage is better, though, visually complimenting the words of his subjects. This documentary also features footage I haven’t seen in any others; when Armstrong and Aldrin break off from Columbia in the lunar module, for example, Collins says to them over the commlink, “That’s a nice looking vehicle you have there, even if it’s upside down.” To which Armstrong responds, in a rare moment of levity, “Somebody’s upside down.” 

Speaking of Armstrong, another thing that becomes clear from In The Shadow Of The Moon is that all these astronauts hold him in high respect. They almost talk about Neil Armstrong the way regular people talk about astronauts. Alan Bean tells the story, told elsewhere (particularly in Chasing The Moon), of how Armstrong barely avoided death by ejecting out of a lunar module training vehicle while test flying it, as shown in vintage footage. Bean, who shared an office and secretary with Armstrong, relates how he heard about this happening later that day, and so he went into the office – immediately after ejecting Armstrong just went back to the office to get back to his paperwork! – and he asked Armstrong about it, and a blasé Armstrong just responded, “Yeah.” Bean gets a lot of amusement out of this, and also he’s the only subject here who discusses The Right Stuff (the original Wolfe book, too, not just the movie!). He also has a laugh out loud bit where he refers again to the book when talking about how Armstrong’s lunar landing could’ve been scrapped due to low fuel. A bit, by the way, that Charlie Duke completely rips off in When We Left Earth

But then the humor is more prevalent than you’d think in this documentary. Mike Collins in particular displays a wonderful sense of humor. Another bit that made me laugh out loud was his comment on President Kennedy’s challenge to the nation in 1961: “It was beautiful in its simplicity. Where? Moon. When? End of decade.” I also appreciated his comment on the success of Apollo 11, and how everything about the mission went perfectly: “No one messed up. Even I didn’t mess up!” Speaking of Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin doesn’t feauture as much as you’d think he would, and for the most part his most memorable comments are about how he must live up to his historical moment every day of his life, and also how he was sort of the butt of a joke among the other astronauts in that at the time he was so focused on the lunar “rendezvous” operation that he would rarely talk about anything else, so people would try to avoid him. Aldrin displays his own sense of humor, too; here is likely the only documentary in which the man himself will tell you that he took so long getting down the ladder of the lunar module to the moon’s surface for his first steps because…he chose that moment to, uh, fill up the urine collector inside his spacesuit. “Everyone has their own first,” Aldrin says. 

I’ve mentioned Gene Cernan in previous reviews, and again he’s a memorable presence, and one the director latched on to; indeed, the title of the documentary comes from Cernan’s monlogue about how the entire voyage of Apollo 17 (or maybe it was Apollo 10; he went to the moon twice) was in the light of the sun, until abruptly everything was dark: “We were in the shadow of the moon.” As ever he has a lot of compelling things to say. So too does Mitchell, who relates the feeling of oneness with the universe he experienced on the voyage home, a feeling that was clearly akin to the spiritual revalations experienced by ancient mystics. On the more religious side of the specturm, Charlie Duke reveals that shortly after his own trip he became a Christian. It is very interesting to watch these astronauts – trained scientists and, per Aldrin’s description in Chasing The Moon, “technical people” – talking so earnestly about their spiritual beliefs. Collins too says that his mission to the moon has made him approach life with “more equanimity,” and Bean’s comments are also memorable – he says that since his trip to the moon he’s never once complained about the weather, or about other people: “We are literally living in the Garden of Eden.” 

In fact the final half of In The Shadow Of The Moon is very emotional, a word I don’t often use here on the blog, given how its lost much meaning due to its overuse in our touchy-feely modern era. But man some of the words here are very moving, and you wonder how different the world woud be if men like this were put in positions of power. As Jim Lovell relates, these guys got so far from Earth that you could block out the entire planet with just your thumb; from that perspective, all the bullshit of Earth – the wars, politics, etc – seemed like absolutely nothing. It’s touches like this that elevate In The Shadow Of The Moon above most other documentaries, and I’m thankful of Sington for making this movie, particularly given that so many of the astronauts seen here have since passed on. 

Neil Armstrong’s presence would’ve made the documentary even better, but unfortunately he’s not here. However as things worked out, a year before he died Armstrong gave a rare interview…to an Australian accounting firm! This 2011 interview is now up on Youtube, and it’s highly recommended as it comes off like a postscript to In The Shadow Of The Moon. This 45-minute interview is more fascinating than I thought it would be; Armstrong talks about many of the same topics covered in Sington’s documentary, and we even get his side of the lunar rover training accident in which he ejected. There’s also a great part where Armstrong takes an audience through the actual landing on the moon. Fascinating stuff, and Armstrong is very relaxed and candid, and the reviewer is great as well: he’s very respectful, lets Armstrong speak, and even tries to get him to laugh a bit. He’s also damned determined to make Armstrong understand how important he is to so many people: “You’re a wonderful man,” he tells him at the end of the interview. You can tell Amrstrong really didn’t give many interviews, as most of what he says here is repeated verbatim in Armstrong

Armstrong (2019): But if that isn’t enough Neil Amrstrong for you, there’s also this 90-minute documentary directed by David Fairhead, produced with the assistance of Armstrong’s family, and featuring, uh, the voice of Harrison Ford reading material Armstrong wrote, ie “the voice of Neil Armstrong.” It’s cool Ford is here and all, but his gravelly voice sounds nothing like Armstrong’s. That being said, at least Ford’s voiceover isn’t delivered as half-assedly as it was on Blade Runner (though in Ford’s defense I read many years ago that he gave such a blasé voiceover performance in the hopes that director Ridley Scott wouldn’t use it, as he supposedly felt the film was better without a voiceover). But man, a lot of Ford’s voiceover is comprised verbatim of what Armstrong said in that 2011 interview, linked above. One wonders why they just didn’t dub Armstrong’s voice on here instead? Maybe it was a rights issue? 

Indeed, perhaps it was a rights issue, as Armstrong has the lowest production values of any of the space race documentaries I’ve reviewed here. The majority of the footage is unremastered public domain stuff, in particular sequences from Theo Kamecke’s Moonwalk One; even this is shown in the public domain 4:3 aspect ratio. We aren’t talking full remastered widescreen glory like in Apollo 11 or Chasing The Moon. One thing the documentary does have going for it is the participation of Armstrong’s family and friends, which means we get a lot of home movies and photos that you won’t see anywhere else. Otherwise the production sticks to promotional films or archival material that, as mentioned, hasn’t even been remastered. Other than that, we have talking heads who try to tell us their impressions of the man: Armstrong’s ex wife, his two sons, some friends he made later in life, and fellow astronauts Mike Collins, Frank Borman, Charlie Duke, and Dave Scott, along with NASA flight director Chris Kraft (who comes off as a particularly cantankerous 95 year-old!). 

I was gutted, as the British say, by the sequence about Armstrong’s daughter, who died at age two. Here we learn that the little girl, Armstrong’s second child, was immediately her father’s favorite, and that he would ignore anyone else when she was around. Amrstrong carried her early passing with him through the rest of his life but never spoke of it, save to close friends. It’s my understanding that the 2018 Armstrong biopic First Man reaps this for all its worth, even up to the point that the film’s big “emotional moment” is Amrstrong paying tribute to his deceased daughter on the moon…instead of planting the US flag, a moment which was infamously removed from the film. (Tellingly, only professional movie reviewers defended this – so far as audiences were concerned, though, the movie was a bomb.) So Hollywood has shown us something that 99.9% didn’t happen instead of something that 100% did. I’ve read that Armstrong’s wife complained that he didn’t take any mementos of his family along on the Apollo 11 flight, so there goes that particular Hollyood delusion…which, let’s face it, is a ripoff of the subplot in Gravity anyway. Here, though, the little girl’s presence has a real impact, brought to life by vintage photos and film, and is a million times more meaningful than anything some Hollywood hack could conjure up. 

Armstrong’s former wife Janet doesn’t come off as too bitter, but I guess there aren’t too many guys in the world who would be thrilled that their ex-wife showed up in a documentary about them. But it’s made very clear that Armstrong was hardly around and that his wife and family were low priority for him, particularly when compared to the space program. Frank Borman pretty much states the same thing about himself in his portions. But this makes it clear that Armstrong, despite being dedicated to the man at the expense of other NASA figures, doesn’t tell us much about Armstrong, because his family didn’t really ever see him. In fact it also becomes clear that Armstrong’s fellow astronauts knew him better, and even they didn’t know him that well, thus one actually learns more about him in the other docs I’ve reviewed. And for that matter, many of those astronauts had unfortunately passed away by the time Armstrong was produced; doubtless Alan Bean could’ve given us some fun material, given that he shared an office with Armstrong at NASA. 

One astronaut who is still living but doesn’t appear in Armstrong is Buzz Aldrin. But this documentary tries to imply there is a fifty-year rivalry between the two, over who toke those important first steps. Flight Director Chris Kraft happily boasts that he was the one who chose Armstrong to take the first steps on the moon: “I did it!” Kraft says that Deke Slayton pegged Buzz Aldrin for the honor, but Kraft felt that Aldrin wasn’t the right man for such a momentous occasion, and insisted the honor go to Armstrong. Kraft clarifies, “I didn’t dislike Aldrin…I didn’t like him, either.” Curiously, the same year Armstrong was released, Kraft gave an interview in which he discussed this decision further, but in the interview he states that he and Aldrin are still “good friends!” Even more curiously, this interview was published just a few days before Kraft died. Anyway, poor Buzz Aldrin doesn’t come off very well in Armstrong, which is a shame; “the voice of Neil Armstrong” (aka Harrison Ford) informs us that he personally liked Aldrin…but soon noticed some “eccentricities” about him. And yet Buzz Aldrin was just as responsible for Apollo’s success as Armstrong was, in his own way; without Aldrin’s expertise in scuba diving, NASA would’ve taken a long time to figure out how to do EVAs, aka spacewalks; per When We Left Earth (to be reviewed next time), Gene Cernan got his ass kicked while attempting an EVA, and it was up to Buzz to teach his fellow astronauts what to do on spacewalks. 

Armstrong’s post-moonwalk life is almost humorously rushed over. Granted, not many people will be going into Armstrong wanting to know about his spell as a college professor in the ‘70s, but still. It’s intimated that he became “reclusive” for a time, yet no one bothers to mention that Neil Armstrong hosted a weekly TV series in the early ‘90s: First Flights, which played on the A&E Network and featured Armstrong flying various planes. Again, Armstrong himself is a mystery; we learn his wife finally divorced him, fed up with his taciturn nature (“He had forty-eight years to change”), but Armstrong’s second wife doesn’t appear. And also the producers, perhaps chaffed that Aldrin didn’t appear, again try to stir the pot with a quick post-mission press interview in which a reporter asks the Apollo 11 crew how they’ll handle “the future” given their newfound fame. Aldrin gives a somewhat jokey response on wishing he could see the future to properly answer the question, and for no reason Armstrong razzes him: “I think it’s up to you.” Later we’re informed that Aldrin went through a few marriages, had a mental breakdown, and etc, the unstated implication that Kraft et al made the right choice. But honestly, Aldrin’s the only member of the Apollo 11 crew still living, and the dude looks fit enough to get on a flight to Mars tomorrow, so he must’ve done something right. 

Overall though, Armstrong isn’t nearly the spectacle of the other documentaries I’ve reviewed here. It’s a bit let down that a lot of it is a retread of what’s shown in the other docs, and also the footage isn’t nearly as spectacular. I did feel that the doc did a better job of focusing on Armstrong and Scott’s near-fatal Gemini mission than most other documentaries, particularly given that Scott himself is here to talk about it. Oh and Armstrong’s death isn’t even really elaborated on; basically it was completely avoidable. “Bypass surgery” is vaguely mentioned as a risky proposition for an 82 year-old man, but in reality it turns out that some sort of snafu caused Armstrong’s death. According to a news story that came out a few years after his 2012 death, the hospital gave the Armstrong family a $6 million settlement, as it turns out that the staples in Armstrong’s heart had been improperly removed after surgery, or something to that effect, and he bled to death internally. In other words, the man whose entire career had been built on careful attention to detail died due to someone else’s lack thereof. 

Still not enough Neil Armstrong for you? Then check out this clip from a 1983 Bob Hope TV special, shot for the 25th anniversary of NASA, some of which appears in the Armstrong documentary. Here you’ll see the first man on the moon in a comic dialog with Bob Hope! Armstrong’s a little stiff and awkward on stage, but his comedic timing is good…his “things that get off the ground” punchline made me laugh out loud. In the segment Bob Hope plays some clips of Armstrong’s appearance at various USO shows in Vietnam in ’69, and here Armstrong is much more comfortable, even making a risque joke for a couple blondes in the audience. (Though of course Hope – then in his late 60s – has even better ones for the two blondes.) And is it just me, or does Armstrong in the 1983 stage material give off some Dick “Bewitched” York vibes? Same mannerisms, posture, pitch of voice, etc. Yeah, it’s probably just me. 

Bonus Record Review Section: 

Michael Drew and John Petrone – The Flight Of Apollo Eleven (Jamestune Records, 1979): This obscure LP, released on a vanity label, is along the same lines as the earlier Journey To The Moon, telling the titular flight of Apollo 11 in a narrative of audio footage and original music. But there are a few differences: One, there’s no narrator here, and the story of the flight is relegated to a single side, with Side 2 being unedited versions of the songs on Side 1. The biggest difference however is the style of music – just as Journey To The Moon captured the vibe of its era with vaguely psychedelic easy listening tunes, so too does The Flight Of Apollo Eleven capture the vibe of its own era: That’s right, folks, disco! And disco of a decidedly jazz-funk vein. Everything is professionally produced and recorded, and the LP even comes in a very nice gatefold jacket that’s filled with pictures and a glossary of terms on the back, so it’s a mystery why this was released on an independent label. But I must admit that the music doesn’t capture me nearly as much as Journey To The Moon, and relegating the narrative to just one side robs the story of drama. Another difference is that there are vocals here; the last track, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” features a female singer. 

But as with that earlier LP, the actual NASA recordings are interspersed throughout, from the astronauts to Mission Control. We have some stuff here that wasn’t in Journey To The Moon, particularly a bit at the end where you can hear Nixon’s voice asking for the chaplain on the recovery ship to say a prayer. And also the LP opens with a long snippet of President Kennedy’s speech to Congress in 1961, similar to the opening track of Public Service Broadcasting’s 2015 LP The Race For Space. As mentioned Side 2 features most of the songs that were on Side 1, only in slightly different arrangements and lacking, for the most part, any of the NASA recordings. 

I’ve played the LP a few times and it still hasn’t clicked with me, as opposed to the immediate response I got from Journey To The Moon, which is still one of my all-time favorite albums. The Flight Of Apollo Eleven is so obscure I’ve not been able to find out anything about it, and there aren’t even any uploads on Youtube. However it does look like Michael Drew, crediting only himself, released the album under the title One Small Step as an “audio book,” and you can hear a few minutes excerpt on Amazon – heard in the clip is the end of track 1, all of track 2, and the beginning of track 3, all three from Side 1. No idea if this “audio book” features the entire LP, or just the Side 1 narrative. At any rate, I got my pristine copy of the LP for two dollars, so I can’t complain about the price!

Thursday, July 29, 2021

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 14

More Space Race Documentaries: 

For All Mankind (1989): This documentary still has a lot to offer, despite being a few decades old now. It’s sort of the prototype of Apollo 11; indeed, Todd Douglas Miller’s 2019 film ends with the credit “For Al and Theo.” Theo is Theo Kamecke, director of Moonwalk One, and Al is Al Reinert, who directed this theatrically-released 1989 documentary. Like Apollo 11, For All Mankind presents a concise trip to the moon and back, but with a few differences from that later film: it too features vintage audio from the era, but also includes modern voiceovers from many of the astronauts, and also it presents a sort of composite of every lunar mission (plus a clip from a Gemini-era spacewalk). In that regard it isn’t nearly the historical document that Apollo 11 is, and actually if you are familiar with the Apollo missions and the various astronauts you could get confused by the whirlwind of assembled footage. For example, Charlie Duke appears in this film as both an astronaut on the moon and a Capcom at Mission Control! Now that’s multitasking! 

Another big difference here, and one of the things that still elevates For All Mankind, is that the majority of the footage is from post-Apollo 11 missions. Whereas most other documentaries just rush through Apollos 12-17 and put the most focus on Apollo 11, here the more famous mission actually gets less screen time. But again, it’s all assembled into a composite of “one” trip, so for example you’ll see Buzz “Apollo 11” Aldrin coming down the ladder for his first steps on the moon, after Neil Armstrong has been out there for several minutes, but the voiceover is courtesy Pete “Apollo 12” Conrad, who’s talking about what it was like to be “second” on the moon. But what Conrad really means is that his was the second trip to the moon, Apollo 12, and he was the third man to walk on the moon. Regardless another thing For All Mankind has going for it is humor; here Conrad reveals that he took a bet with someone that he could say whatever he wanted when he first stepped on the moon, and thus he proclaimed with his first step: “Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!” 

One thing For All Mankind proves is that the Apollo 11 crew (Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins) was indeed a laconic bunch…even when compared to other astronauts. For the others presented here are downright giddy; these guys hoot and holler, joke constantly, occasionally sing and dance, and as seen above even lampoon famous quotes. In fact one wonders how different space history might’ve gone down if the Apollo 12 crew of Pete Conrad and Alan Bean were the first two men to walk on the moon, not Amrstrong and Aldrin; Conrad and Bean are almost a lunar comedy duo. Whereas the Apollo 11 crew approached their mission with a sort of gravitas, Apollo 12 and the rest mostly just seemed to have a good time. I wondered as I watched how it would’ve been if these later guys were really the first ones to get there, the ones that billions would’ve watched on TV…I figured it could’ve gone either way, with the public either getting more invested in the program, what with how approachable and goofy these astronauts were, or they could’ve thought the entire thing was a waste of money, being taken as a joke by the astronauts. 

The footage itself is incredible, and one of the big selling points of For All Mankind when it was released was that it was the first time many viewers got to see actual moon footage outside of the blurry black and white images that had been originally broadcast on TV. It isn’t a feast for the senses like Apollo 11 is, but it’s still in the same ballpark at least, and the Criterion Blu Ray presents it all in remastered high definition. There’s a lot of great material with the lunar rover just barrelling over the moonscape. The majority of the Mission Control footage comes from the Apollo 17 mission (as seen in The Last Steps, below), but as mentioned footage from various missions is cobbled together. This personally bugged me about the film, but honestly the less you know about the Apollo program the more you’ll enjoy For All Mankind. Another thing that added to my personal confusion was that none of the modern voiceovers are credited; you’ll hear an astronaut talking – and most of them have Southern accents, adding to the confusion – but you’re not given any info on who he is. However having seen a few of these space documentaries now, many of the voices were recognizable to me, in particular Mike Collins, Charlie Duke, Alan Bean, and Gene Cernan. 

Speaking of astronaut voices, one you won’t hear is Neil Armstrong’s. It doesn’t look like he appeared in many of these documentaries; the only one I’ve yet seen is the 2008 Discovery Channel doc When We Left Earth, which features Armstrong as one of the onscreen talking heads. Otherwise director Reinert, who apparently gathered all his audio interviews in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, has assembled at least one crew member from each of the lunar missions, ie Apollo 8 through Apollo 17. Speaking of which two more surprising no-shows are Frank “Apollo 8” Borman and Buzz Aldrin. And neither of the Apollo 14 lunar walkers – Ed Mitchell and Alan Shephard – show up. Mitchell I believe was sort of the black sheep of the space program, given his New Age/UFO interests (see below), which might explain his absence, but I’m surprised that Alan Shepard rarely features in any of these documentaries. I find his story compelling, given that he was the only Mercury Program era astronaut who actually made it onto the moon during Apollo. But the Apollo 14 mission, in all the documentaries I’ve yet seen, is usually relegated to a few super-quick clips. Mitchell did show up in In The Shadow Of The Moon (2007), at least, but given that Shepard died in 1998 I’m not sure if he appears in any of these space documentaries. 

Oh and I’ve gone this far and forgotten to mention the one thing most people talk about when it comes to For All Mankind: Brian Eno’s score. This is the most overtly “sci-fi” of all the space documentaries I’ve yet watched, and really it comes down to Eno’s work. Its ambient, synthy vibe gives everything a science fiction spin, yet at at the same time it sort of reminds me of the music I’d hear in Twin Peaks at the time. That said, there’s also a lot of country music in the film, given that so many of these astronauts were fans of it– Southern boys, remember – and they would take along tapes of country music into space. Personally if I was going into space I’d take along Electric Ladyland. Oh and one of the astronauts also plays “Thus Spake Zarathustra” in the command craft, talking about how ironic it is to be playing the theme from 2001 in space. 

But overall this gives a great view into what the lunar astronauts experienced, and the film pairs well with the later In The Shadow Of The Moon (which I meant to review this time, but given how I’ve gone on and on per usual I’ll save it for the next Random Review). Reinert only uses a little footage from Moonwalk One; even the launch prep material, of the astronauts getting suited up and waiting to leave, is from later missions. After the launch we have the aforementioned spacewalk, aka “EVA,” which actually predates any of the Apollo material – it’s Ed White performing the first American EVA in 1965. Reinert even incorporates the Apollo 13 disaster into the storyline, with an alarm flashing abruptly on the soundtrack courtesy some post-production audio. Unlike reality though, the error is quickly fixed and the composite lunar mission continues on. And speaking of multitasking, Jim “Apollo 13” Lovell also appears as both an astronaut and in Mission Control. The lunar material gets a lot of screentime, but Reinert skips over the return material, basically ending the film with a quick clip of the descent parachutes and the mandatory flashback to President Kennedy’s speech at Rice University in 1962. Throughout there is unexpected stuff, likely not seen anywhere else, like the fires of Bedouin desert tribes in the Sahara, glimpsed through the cockpit window as the ship orbits the Earth, or a part on the moon where one of the astronauts loses his footing as he walks and totally wipes out into the lunar dust. 

The “modern” audio from the various astronauts adds an extra layer to the film, giving us their thoughts. Cernan as usual stands out; his gift for gab and making “profound statements” must’ve been a godsend for these documentary directors. Reinert features long clips of Cernan’s voiceover, particularly his “The stars are my home” monologue which closes the film. Cernan’s comments also graced the closing credits of In The Shadow Of The Moon, by the way – and in fact even the title of that film was derived from one of his comments. But not always knowing who is talking does rob For All Mankind of a little emotional connection. That said, Reinert does a great job of showing how lonely the command capsule pilots could become when their two fellow crewman would descend to the moon, leaving the pilots to circle the moon alone for the next few days; Neil Armstrong’s “See ya later” to Mike Collins as Eagle breaks off from Columbia particularly comes off as touching in this regard – and also this is the only documentary where I’ve heard this audio footage. A cool thing about watching all these space docs is that you see and hear different stuff in each. 

The Last Steps (2016) Three years before the incredible Apollo 11, director Todd Douglas Miller released this mini-documentary, again for CNN films. Whereas Apollo 11 documents the first moon landing, this one documents the last, in December of 1972. The Last Steps follows the same format as the later film, using archival film (remastered in high definition) and audio footage to tell the story with no modern intrusions. And once again Matt Morton provides the score, making this come off like a proto-Apollo 11. It isn’t nearly as epic, but then it’s only 25 minutes long. This was the last Apollo launch; budget cuts cancelled any more moon landings, and Apollo 17 would be the last lunar landing: Commander Gene Cernan (who had also commanded Apollo 10), Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, and Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans. Cernan was the only one I was familiar with, given that he’s appeared in almost every space documentary I’ve yet watched. He’s quickly become one of my favorite astronauts…he has this super-serious sort of vibe, always making these “profound” statements, but at heart comes off like a fun-loving goofball. He’s like the kind of character Patrick Swayze would play, if that makes any sense. 

Anyway, it’s late ’72 now, and first thing one notices is that things have gotten a bit grungier: the hair is longer, the sideburns are thicker, the collars are more severe. Whereas Mission Control in Apollo 11 still had that natty ‘60s look, it’s replaced here with dudes sporting massive ‘staches, smoking pipes, and just in general looking like hairy freaks. Oh and speaking of Mission Control, there’s a brief clip of Jim “Apollo 8 and Apollo 13” Lovell sitting in there; again, much of this footage, as well as the ensuing lunar footage, is also seen in For All Mankind. Miller opens the documentary with some rare pre-flight PR material from Cernan, talking directly to the camera and explaining that Apollo 17 is not the “end” of space travel, just of the Apollo Program. How little did he know… From there we go to the midnight launch of the Saturn V rocket, which turned night to day – this was the launch Tom Wolfe was hired by Rolling Stone to write about, the ensuing story which became the kernel for The Right Stuff (see below). 

The launch material is thrilling, Morton’s music again providing a great soundtrack. Miller uses still photography at times, and when the ship gets to the moon we also have video – by this time NASA was able to shoot color video on the moon, though I don’t believe any of it was broadcast on television at the time. The public had pretty much grown bored with the whole space race thing, which makes you feel sort of sorry for Cernan and crew. I mean, they were still risking their lives, same as the Apollo 11 crew did, but none of their names would be cemented in history like Neil Armstrong’s was. Oh and speaking of which, it’s funny to see how blasé these moon landings had become; when Cernan and Schmitt land “Challenger” on the moon, Cernan yells, “We is here! Man, is we here!,” and the Capcom says, “Roger, Challenger, that’s super!” So much for momentous occasions. But then, Cernan and Schmitt reveal themselves to be fun-loving goofs of the highest order, gamboling across the lunar landscape like little kids on the playground, cracking jokes, and even breaking into song. 

But there is also a sense of sadness about it, as everyone involved – both the astronauts then and Miller and his crew now – knew that this was to be it for the moon landings. Cernan almost seems desperately insistent that this is not the end in his opening and closing PR interview, that the exploration of space will continue. But it was not to be – and manned space exploration still hasn’t reached the extent of the Apollo Program. As for Morton’s score, you can hear some precursors to his work on Apollo 11, though The Last Steps has a bit more of a tribal feel at times, which is nice. Morton too seems to tap into the elegiac vibe of this final Apollo mission; in the staging sequence where the rockets drop off in the blackness of space, the music is almost mournful: this will be the last time a Saturn rocket heads for the moon. 

Overall The Last Steps is a concise, entertaining mini-doc that really paves the way for what Miller would accomplish on a grander scale in Apollo 11. A lot of the footage here – especially the Mission Conrol sequences – was seen previously in For All Mankind, but here it’s shown in its proper context. Currently The Last Steps can be viewed for free on Vimeo; personally I think it should be released on a special Blu Ray with Apollo 11 and Apollo 11: Quarantine. Actually what I really think is that Smith should do a documentary for every one of the Apollo lunar missions! 

SPECIAL BONUS MAGAZINE REVIEW SECTION! 

Tom Wolfe, “Post-Orbital Remorse” (1973): Here’s an admission: I’ve never read or seen The Right Stuff. (I’ve never even seen Apollo 13or Jaws!) Several years ago I was on this crazy New Journalism kick and even then I never read Wolfe’s famous book, even though I read many other books by him. The reason was, I knew The Right Stuff focused on the earliest days of the space race, and indeed spent the majority of its opening sequences even before that, with Chuck Yeager in the ‘40s. I wanted to read about stuff from later on, at least the Gemini Program but especially Apollo. I also knew that Wolfe had originally planned to write about all three of these programs, but after spending so long on just Mercury his wife told him that he was finished with the project(!). So The Right Stuff turned out to be Wolfe’s only book on the subject, ostensibly about the Mercury Program but as mentioned taking a long time to even get there, with a lot of ‘40s test pilot stuff. 

Anyway, you often read that The Right Stuff started life as an article Wolfe wrote for Rolling Stone. I was under the impression that The Right Stuff was just a fleshed-out version of that original article, which ran in four issues of the magazine in early 1973. However this was not the case: “Post-Orbital Remorse,” the title of the series of articles, actually encompasses the entire space program up to 1972. Wolfe was hired by Jann Werner to cover Apollo 17 (see above), and while gathering material from the various astronauts at the launch he cottoned to the idea of telling the entire story. Here we can see where a lot of The Right Stuff probably came from; the article is written in this omniscient “collective voice of the astronauts,” telling “Tom” about their test pilot origins and their quest to be at the pinnacle of “the Right Stuff.” 

Even though this long article covers the entire program, you can tell Wolfe’s heart is already with the earliest days; so much of “Post-Orbital Remorse” concerns the test pilot beginnings and the Mercury Program – with of course the usual detours expected of Wolfe’s new journalism. He doesn’t touch on Gemini much, and surprisingly doesn’t even talk much about Apollo 11, but he does get into some of the other lunar flights, among them Apollo 8 (where he details Frank Borman’s bout of stomach flu). As for Apollo 17, all Wolfe really talks about is the launch, then in a later part he lampoons commander Gene Cernan’s moment of “the higher bullshit” when Cernan starts thanking countless people for the success of Apollo at a press conference. Here Wolfe goes into a humorous fantasy sequence in which a janitor pushes Cernan off stage and starts taking credit for the mission’s success. We also get some detail on the “postal flap” that plagued the Apollo 15 mission, and also a focus on Edgar Mitchell, who was forever after maligned for his New Age ESP experiments on Apollo 14; Wolfe, in that “voice of the astronauts,” ponders over Mitchell, as he has “the Rightest Stuff” of them all, what with his incredible fighter pilot and test pilot background, yet he too was humbled by his trip to the moon. 

You can also see why Wolfe titled his later book The Right Stuff, as that’s the phrase most often repeated here. The titular “Post-Orbital Remorse” only factors sporadically, and has to do with the comedown the astronauts experience after achieving the “pinnacle of the Right Stuff,” ie going to the moon or into space and then coming back to…what? As Wolfe details, there’s nowhere left to go, other than into religion (as some of the astronauts did, which Wolfe also details) or mysticism (like Mitchell) or politics (like John Glenn) or “an old-fashioned breakdown” (like Buzz Aldrin). Speaking of which, Wolfe also mentions a Volkswagen TV ad Buzz did at the time, which I’d never heard of before: you can see it on Youtube. Also Wolfe discusses things that were about to happen, like how Deke Slayton, a Mercury astronaut who was grounded due to a minor heart issue: Wolfe tells us that Deke got surgery, the issue fixed, and will soon “go up” in Skylab, which Slayton in fact did. Also Wolfe of course was unaware of stuff further in the future; he tells us that John Glenn’s first voyage into space was so magnificent to the public that New York cops broke into tears at Glenn’s parade, and Glenn was so famous NASA couldn’t let him “go up” anymore…meanwhile, Glenn did return to space, at the age of 77 in 1998. 

I don’t believe “Post-Orbital Remorse” has ever been reprinted. But someone by the name Tom Rednour on the collectSPACE forum scanned the entire series of articles onto a 24-page PDF and uploaded it here, so check it out if you’re interested.