Cartoon Review: Garfield's Halloween Adventure

Garfield's Halloween Adventure



You know, with the Garfield Halloween special, I'm almost inclined to link to X-Entertainment's review and call it a day. However, I decided when I started this that I would try and do more than just link to a review and then give my thoughts. It's going to be hard not to either blow this or end up doing a run down of everything that happens which is less a review and more a written description. The chief problem with Garfield is that he’s purely a cynical attempt to cash in on things. From the very start, that was Jim Davis’s idea, to make a media powerhouse and damned if he didn’t do it. With that in mind though, and that being admitted, it feel facile to simply complain that this is a cynical, phoned in attempt to grab some ratings for Halloween. Doesn’t mean that isn’t what this is, but it does feel sort of redundant at this point.

Cartoon Review: It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966 CBS, Dir. Bill Menedez)

What would Halloween be for a Baby Boomer - Gen Xer former kid without Linus Van Pelt sitting in a pumpkin patch waiting for Santa Claus to come? What's that? Oh yes, the Great Pumpkin was originally devised by Charles Schultz as an amusing story about Linus being badly confused about Christmas and Halloween. Since Linus started out as an eccentric baby in the strip, this was probably a logical extension of that. Oddly, the sun shows up twice inside of 6 seconds in this thing. Right at the opening bit, They pass the sun, and then just as Linus is going to throw the apple away they pass it again.

Movie Review: Twilight Zone: The Movie

Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983 Warner Bros. Dir. John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante & George Miller)

Hey! An anthology without AIP, Vincent Price or Stephen King’s writing! It’s not even based or inspired by EC comics! Woo! Something different. This time it’s the movie based on the Twilight Zone TV show, which probably was only made after everyone saw how well Creepshow did. Far as I can tell, Steven Spielberg & John Landis put this joint together with Frank Marshall as the Executive Producer. Sort of like how after Tales from the Darkside did so well, Spielberg made Amazing Stories. That’s not to say that this is bad or anything, just saying that it’s a copycat production made after Romero proved that it could be done. I will say however that this sort of a crystallization of these directors in that time period. Everything you want to know about Landis, Spielberg, Dante and Miller in the early 1980s, you can learn by watching this movie. They pretty much bring all their early 80s tropes with them to this production. Is that good? Is it bad? We’ll have to see…

Movie Review: The Immortals (Pain Box)

The Immortals (1995 Nu Image Films Dir. Brian Grant)

Because it takes place at Halloween, that’s why! What, was that? You hadn’t actually asked why we were watching a heist movie as part of our Halloween special? Well, that’s probably because you’d never heard of this before. And why would you? As far as I know, it was just a direct to video/cable movie that came and went like the wind during the mid-nineties when HBO was showing things like this about once a week. I saw it back in the day and I remembered it well enough that when I noticed it was part of a pain box set I bought it. I got this from Target, as part of a 1 disc, four movie set from Echo Bridge Entertainment. Welcome to the Pain Box Club guys! Actually, Echo Bridge can't be blamed for this movie. Like most Pain Box distributors, they didn't make this thing. They just acquired the rights to it. Interesting point though, they actually seem to own the rights to this movie, at least in North America. Most Pain Box makers just grab whatever is in the public domain and throw it out there. Not that I believe they meant to buy this and distribute it. I'm going to go ahead and assume that when they bought Alliance Atlantis, it was part of the library that they got with the sale. I can’t imagine anyone deciding to seek out this movie so they could have the rights, particularly not so they could release it on a disc with two other forgotten mid-90s gangster movies and a blaxploitation film. No, this smacks of “We have the rights to these, what’d you want to do with them?” However, that doesn’t mean the movie is horrible, we should give every movie that comes across our plate an equal chance to delight or at least surprise us. Particularly this one, as I remember it being pretty good.

Movie Review: Creepshow 2

Creepshow 2 (1987 New World Pictures Dir. Michael Gornick)

How do you follow the success of one of the most popular horror anthology movies ever? You make Tales from the Darkside for TV of course. What if you’re knee deep in that program and someone reminds you that Creepshow was a theatrical release and that they’d like to have another movie? Well, if you make a sort of halfhearted sequel that’s under funded and as a result fails to capture quite the spirit of the original. I place no blame at the feet of director Michael Gornick. I’ve listened to his commentary and it sounds like he made the best product he could with the tools he was given to work with. The problem was that New World Pictures was trying to make the movie on less than half what the first movie cost, which I can’t help but wonder if that frustrated Romero, which caused him to pass on directing duties. As I understand it, Romero was going to write and direct, and then decided to pass the directing duties to Tom Savini, who either because of time or not wanting to deal with what was becoming a cost cutting adventure passed it on to Gornick. Additionally, because of some production problems, the bonding company ended up placing extra pressure on the company asking them to speed up the production. So, there was some frustration in production, and that caused the end product to be less than stellar. It’s not even that this is bad, or not an enjoyable ride. It’s good, it’s fun, it’s just not as good or as fun as the original. It’s worth watching though, so let’s dive in and check it out.

Movie Review: Hamlet (review 101)

I decided, in order to make up for the abysmal showing of my 100^th review, I would make up for it by showing off something special. Something foreign with an exploitative topic of a man murdering his brother so he could bang his wife and steal the inheritance. The story of a son, discovering his father murdered flies into a murderous rage. A young girl’s boyfriend takes sexual advantage of her, murders her father, and then leaves her to fall into insanity, eventually driving her to her own suicide. It’s even got a supernatural element, just in case you were afraid that this could in anyway be considered classy. A man even gets two of his old school chums murdered, more or less for the lulz.

What is this movie you ask?

Word up for The Bard bitches!

Hamlet (1996 Castle Rock Entertainment Dir. Kenneth Branagh)

Now I know what you’re asking… am I kidding? NO! I am not. Had this been written in 1975, entitled “Prince of Blood” or any of a dozen alternate titles, and made for under $100K it would be looked down on as much as any other exploitation movie. It’s got all the nasty hooks. Ghosts, revenge, sexual shenanigans, murder, a hint of incest, bad action, characters that pop in and out of the tale at random, and huge events happening off camera. Not to spoil it for you, but one of the most important side characters in the entire play dies off screen! This is not a classy play, let’s be clear on that. This is an exploitation movie, plain and simple. It just happens to get a larger budget and better actors than most exploitation flicks. Because of that, it’s a great exploitation movie, don’t get me wrong, but it is still exploitation. Not only that, but it’s a really silly exploitation movie. Let us be perfectly frank about this so called Greatest Work of the English Language. If the script for Hamlet were handed in today, zombie Louis B. Mayer would rise up from the grave and slap the taste out of Shakespeare’s mouth.

Movie Review: Twice Told Tales

Twice-Told Tales (1963 United Artists Dir. Sidney Salkow

Hey, how about that? An anthology horror movie that isn’t based on Stephen King stories or was made by the good people at American International (a name that frankly confounds me) for a change. It still has Vincent Price in it though, so we’re not totally out to sea without a familiar landmark. We got Vinnie, we’re good. After Tales of Terror did so well, one assumes United Artists wanted to get in on the horror anthology game. Since AIP had a lock on Edgar Allan Poe's work, UA went for three stories from Nathaniel Hawthorne. Or, maybe they never even heard about Tales of Horror and it was just chance that they got AIP’s biggest star to be in a horror movie for them. Sure, that’s probably it… chance. Probably just chance that it looks like a Corman Poe movie too.

The Goonies Conundrum

If you didn’t grow up during the 80s, allow me to give you a quick catch up. In 1985, Richard Donner directed a kids adventure movie called The Goonies. It was one part Indiana Jones style adventure throw back, one part Famous Five, one part pirate story and about 6 parts pure 1980s. It was a goofy kids movie that was extremely popular back in the day, but is now a very divisive movie. Some movie geeks still hold it up as the pinnacle of Kid’s Movies, while others claim it’s a festering turd. Others, mainly hipsters who need to be drowned in a bathtub, claim it was always crap and that they never ever liked it. Most these people are the same assholes who try and convince you they always hated the Ewoks despite still having their Wicket stuffed toy from ’85.

In truth, it’s pretty hard to say the movie holds up as an adult. I have shown it to people who missed it as kids and they’ve always had the same response, “What is this crap?” This says to me that you have to view it as a kid to like it. As an experiment, I showed it to a few of kids who were between seven and ten, and they all said the same thing… “Please Mister, I won’t tell anyone, just let me go.” Once they realized they couldn’t gnaw through the restraints and that I wasn’t going to molest them or anything, they enjoyed the movie. Conclusion: You’ve got to be a kid to like Goonies. The Problem is that a lot of people who are no longer kids keep trying to watch the movie.

What always gets me is that people who really liked the movie, and come back as adults and find it didn’t revive the magic for them, get really really, really mad about it. They get very vocal about how it sucks, it always sucks, you suck for liking it and your mom sucks on the corner for nickels. You can often sense the same disappointment and resentment that comes off fanboys like a bad smell because The Star Wars didn’t leap off the screen and felate them in their seats. The magic didn’t happen twice and it’s clearly the movie’s fault!

My question however is, why would anyone expect it to? You’re an adult and it’s a kid’s movie. NOT I hearken to point out, if hearken is indeed the word I want, a family movie. Toy Story is a family movie, because both an adult and a child can watch it to be affected by its mawkish sentimentality. Goonies is a movie for kids though, without a single concession made to the adults who might be forced to watch. Not a single winking pop-culture reference or a double entendre meant to go over the tykes head to be found. Yes my dears, this is not Shrek… and thank the All Might Waffle for THAT mercy. This is purely a movie for kids, which again leads me to the question of why is a 30 year old trying to watch it? Why not move on to some adult fare for a change? It’s not for your adult self, it won’t work because they didn’t put anything for adults there. Yet, people try, and they get angry because they expect (almost to the point of demanding) that their feelings on a piece of entertainment never, ever change.

As much as I appreciate that some things from childhood can still be appreciated, ours seems to be a generation that took the Toys R Us song to heart. While I may still wish to have an action figure from time to time, to be honest I’m far more likely to buy a toy from Babeland than I am to get one from TRU. Ours is a society that is deep in a period of arrested development. We’re just remaking and repackaging things from our childhood right now. Worse yet, we’re embracing it, begging it to be as good as it was the first time. When it’s not, the disappointment comes off people like waves. This isn’t an isolated effect, I’m just pasting it to Goonies for an example.

For myself, I’ll say that Goonies doesn’t hold up for me, but I didn’t really expect it to. I don’t resent it, I have fond memories, but I have no real desire to revisit it because I feel I’m past that point. I’m sort of turned off by the treatment of Chunk these days really. Come to that, Data feels like a racist portrayal as well. Not in a way that makes me want to burn copies of the film surrounded by people in matching shirts and armbands or anything, just in a way that makes me sort of queasy. I don’t mind the movie that much though. It’s good enough for what it is, it’s just that what it is, isn’t for who I am. It was fine when I was in the demographic, but now that I’m out of it I’m no longer interested.

I’m skipping over the fact that the other side of this coin is the people who do still watch it and do still enjoy it on some level who get amazingly angry if anyone so much as says “Well, it was alright when I was a kid, but I’m not a kid anymore.” because I’ve only got so much energy, Besides, I started with a clear concept and seem to have muddied my mental waters by splashing around, so I’ll just leave it here for the moment.

More thoughts as they come to me.

Movie Review: Tales of Terror

Tales of Terror (1962 AIP Dir. Roger Corman)

Right before the out and out comedy of The Raven, the idea of adding a little lightness was experimented with in Tales of Terror. This is a little set of three Edgar Allan Poe stories, but done in that very special Corman way, by which I mean they only vaguely follow the original stories if at all. Part of the reasons Corman went on like this is that the stories are actually so short, or in some cases deal almost entirely with sensation, that it would be impossible to spin a coherent narrative out for 90 minutes. Partly it was budget constraints. Fewer characters meant fewer actors. For the most part, they pulled it off. This however, just might be the weakest of the Corman Poe Cycle. It’s okay though, chronologically they hit a low point in the middle and swept back up to great heights by the end. Usually a series dips and then just keeps going down hill, but Corman saved it and brought the whole thing to a triumphant conclusion.