A Hawaiian, an Australian and a Brit Walk Into a Car Wash ...

There's nothing wrong with The Crazies, Breck (Sahara) Eisner's new remake of an almost-completely-forgotten George Romero quasi-zombie movie of the early Seventies.  There are a few pretty cool scenes, some credible acting, and decent production values throughout. The script itself has some real logic problems and fuzzy continuity, but the feeling in general, with more than 0% positive reviews clocking in on Rotten Tomatoes, seems to be, "What the heck? It's just a friggin' zombie movie, dude!" 

A minor but mildly interesting thing is that the main characters in this survival-slash-government-paranoia actioner are all salt-of-the-earth Midwestern types; the story takes place entirely in a small Ohio town, population 1,200 and something (think of it this way: they keep talking about escape to the Big City ... of Cedar Rapids).  However, not one of the three principals is actually from the continental United States, and two are from much farther away.

Timothy Olyphant, playing the earnest and admirable sheriff in a bad place, is best known as Seth Bullock in HBO's rather amazing series Deadwood, in which he played an earnest and admirable sheriff in a bad place.  Tim was born in Hawaii. His wife, the town's doctor, is played by the radiant Radha Mitchell, an Australian actress best known for kicking ass a little more efficiently a few years back in Pitch Black.  And the most convincing and 'regional' role in the mix in Joe Anderson, playing Olyphant's deputy Russell.  Anderson is British, though he's been hanging around American movie-makers for a while now. He's probably most memorable to Rush-types as one of the ill-fated tourists in The Ruins (but then weren't they all ill-fated?).  Only Danielle Panabaker, in a decidedly secondary (and sadly temporary) role, could lay claim to some kind of Midwestern roots -- if you consider Georgia the Midwest.  It's just worth nothing that the most convincing, even quintessential "American" roles are taken here by people that are anything but.  And they're all actually pretty good.  (They all have pretty good horror-movie pedigrees, too: not just Mitchell's Pitch and Anderson's Ruins, but Panabaker was a principle in the remake of Friday the 13th, and even Olyphant did his horror duty, as a major player in The Perfect Getaway earlier this year and in the best-forgotten film version of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher n the fortunately dimmified past. The Crazies opens today, Friday the 25th.  You can see one of our editors' take on it over at ScriptPhd, or a different (and far more sarcastic) version here at The Rush, in Contrariwise.

 

Survivors Returns, To the Beeb and BBC America

A couple years back, the BBC premiered one of those rare reboots that's actually not half-bad (see an earlier post on Plisskin, Snake for a short and incomplete list of the bad remakes/reboots). This one is Survivors, the modernized of a popular speculative series of the Seventies, in which a deadly "European Flu" wipes out 99% or more of the population, and we follow a group of good-hearted but damaged survivors as they try to ... well, just survive at first, and then more intentionally try to rebuild the world, with the interference and help of other survival cells and the remains of a government that's going very solidly to the right.

There's some good thinking, some strong British acting, and some realistic and heart-wrenching characterizations in this piece, which manages to stay ominous without being grim. And it was good enough for the BBC to commission a second set of shows, which began running in the UK this January.  Now BBC America is reshowing Season One, hopefully in preparation for bringing the second series across the pond.  Worth a look, especially if you're a lover of the post-apocalyptic thriller ... or just good suspenseful storytelling. 

Series One is not yet available on DVD, so see if you can catch one of the multiple showings on BBC America in the coming weeks.  And strangely, you can get the British novelization of the first series from the late Seventies, written by the notorious Terry Nation.  Odd.

 

May the Best Wolfman Win

The Benicio del Toro Wolfman opens today to decidedly mixed reviews (our favorite, from the often insight What Would Toto Watch: "Where  did we put that silver bullet again?"), but one thing is undeniable: our culture loves the icon of the Man-Beastt.  

Other, far better popcult polymaths than us have already put together nearly endless lists of lycanthropic antecedents in the media, beginning with the 1941 Lon Cheney Wolfman (upon which the del Toro Wolfman is oh so loosely based) to The Wolfen, American Werewolf in London, The Howling, She-Wolf of London, Werewolf By Night, Silver Bullet, The Monster Squad, Wolf Lake, Wolfie of The Groovie Ghoulies, and on and on and on.  But what's the real attraction here?  Why does this cultural icon continue to have such lunatic (literally!) attraction?

It's something more than multiple personalities, or more precisely with the Jekyll and Hyde phenomenon, or the acknowledgment of each human's darker, bestial 'inner self.'  At some level, it's really -- strongly and simply -- about raw madness, about losing control, and the endless fascination with watching a man go insane, right in front of you.

Unfortunately, the imagery of transformation that was so powerful when it was created by Universal more than 75 years ago has lost much of its impact with age; it's sad to recall that some of the most vivid and durable reiterations of the image, from Teen Wolf to the Lycans, were partial or complete parodies of the horror-movie cliche.  But the hallucinatory strength of the wolf did get a much-needed revivification in animator Tom Hope's remarkable animated short, The Wolfman.  Made more than ten years ago, it's a six-minute reminder of  just how all-fired crazy the idea of a human becoming a wolf really is, and why we love it so.

Watch it here or hop on over to YouTube.  But believe what we say: you can get all the wild-ass excitemen tof The Werewolf, and probably more than The Wolfman (2010) can offer, right here in this powerful little package.  

Click below, but .. .bewaaaaaare ... 

 

Snake Plissken Lives! (And Leave Him Alone!)

To put it simply: it's a bad idea. With a couple of notable exception -- the Kurtzman/Orci Star Trek and the Nolan Batmans -- reboots and remakes always seems to end badly. Consider Mission Impossible, Charlie's Angels, Starsky and Hutch, Halloween, Superman, Bewitched, Psycho, and on and on. And to steal a phrase from the military, when it comes to future projects, like the upcoming A-Team reboot ... confidence is not high.

But once in a while, once in a while you can see a glimmer of hope.  And if Claude Brodesser-Akner's article over at the New York Magazine web site is even half right, there seem to be a slim possibility that  the remake/reboot of John Carpenter's thriller / science fiction / post-apocalypse / action/adventure classic, Escape from New York will not totally suck.  As Claude reports:

"We learned that in order to land the rights, New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating, among other things, that Plissken "must be called 'Snake'"; "must wear an eye patch"; and that he would — and we're not making this up — "always be a 'bad-ass.'"; So, if you ever catch the new Snake watching Grey’s Anatomy or complaining that the senator isn't "emotionally available," just know that somewhere, some poor development exec is about to be carted off to jail."

You can read the details of the reboot here, and buy the original here. And hey, turn that anticipatory frown upside down, lovers of Snake Plisskin! It might turn out okay!

Credit Where Credit is Due Department: First word of the New York column came to us by way of columnist/blogger Sarah Weinman's terrific Twitterfeed and Blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.  Well worth bookmarking, following, feeding, and caring for.

 

Not Your Father's Stepfather (And Why Not?)

Way back in 1987, the phenomenal Donald Westlake wrote a tidy little serial-killer movie called The Stepfather. It was made with actors you never heard of (with the possible exception of former supermodel, soon-to-be-runner-up-Charlie's-Angel Shelly Hack) and folks, it was just plain creepy. The best part of it was the understated and eerie performance by then-unknown character actor Terry O'Quinn, who's gone on to late-in-life fame and fortune as Locke on Lost. 
Maybe it was memorable because it was one of the first of its kind; today, the story seems a bit thin and familiar, and some of the performance strained to say the least.  But the basic story (not terribly unlike the "Trinity" storyline in last season's Dexter) of the demented "family man" who keeps trying to build the perfect family, only to be homicidally disappointed remains strong.  In its own way, it's a small and half-forgotten gem. (Andrew Wickliffe of The Stop Button and Matthew Hurwitz of Cinemachine do a nice commentary about the '87 film on The Alan Smithee Podcast.  Check it out.)


But not forgotten enough, apparently.  Because somebody dug up the rights to the late Mr. Westlake's screenplay and did an awful thing to it: they remade it into a boring, puzzling mess when they really should have left well enough alone.

Dylan Walsh of Nip/Tuck is no Terry O'Quinn, and Sela Ward, though she tries earnestly, can't make this work either. Worst and most puzzling of all, themildly (and justifiably) rebellious teenage daughter of the original film is inexplicably transformed into a son, returning home from military school, and with that change the whole dynamic of the '87 film is unalterably and tragically abandoned. 

The biggest problem is quite simple: when Stepdaddy goes on his rampage in the last reel of the original, he's a real threat and scary as hell, stalking a teenage girl and her hysterical Mom. In the remake, the son is tall, strong, and well-built, and Walsh is no ectomorph.  There's no real sense of danger or surprise (they've added some earlier, pointless murders just to juice it up, so there's no real shock in the late-coming burst of violence). The only real question is how long it will take the perfectly fit (and trained) teen hunk to kick the old serial killer's ass.  Which he does, rather handily.

Some things should be left alone. 1987's The Stepfather, for all its dated flaws, is one of them.

 

Super-Bad: The Day Costumes Killed the Justice Society

We checked in over at Smallville this week. Been a while since we stopped by, and boy, have things changed. Superboy -- d'ah, Clark -- still refuses to fly or wear the stretchy suit, but Lana's gone and Lois Lane, annoying reporter, is in, and Lex is 'dead' -- uh -- and there are so many characters from the DC Universe running around even veterans of the Comics Division of The Rush International need a scorecard to keep up ... especially when the versions we're seeing here are all funhouse-mirror versions of the characters we know and love.

It's the costumes, y'see. The costumes freak people out, including the producers. And the costumes in the recent episode called "Absolute Justice," starring Smallville versions of the Justice Society of America, including Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Stargirl, and others showed just how bad it could get.  The costume design for the episode pretty much ruined and otherwise promising premise by DC writer-superstar Geoff Johns. Get the details of what went wrong and just how wrong it went (which is filed under "Very"), with the full article in Contrariwise.

 

A Trick of Perception

Popular entertainment is all about manipulating your emotions. That's one of the reasons we like it -- because it can induce that little rush we're always talking about around here.

But it's a pretty powerful skill -- so powerful, as the Firesign Theatre reminds us, that it can only be used for Good ... or Evil.

Consider his odd little artifact we stumbled on over on YouTube a while back.  And see how hard it is not to laugh at this extremely serious scene -- also EXTREMELY NSFW!! -- from the grim and now cancelled cop drama, The Wire.  It reminds us just how suggestable we poor humans are. Which is kind of scary all by itself.

From Water Cooler to Parking Lot at the Mortuary

Remember those TV shows we used to talk about at work the next day?  The thrillers or science fiction or cults shows or action series that everybody was watching then; they were the talk of the lunch room and water cooler and the first ten minutes of any committee meeting you didn’t really want to attend. In the old days it was shows like The X-Files, Friends, and ER. More recently, it’s been Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, 24, Survivor, and Lost. And as this season began, you heard some chatter about V and FlashForward.

But here's the weird thing.  According to our patent-pending mega-scientific Rush Survey, there is exactly one show on that list that people are actually still talking about ... yet all the rest  are still on the air.

What happened?

Check out longer, wider and uncut (?) ruminations over on Contrariwise. Meanwhile ... what did you think of the Lost re-premiere?  The beginning of a satisfying conclusion or Much Ado?

Bye Bye Echo. We Hardley Knew Ye

So Dollhouse finishes up with an episode that's a sequel to a year-old episode that never actually ran on FOX.  And if there was ever pure evidence of an idea wasted by ... what, network timidity?  The shortfall of a creative vision?  Or just the structure of American television itself? ... this is the one.

Usually series like Dollhouse end with no real resolution at all (i.e., Jericho) or a hurried and unsatisfying whip-whap-whup (i.e., the American version of Life on Mars).  Once in a great while, they actually get to finish what they started just as the creators intended, as seems to be the case with the wind-up of Lost.  But rarely -- ever? -- has an essentially failed show -- a show that had obviously failed before its first season was in the can -- actually finished stronger than it began.  Only after its fate was sealed and nobody at the network seemed to give a rodent's rear did Joss Whedon find his voice and move the Dollhouse concept forward, in a dark and relentless direction that left those boring and embarrassing "kick-ass or touching hooker of the week'"storylines in the dust.

You can read a bunch more on Contrariwise, out big-long-essay section. But briefly: Epitaph Two is great.  If only the rest of Dollhouse had been half as challenging, exciting, touching, or just plain cool.  You can catch the finale right here on Hulu, and on Fox as well.  It's good stuff, especially if you saw the prequel, Epitaph One, floating around the net or hiding on the Season One DVD.  Either wait, it's worth it.

Too bad it was too late for Joss Whedon and Dollhouse -- not that a season either way would have mattered; it's more like the timing was always off, from the very beginning.  Still, it's a shame: it could have been so cool.