Cynical Cinema

The Incredible Hulk was the third-best comic book adaptation of the past summer.  Considering, however, that the other two were Iron Man and The Dark Knight, that’s some pretty good company.  And it appears that if you’ve seen Iron Man, then you definitely have to see The Incredible Hulk.  And vice versa.  Not only are both of them terrific movies, but a tiny cameo appearance at the end of this film indicates that there will be some kind of cross-over between the two at a later date.  And that crossover is certainly something that I want to see. 

The main reason these movies are great are the actors.  Robert Downey Jr. is magnificent as Iron Man, and Edward Norton is just as good as The Incredible Hulk.  Where normally film studios making superhero movies are looking for guys with chiseled bodies and chiseled faces and “the look”, rather than people who can really act.  So we get Brandon Routh playing Superman.  Which is fine, but the added element of serious acting provided by Edward Norton as Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk creates a far more compelling movie overall. 

That being said, the other serious actors in this movie are underused.  Willima Hurt, one of the world’s great actors, plays Banner’s nemesis, General Thaddeus Ross, who wants to capture Banner to harness the power of the Hulk into a weapon.  He is cartoonish, which one would expect from a comic book movie, but I was hoping for something more.  Norton’s character isn’t a cartoon, why should Ross be one?  Same goes for Liv Tyler, who plays Banner’s obligatory love interest, and yet she serves the comic book movie cliched purpose of being in distress and getting rescued, and then complaining to her father (General Ross) about his treatment of her boyfriend.  Basically, her sole purpose in the movie is to get hurt or attacked, an event which inevitably leads to more rage in the Hulk, which allows him to become more powerful.  And that’s about it.

Tim Roth is fantastic as the really bad guy, Emil Blonsky, a commando from Russia and Britain (mostly Britain…I think).  He is so impressed with the power of the Hulk that he wants the same thing for himself, and this leads to a showdown at the end of the film between two massive behemoths in New York City.  It’s always New York City when two massive creatures have a battle to the death.  Well, New York City or Tokyo.  In this case, we don’t see any people die, or at least, we’re not certain they are dead.  But with the crazy mayhem of wreckage that exists at the end of this scene, we can only assume that hundreds of innocent people have lost their lives.  At the very least, hundreds of people lost their cars.

The Incredible Hulk works because of Norton.  The special effects are pretty good, although there are some moments where we are acutely aware that we are watching computer-generated monsters fighting.  The story movies along quickly, but for the most part it is a chase movie.  The government agents try to track down Bruce Banner, but he turns into the Hulk before they can capture him, and he wrecks a bunch of stuff and runs off, only to be tracked down again, and the whole process is repeated.  There is a love interest who exists mostly to help make him angry.  And the bad guys exist mostly to be cartoon-bad-guys, so evil that they make the Hulk seem like the good guy in comparison.

With all this going on, it would have been very easy for this movie to sink to the level of the standard, average, by-the-numbers comic book adaptation.  But it’s Norton who gives the movie it’s heart and soul, something it desperately needs.  When the movie opens, he’s a tortured man working at a soda-bottling plant in Brazil, trying desperately to keep his emotions under control.  Even when a situation calls for anger, he can’t allow himself to become excited in any way.  He wears a heart monitor to make sure that nothing goes awry, and the conflict within him is apparent.  This also leads to the best line in the movie.  In Brazil, the film is subtitled, and Banner’s Spanish isn’t exactly top-notch.  He says “don’t make me…hungry.  You wouldn’t like me when I’m…hungry.”  One of the two lines we expect in the movie - the other, “Hulk Smash!” plays out at the end.  Bases covered!

On the Blu-Ray DVD I have, there are dozens of special features, some of which are worthwhile and some of which are not.  The most interesting of these special features is an “alternate opening”, which I think would have worked better than the one they used.  Bruce Banner is running across the deserted wasteland of either Antarctica or the Arctic, having just wreaked havoc in his personal life, and seen the Hulk appear in himself for the first time.  It is incredibly poignant, as it parallels almost exactly the final scenes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein book, where Frankenstein’s monster is running off, by himself, over the ice in the Arctic.  It sets up the movie perfectly, worldlessly conveying the conflict in Banner’s tortured soul.  He can’t help what he is, but he can’t live with it either.

At the very end of The Incredible Hulk, we get a cameo appearance from another major star, one which indicates that there will be a crossover movie in the coming years between The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man and perhaps some other, as-yet-unreleased movies.  And even though I’m generally not a comic book guy, this is about the most exciting news I can imagine.  Watch these movies.  Buy Iron Man, and at the very least rent The Incredible Hulk.  Then you, too, will be prepared for the upcoming awesome.

At first, it may seem incongrous. Alliance Films is releasing a box set of two classic Japanese monster movies from fifty years ago on October 14th. And I gave one of those movies, Rodan, three stars. And I gave the other, War Of The Gargantuas, one star. And yet the box set itself gets eight. I know what you’re thinking. That doesn’t make sense. Packaging two terrible movies together does not make for a great box set. It is merely a whole lot of garbage packaged together to make a slightly bigger heap of garbage. And you would be right. However, that garbage is absolutely glorious. And it really does deserve a positive rating, one that will likely be appreciated only by the few people who have a highly developed sense of irony, or the few people who are obsessive over Japanese monster movie history. Like me. First, the movies themselves.

Rodan (***3/10): The first major monster movie after Godzilla for Toho studios in Japan. The original director of Godzilla, Ishiro Honda, was at the helm for this one as well, and much like Godzilla, the movie is a fairly thinly-veiled political and social comment. Of course, there are nuclear experiments off the coast of Japan that harm the Earth. And the Earth responds to these attacks by releasing Rodan, a giant pterodactyl-like beast that besieges Tokyo. (There are also some giant man-eating bugs.) This is the standard Japanese monster movie set-up. The human impact on the environment creates a massive blowback that threatens to consume mankind. We human beings do violence to the Earth, (like a nuclear test), and the Earth returns the favour by creating a strange, unfamiliar menace. We don’t know how to react to that menace, and we respond to that with violence as well. The violent reaction of the human beings makes the situation worse, and we’re left to wonder at the end of the movie - who is the bad guy here, the monster or us?

That being said, this is not a very good movie. In that old guy-in-a-monster-suit destroying a miniature city tradition of Japanese cinema, there are a lot of obvious blue screen shots and some hilarious smashing of toy tanks and helicopters and boats. For it’s time, 1956, the special effects are pretty good, especially the amazingly detailed miniature cities. But that was the entire point of the movie. After the special effects, the story is weak at best, featuring human beings running away from the creature, the army going after the creature, more people running, more army intervention, and then the big finish. The narration and the dialogue are ludicrous. The dubbing into English is hilarious. The final narration, when the whole movie is done, must be seen to be believed. It is one of the most cheesy, nonsensical speeches delivered on film this side of Ed Wood. And yet, it manages to somehow achieve a sort of poignancy. Bizarre!

War of the Gargantuas (*1/10): Again, Ishiro Honda took the helm for this one, which is far worse than Rodan. First of all, there is no social comment in the film whatsoever. There is an attempt, toward the end, to create in the audience a bond with one of the giant destructive creatures, in the vein of King Kong. It doesn’t work. The movie opens with a weird, froggy looking octopus in the sea attacking a ship. But at the last second the crew of that ship is saved by a monstrous green giant who rises from the sea and kills the octopus. Then HE sinks the ship. And that sets the tone for the entire movie. A guy in a green gorilla suit capsizing toy ships and flipping over houses and throwing tiny trees at another guy in a brown gorilla suit. These are not, technically, gorillas, because that had been done in King Kong. Instead, these are “gargantuas”, a term that appears to be arbitrarily chosen to describe two giant hairy humanoids that are destroying Tokyo.

The dialogue in this movie is weak, even for badly-dubbed Japanese monster movies. The plot contrivances are terrible, even for badly-thought-out Japanese monster movies. You see, the good, kind gargantua escaped from his cage where he lived with humans, caught his flesh on a rock, that flesh floated out to the sea where it bonded with plankton and created the new, sea-dwelling, evil gargantua. The military plan to trap that evil one by luring it into a trap, where they can shine lights on it and make it run away. Ummm….what kind of trap is that? The bad gargantua growls a lot, and it sounds a LOT like a jet engine. But here’s what makes this movie entirely enjoyable for those with a highly developed sense of irony:

This movie looks, a lot, like it was written, produced, directed and acted by seven-year-olds. That explains the bizarre plot contrivances and unintentional red herrings. There are laser guns, and electricity being shot at these giant creatures in the form of lightning bolts. But the real idiocy (or, genius, if you will) comes from the creatures themselves. Both of them move around as though there are un-coordinated four year olds in the suits. They shamble around like very, very small children who are still not fully accustomed to walking. The final showdown between the two gargantuas begins with them both posing AT each other, like two eight-year-olds doing “I know karate” moves. It is simply bizarre, but watched a certain way, it is amazing.

Bringing Godzilla Down To Size (*******7/10): This is a 70-minute documentary included in the box, on the Rodan disc. The history of Japanese monster movies, from Gojira (Godzilla) in 1954 until today. The documentary focuses on the craftsmen who created these movie worlds in the 1950s and 1960s. They speak passionately about the tradition of their monsters and their movies. The guy-in-a-rubber-suit style that so many North Americans make fun of today is essential to the ethos of the Japanese. And that’s exactly what I love about it. Yes, it’s cheesy. Yes, it’s OBVIOUS that it’s a guy in a rubber suit. But the craftsmanship that went into that suit, and into the little city that was incredibly rendered over many months only so it could be destroyed in a few hours, is unbelievable. The love these artists have for their creations is wonderful. And the tradition is magnificent.

The tradition arises from the context of World War II, the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan, and the American nuclear tests that took place near Japan in the 1950s. The tradition also arose from the American film King Kong in 1933. The Japanese did not have the time or the budget to do the stop-motion animation that created King Kong, so they were forced to create the man-in-a-beast-suit effects. Which some would suggest are far cooler. Then there was the politics and social environment. In the early 50s, there was a real-life nuclear scare. After an American nuclear test, the crew of a Japanese fishing boat developed radiation poisoning. There were tuna boycotts across Japan, and many demonstrations against war and against the bomb. Ishiro Honda, the original Gojira director, was an avowed pacifist, who saw Godzilla as a great way to put his anti-war, anti-bomb protest up there on the screen. If we do this to the Earth, it’s only a matter of time before the Earth does this to us.

There is one scene in this documentary that brings together three guys who have played Godzilla, that is, have been the guys inside the rubber suits in different movies. Listening to them recall the mishaps that took place on the sets, when they couldn’t see in the suits and fell over and wrecked the sets before it was time, or when they almost drowned in the water scenes, is priceless. These guys absolutely love the fact that THEY have been Godzilla. Not CGI, not stop-motion animation, they have been THAT guy in THAT suit. Their love for this creature and this tradition is palpable, and this entire box set might be worth it for that scene alone.

The Japanese monster tradition goes far beyond Godzilla, beyond Mothra and King Ghidorah and Gigan. All of it is worthwhile, for one reason or another, and this box set is an excellent place to start.

When I first started watching Rogue, the killer-crocodile movie out next Tuesday, August 12th, from Alliance Films, I was struck by the beauty of the scenery. Later, I was amazed at the quality of the filming. The killer crocodile is actually fairly realistic. Most of these killer-monster movies have a really cheesy, blue-screen monster that looks nothing like a real sabretooth tiger, or mammoth, or whatever it is. Or, they’re massive-budget, Jurassic Park type films with super-realistic monsters and dinosaurs. And Rogue falls somewhere between Mammoth and King Kong in terms of realism. Which is a pleasant surprise. The cinematography, the realism of the monster itself, and the fact that you can actually SEE it throughout the film make Rogue stand out from other cheesy schlocky monster movies.

And yet, the script is very much the same as other monster movies. At the beginning, the crocodile eats a big wildebeest. And then a bunch of tourists venture into it’s habitat. There are scared ladies who panic and freeze and put everyone else in danger. There are bad guys who get eaten by the beast, thereby saving the tourists from further irritation. There are stupid men who push little girls out of the way to go first in escaping and of course meet their well-deserved fate. There are smart guys and tough chicks and smart chicks and tough guys and kids and a dog. I bet that the dog, the kid, the smart guy and the tough chick are the ones who are left alive at the end of this movie…I was wrong. I won’t tell you which one dies, because I actually want people to watch this movie.

I couldn’t figure something out throughout the film though. There was so much cheese in it, and so many silly cliches, that I couldn’t tell whether it was just standard monster-movie idiocy or whether they were trying to be ironic and lampoon the monster movies of the world to a degree. The crocodile’s jaws make funny noises when they snap shut. Like that sound jar lids make when they are opened for the first time and that little freshness-seal button pops up. There is a LOT of blood, and some pretty gruesome death scenes. And of course there are all the characters who come straight from other monster movies. And I didn’t really know until the movie was already over. In the final credits. The song playing during the final credits - “Never Smile At A Crocodile”.

Never smile at a crocodile
No, you can’t get friendly with a crocodile
Don’t be taken in by his welcome grin
He’s imagining how well you’d fit within his skinNever smile at a crocodileNever dip your hat and stop to talk awhileNever run, walk away, say good-night, not good-dayClear the aisle but never smile at Mister Crocodile
You may very well be well bred
Lots ot etiquette in your head
But there’s always some special case, time or place
To forget etiquette
For instance:
Never smile at a crocodile
No, you can’t get friendly with a crocodile
Don’t be taken in by his welcome grin
He’s imagining how well you’d fit within his skin
Never smile at a crocodile
Never dip your hat and stop to talk awhile
Never run, walk away, say good-night, not good-day
Clear the aisle but never smile at Mister Crocodile

You know, from the Peter Pan soundtrack. And then I finally knew - it really WAS meant to be ironic! This was the big wink at the end of the movie that proved the film makers’ intentions. The movie was supposed to be cheesy and silly. And I would let people watch the movie and figure this out for themselves, but I assume that most people turn the DVD off for the credits. And as such they may be left with the confused feeling I myself had until I heard that song. So here’s what I suggest. Watch Rogue. Enjoy this movie. And take it all with a grain of salt. A grain of highly-entertaining, totally brutal and fun-filled salt.

Another movie mash-up, this time perhaps the first one ever, was 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. As is proper, Frankenstein gets top billing, since his was the superior series of movies. In fact, the Frankenstein movies were excellent up to this point, and continue being excellent through this one. In a sense, this is the sequel to both The Wolf Man and Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and House of Frankenstein, only this one involved only Frankenstein’s monster, and he isn’t portrayed by Boris Karloff, the original and best monster. Bela Lugosi, however, one of the great monster movie actors, reprises his role as the Wolf Man.The premise is solid. Grave robbers awaken the Wolf Man, who has lain dormant in his coffin for five years. Lugosi, afraid he is going to continue killing, seeks the help of Dr. Frankenstein, who has done crazy experiments altering life and death. The Wolf Man wants Frankenstein to figure out a way to kill him so he can stop injuring innocent people. However, he arrives to find Frankenstein dead and only his monster remains in his palace. The two of them recruit Frankenstein’s daughter to help find his missing notebooks so that the Wolf Man may be killed.

Of course, not everything goes to plan, and leads to the obvious conclusion of Frankenstein fighting the Wolf Man to the death. The tone of the movie is similar to the Frankenstein series, which was excellent throughout, and some of the characters - most notably the old gypsy woman - from the Wolf Man movie show up. Not essential viewing, but certainly a great addition to both the Frankenstein and Wolf Man series.

The same way I have a soft spot for ridiculously bad musical acts like Poison, I also have a soft spot for really terrible movies, like those that star Steven Seagal, and those that involve prehistoric animals terrorizing cities. So on Tuesday, I left two Rogers Video cashiers crestfallen when I rented the movie they wanted to watch that night - Mammoth! You see, there is a comet that crashes into the Earth. And it re-animates a mammoth who resides in the Museum of Natural History. This prehistoric wooly beast then takes out it’s thousands of years of anger on the poor, unsuspecting small town in which the museum is located. This is a concept right up there with the classics of the last few years, among them Megalodon, Sabretooth, and Pterodactyl.

But wait - there’s more! Not only is there a mammoth on the loose, goring people with it’s tusks and stomping them in their cars, but it is being controlled by…aliens! AND, there is a severed hand that also becomes re-animated. Terrific stuff. The one complaint I have about the film is that there is just not enough mammoth. There are some great scenes where you can see just part of the creature, since animating a whole mammoth would have been too expensive, but there is not enough stomping and goring. Too much actual story. Mammoth is great and it stars Tom Skerritt. What more could you want? A fine film, but not yet in the league of Pterodactyl.

I was excited for Dragon Wars. As those of you who read my blog regularly know, I have a serious affinity for the terrible monster movies. Mammoth! Megalodon! Ice Spiders! Well, I am sad to say that Dragon Wars does not achieve even that level of camp. This movie was apparently made with a budget of 70 million dollars. Which means the special effects are very good. Too good, in fact. The dragons (which are really snakes and flying things and walking things) are not campy because they look real enough. But this begs the same question I have asked of countless multi-million dollar movies. If you are going to spend 70 million bucks on a film, why not leave out just one of those monster-attacking-a-city scenes and spend that extra million bucks on a real screenplay, and maybe decent actors? When you have no story, you have no movie, no matter how spectacular these effects may be.

I am currently sitting in my basement, trying to avoid Maury Povich. Today his episode is about girls who used to be geeky and ugly, with self-esteem issues, and boys made fun of them. Now, several years later, however, these girls have blossomed into good looking, slutty strippers and porn stars, with self-esteem issues, and they want to rub it in the face of the boys who formerly rejected them. And for some reason, none of the guys say things like “yeah, I’m still not interested…you’re a hooker.” So I am downstairs watching Frank Capra’s briliant Mr. Deeds goes to town. Gary Cooper beats Maury Povich, hands down. And Maury Povich beats Dragon Wars, which is still on my mind. I just looked up the budget for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It cost $806,774. Frank Capra was very worried at the time, as he had gone 5% over budget in crafting this classic. I then looked up the budget for that Adam Sandler remake that sucked so much. It was shot for a mere $50,000,000. I am trying really hard to figure out why. Since there were no real special effects, and the script was stolen from an essay written by a ten-year-old for English class, I can only assume that Winona Ryder earned $3,000,000, John Turturro earned $2,000,000, and Adam Sandler earned $44,000,000 for his role in the film. And $1,000,000 was spent on sandwiches.

That is a movie that certainly proves that big budget does not translate to better quality. Which brings me back to Dragon Wars. The movie is…I guess…about a young boy who walks past a box in an antique shop of some kind, and the box opens and turns blue, and then the proprietor of that shop (played by Robert Forster, who had his chance at a career after Tarantino cast him in Jackie Brown, but wasted it on movies such as this one) tells the boy that he is the reincarnation of a Korean dude. Then he tells a story about a Korean legend where a bad guy wants to be a dragon and a good guy needs to protect a girl who is pregnant with a child that will be needed to turn the bad guy into the dragon, but for some reason the bad guy wants to kill the girl, even though she has the child inside her, and instead the good guy and the girl die, and are reincarnated as this boy and some other girl. In modern Los Angeles. So, years later, the boy has grown into an impossibly handsome young reporter, and the girl is of course gorgeous. And works somewhere. Maybe.

Anyway, then some snakes show up and eat some elephants at the zoo, and start wrecking the city. The only way to stop them is to go to some cave. But they don’t. They are taken by the snake and then have a big fight with some bad guys and some flying beasts. Then another snake shows up to attack the evil snake, and they have a big battle, full of snake-on-snake violence. Then some weird stuff happens, the old man is never heard from again, and a glow of light takes the heroine away. Sounds dumb, no? Well, I have included only the smartest parts of this film. How this film got it’s 70 million dollar budget is beyond me. Don’t you have to show someone a script, or have good actors in place, or something to justify that kind of money to a studio? Apparently not. And why, you ask, would I even bother writing about this garbage movie? Well, because no one ever, I assume, has used the words “crappy Korean monster movie” in the same review as the words “Frank Capra”. Until now.

When I picked up “Raging Sharks” from the video store, I thought I was in for a real bad-movie treat in the afternoon.  And I was partly right.  As far as B-grade, poorly filmed monster movies go, however, there are dozens that leap to mind right away that are far more entertaining than this one.  Don’t get me wrong - all the proper plot elements are there to make this one a classic of the bad movies.  The sharks which are, for some reason, filled with “rage” and who attack everyone in sight.  The tough-as-nails marine submarine captain.  The evil bad guy who shows up and does evil-bad-guy things for no apparent reason, or at least for no good, explainable reason.  The sad, pathetic, porn-level acting from the main characters.  The three female stars who are clearly chosen for their fat puffy lips more than for any other reason.  And, of course, the aliens.  There are aliens.  Put these things together, and you should have a movie bad enough to laugh at all the way through.

 But the worst thing a film like this can do is to bore you.  It must be consistently ridiculous, and contantly awful, and the action should never stop sucking.  However, this is where Raging Sharks goes wrong.  Not that there are moments where it is good, but rather there are moments where nothing is happening at all.  Which means there are stretches of twenty minutes where you have nothing to watch except horrible acting.  Which is funny for three minutes, but then you want to see stupid shark scenes and badly-shot explosions and inexplicable alien visits.  So you’re almost asleep when the next idiotic shark scene takes place.

 The sharks are the best part of this film, but they play a very small role, considering they are the title characters.  You see, they attack people, but on a low budget that means that all you get to see is a shark mouth opening really fast, water splashing, and red dye poured into the water, followed by shots of disembodied hands floating to the bottom.  In fact, this film is SO low-budget that the same exact shark shots are used in nearly every shark attack.  And the best part - the sharks ROAR.  Like lions.  In fact, I am almost positive they took the audio of the lions roaring in kids movies like Madagascar and The Wild, and put it into their soundtrack where they believed the sharks should be roaring.  

 The movie does not even wait to reveal the involvement of aliens.  The very first shot in this film is on of two alien spacecraft smashing into one another, dislodging some sort of fuel cell that careens into the ocean on Earth (of course it hits a boat on the way down).  The aliens do not appear again until the very end of the film, and even then they are just there.  They don’t do anything.  They just come to get their fuel cell back.  The end.  In the meantime, the three lead actresses compete for the puffy-lips crown.  Vanessa Angel, who already had very puffy lips in the excellent film Kingpin, seems to have overdosed on collagen since then, and now has a what looks to be a fat guy’s pink ass on her face.  Elise Muller and Simona Levin also provide some full-lipped entertainment, which is a little funnier because it clearly makes them incapable of pronouncing most words properly.

The main action takes place on an underwater research station (as it always does in cheesy shark movies), a station apparently situated about eleven feet from the surface, as scuba divers are able to get in and out.  A bonkers premise like this one promises way more campy idiocy than this movie delivers, and that is a real shame.  Aliens, cruddy shark attacks, pointless bad guys and horrible poofy-lipped acting all spell camptastic, but this movie can’t even do that right.  This film is a turd.