Skeleton Crew
Contains Spoilers for Friday The 13th
Contains Spoilers for Friday The 13th
Here's the thing. As you might have guessed from a few of my previius blogs, I am A) A huge fan of horror films and B) The owner of hundreds of DVDs, a great majority of which I haven't got round to watching yet. Hell, I've got a Marilyn Monroe box set I bought about seven years ago that I haven't even opened yet. Mainly it's a time issue, but a lot of it has to do with mood. As in, what film/TV show am I in the mood for tonight.
So that's part of the reason the Rob Zombie remake/reboot/rimagining/re-whatever they're calling it these days has been sat on my shelf for - ooh - years now. I bought it even before it came out over here. I jumped the gun and got the Region 1 DVD. And yet it's still. Just. Sitting. There. It mocks me sometimes in the middle of the night. But I made the mistake of soaking up all the reviews which sad that it was a bad film. And that was most of them. I don't recall a single positive review (and now Zombie's making a sequel, but they made a sequel to the Steve Martin starring Pink Panther so that's not a sign of quality as it once was). You know, don't get me wrong, sometimes a bad review actually encourages me to go and see it. Not that I'm a sadomasochist or anything, but I'm a great champion of the underdog. That's why in my DVD collection today I own films like Tank Girl, The Phantom and the entire run of Enterprise (more on which later).
But where I stumbled with Halloween was all the reviews made a big thing about how the film explores who Myers is. And that's wrong. That's a method born out of hundreds of trashy goth romances. It doesn't enrich the character; it destroys him. Michael Myers is the Boogeyman. He cannot be killed, he cannot be reasoned with and he absolutely will not stop until you are dead (that's actually the Terminator there, but both him and Michael Myers come from the same stock). You flesh him out, give him a background, give him motivation, then it's just another nutter with a knife on the loose.
That's why the Blair Witch was so scary; you never saw anything, you never understood anything, it just happened. As soon as you get a guy in a big rubber costume running around it's simply not real anymore. And so you have Michael Myers explained away and he stops being a force of evil and he's just a guy in a dodgy mask.
Another film with a man in a dodgy mask is Friday the 13th, the remake of which I have seen. I wasn't sure about going to see it but I'm sorta not-quite seeing someone at the minute and I knew she's like to go and see it. And it's good. It essentially compresses the first three movies down into one (the first movie comes off the worst, given that it's three minutes of the credit sequence and the second movie becomes a half hour prologue to the main bulk of the story, starring Sam Winchester off of Supernatural.
This compression is by no means a bad thing, given that the first three Friday films, as I've already discussed here, have much the same plot.
It's an enjoyable hack and slash movie, with acres of completely gratuitous nudity (all female, as if you couldn't guess, although nothing as rampant as one of the main cast of My Bloody Valentine runing around starkers for about ten minutes) and some wonderfully gruesome deaths. It isn't in any way revolutionary. It doesn't take any liberties with Jason's heritage.
Well, apart from one thing. In the original movies, Jason just kills. He doesn't take prisoners. Yet here, he takes Sam Winchester's sister hostage and holds her in his little underground den for about six weeks. Of course, when Winchester Jnr turns up, if she's dead then Winchester has to get his revenge. If she's not dead then... actually, there we come to the problem. The movie tries to gloss over it by having Clay's sister take a locket that belonged to Mrs Voorhees (a wonderful if crininally underused Nana Visitor, a long way from DS9's Major Kira) and that's the reason why Jason doesn't kill her, but why would he then slap her in chains in his little dungeon?
It's a niggle, a small one admittedly, but one which edges this film into Texas Chainsaw territory (and I'm sure I hardly have to remind you that producer Michael Bay and director Marcus Nispel previously teamed up on the Texas Chainsaw regurgitation, the only highlight of which was seeing Jessica Beil bloosom), and while Friday might borrow liberally from other horror franchises (it is in effect Halloween with a bigger knife and a rural locale).
But overall, a good film. So, have a plucked up the gumption to subject myself to Zombie's Halloween yet? Not quite.
The screens these days are so flooded with reboots and sequels and what-have-you (probably the best film of 2007, Transformers and this years GI Joe (which has potential to be one of the worst film of all time, even if it does have the mighty Ecclescakes as shiny slaphead Destro and the fantactically grizzled Dennis Quaid as Hawk, were both inspired by toys for fuck's sake). A couple of years ago Stardust made an impact simply because it was based on a book and the last actual-honest-to-God original movie I can remember seeing an enjoying thoroughly was Juno. The big films I'm looking forward to this year are:
1) Watchmen - Graphic Novel adaptation
2) Star Trek - Long awaited reboot of a sixties TV show
3) Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince - Movie 6 in a long running series of adapatations of the novels by JK Rowling.
It's a harsh world out there, one in which the executives obviously think that having a hook, a pre-established presence to lock on to. This is the only explanation for the glut of remakes that we're currently wading through. I can only hope it stops before someone decides to remake Nightmare On Elm Street.
Oh. Too late.
Faith Of The Heart
You know, a lot of Star Trek fan hate the theme tune for Enterprise. It's true. They're so indoctrinated into what a Trek theme should be (bombastic, orchestral, full of rising crescendoes and strings) that a soft rock ballad sits ill with them.
Am I one of them?
Well, yes and no. I don't think it's a particularly good theme song, but I applaud the decision to do something a little different. If only that philosophy had continued on over into the show itself.
I've recently been reading a book in the BFI TV series about Star Trek, by Ina Rae Hark. She starts out with a lot of good stuff on the original series, TNG and especially DS9, then trails off when it comes to Voyager and has clearly exhausted herself by the time she comes round to discussing Enterprise. And it's really not her fault, because there's very little to talk about concerning Enterprise. Despite the alleged efforts of Berman and Braga, it's a very vacuous show. It doesn't even have the strong backbone of characters that saved Voyager (even if those characters only accounted for a third of the cast). Archer is a dullard, continuing on Trek's seeming obsession with giving characters obscure hobbies. In this case water polo.
Water polo. Fucking water polo? This is a series which, it was claimed, would get back to basics and make the characters more like us than the idealised versions from the 24th century. And what sport do they make the captain a fan of? American football? Hockey? Hell, by this point I would even accept basketball. But water polo? I mean, do you even know anybody who likes water polo let alone watches matches religiously?
Hark also points out that each of the writers of TNG who went on to DS9 and Voyager all had their own little niches - Ron Moore would do the big military stuff, Joe Menosky would handle the relationship things - and by the time of Enterprise, most of them had moved on, leaving Enterprise with a writing staff composed of two very old hands - Berman and Braga, who took writing credits on well over half the first season) and a bunch of newbies. It's telling that when they get people in who do know Trek, as when the Reeves-Stevenses are hired for the fourth season, the quality of the storytelling improves dramatically.
Enterprise's biggest flaw is that it is dull. And I'm halfway through watching Season 2 of it now. Unlike Stargate, where I was enjoying myself so much I was binging and watching a dozen or so episodes a day, I can barely watch two episodes of Enterprise back to back. They suck my will to live. And I'm speaking as a hardcore dyed in the wool Trekkie here. It's painful to see the Trek name get dragged through the mud by a show which obviously only survived as long as it did because of the network it was on and the fact that it was stamped with the brand. Had it been around instead on TNG in the late eighties, Trek would have been dead long before now.
Except it's not dead, is it? We have the movie to look foward to. Another reboot. But hopefully one that will return us to what made Trek great in the first place (and it's worth pointing out that the Trek movies still haven't surpassed Wrath Of Khan, a movie which is now twenty seven years old). And it's worth hoping that this movie brings us into the present, because modern Trek has always been a product of the eighties; like it or like it not, those first formative years of TNG established a great deal, some of which was very much a product of the time (the presence of a counsellor, the overwhelming biege-ness of it all, Picard's proclivity to call meetings while the Enterprise is under attack) and some of which was sound judgement (the Federation-Klingon alliance, the Romulans).
Peace out.
