Category: Reviews

Review: Primeval Volume One

Review: Primeval Volume One

The BBC reserves its Saturday night prime time slots for genre-bending fare and it’s where shows vie for a place.  [[[Primeval]]] is one of the newer series to occupy the coveted slot on ITV and recently completed its run on BBC America.  Today, Warner Home Video collects the first 13 episodes, comprising its first two seasons, as [[[Primeval Volume One]]], which will have to tide us over until season three kicks off next year.

Totally unrelated to [[[Doctor Who]]] or other SF series, the show seems to owe more [[[Jurassic Park]]] than anything.  We’re in a world where spatial anomalies randomly open (throughout only England it seems) and objects animal, vegetable or mineral can cross through.

On the one hand, it’s a paleontologist’s dream, on the other hand it’s also a nightmare as long extinct predators arrive seeking dinner. A group of individuals, responding to what appears to the first such rift in space/time find themselves forming as a team, working for the British government to understand the rift and keep humanity from harm.

Over the course of the six episode first season, which ran late last year, we also discover that the wife of Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) went missing eight years ago and apparently went through an earlier rift.  Very quickly, we discover there’s a lot more to her and the rift than originally imagined and suddenly we have threads to tie the episodes together in an overall arc.

Cutter, who teaches evolutionary zoologist at university, is joined by in the adventure by his colleague Stephen Hart (James Murray), who just happened to have an affair with the missing Helen (Juliet Aubrey) which makes things just a wee bit tense.  Grad student and overly enthusiastic Connor Temple (Andrew-Lee Potts) brings a geeky charm to the team which is rounded out by reptile expert Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearritt). When the government figures out these guys are the answer to an unforeseen problem, they assign overly officious Sir James Peregrine Lester (Ben Miller) to run the operation, handing the grunt work over to Claudia Brown (Lucy Brown). Sparks fly between her and Cutter as they do for Abby and Connor.

While each episode is self-contained, we discover the threats both here and to the past.  This is shown in exceedingly dramatic effect at the end of season one as Helen does something in the past that changes the future, eradicating Claudia from the timeline. As season two opens, the government has figured out the team needs a proper HQ and they start working out of the A.R.C. building which is one of the niftier set designs I’ve seen since Alias. We then meet Jenny Lewis, a PR flak to help convince the public they really aren’t seeing dinosaurs.  She happens to look just like Claudia which sets Cutter’s heart a pitter pattering.

The stories range from outright terrifying to mildly amusing.  The anomalies open between today and various tomorrows so we’re getting glimpses from different parts of the world’s evolution. A great example of that is episode 8, as worm-like creatures and their toxic atmosphere find their way into a London high rise office building.

Overall, the show looks great and is well acted.  It helps that most of the episodes have been written and directed by a small team of people so there’s a consistency to look and performance which keeps the show comfortable.  The action quotient was upped in the second season so things move along more quickly which is as it should be now that we’ve learned the premise and gotten to know the characters.

And yet…the show is entertaining but not as compelling as Doctor Who or Torchwood.  The humor is a little on the juvenile end and Helen’s evil plans just aren’t feeling very dangerous yet.  The characters and relationships feel as if they were scaled for all ages and the threats, while interesting, don’t threaten humanity or the cosmos on the same scale.

The DVD is nicely packaged and has some episodic commentary plus two documentaries on the making of the show, each produced to air at the end of each season.  The latter, “Through the Anomaly”, includes neat bits on how the actors become models to their action figures and the process toy designers currently use.

Review: ‘Berlin: City of Smoke’ by Jason Lutes

Review: ‘Berlin: City of Smoke’ by Jason Lutes

Berlin, Book Two: City of Smoke
By Jason Lutes
Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008, $19.95

More than ten years ago, Jason Lutes began serializing his long graphic novel [[[Berlin]]] in a comic of the same name. Making long-form comics is long, hard work – more like an ultramarathon than any other art form – and this year finally sees the publication of the second part of that story. Even now, the end is still probably four or five years away –although we can certainly know what will happen in Berlin, and guess what will happen to these people, as 1929 slides into ‘30 into ‘31.

Berlin is a dense, complicated story with a large cast of characters, told in a naturalistic, cinematic way, without identifying captions or explanatory notes. That keeps from slowing down the reading experience, and the characters are always recognizable – but it does make it hard to review the book, when I realize that “the Jewish orphan girl” was probably named twice in the entire two hundred pages. (And with two different names at that.)

Berlin takes place in the last days of the post-Great War Weimar Republic, and its implicit theme is the battle between fascism and communism. (Given the time and the place, one need not even pause a moment to guess which side Lutes comes down on. This is unfortunate, though – and more so the more a reader knows about history – since we all know the fascists will win, and that things aren’t going to get better for a long time. And even if the Communists flee to the Soviet Union, they won’t escape the Nazis that way – much less escape oppression, war, and mass death.) The characters are mostly at the lower end of middle-class, if not outright poor, with some secondary characters higher up the income ladder, and they also tend to be outcasts and bohemians of one sort or another: musicians, reporters, artists, lesbians, Jews, tramps, black Americans. Again, one notes that these are all people who will not fare well under Nazi rule.

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Review: ‘Popeye the Sailor Volume Three’

Review: ‘Popeye the Sailor Volume Three’

By 1935, [[[Popeye the Sailor Man] was considered more popular than Mickey Mouse and his animated exploits thrilled theater goers year after year as the Fleischer Studios continued to churn them out almost monthly. When they began running on television, the animated exploits delighted a new generation of viewers and keeping the character viable long after his comic strip passed its peak.

Warner Home Video finally cleared all the legal problems and began to restore and collect these classic cartoons on DVD.  The first volume, four discs and 60 episodes, came out to great acclaim in 2007.  A second two-disc set came out earlier this year and on Tuesday, the third volume will be released.  On this set, another 32 cartoons are collected, covering 1941-1943.

By this time, there was evolution to characters and the content.  First, in May 1941, Paramount bought out the Fleischers and by year’s end fired the feuding brothers and changed the name of the outfit to Famous Studios. Along the way Popeye was softened and made less ugly and more adorable.  His dark sailor suit was also traded in for Navy whites as he enlisted when America entered World War II (an outfit he’d wear through the 1960s).  As a result, much of the content has patriotic themes and imagery.  Interestingly, we often saw the Sailor Man confounded by the complexity of modern warships leading to much fish out of water humor. There’s one, “Many Tanks” where Bluto is seen in the Army, swapping uniforms with Popeye so he can date Olive, leaving a confused Popeye manning a tank. Being the war, of course, the depiction of the Japanese opponents are stereotypical and offensive to today’s eyes but a product of their times.

In the end, though, Popeye always comes out on top and is recognized for his heroism.

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Horror Review: [[[Last House in the Woods]]]

Last House BoxSynopsis:

All Aura and Rino wanted was to find a secluded place where they could make love in nature, but the appearance of three sadistic bullies soon sends a romantic evening alone careening into violence. In the ensuing struggle, the couple is tortured nearly to death. Mercifully, the couple is rescued by tough-talking Clara and pistol-packing Antonio. After chasing the attackers away, Clara and Antonio offer to take Rino and Aurora to their remote cabin in order to recover, an offer which the frightened youngsters appreciatively accept. Upon arriving at the isolated abode, however, Rino and Aurora quickly realize that their troubles may have just begun.

Lowdown:

Those who enjoy any type of horror flick that would normally read on a marquee “GORE FEST” will enjoy this picture. Almost derived from a [[[Texas Chainsaw Massacre]]] script, there is plenty of dismemberment, gore, and even some intense makeup throughout the film which will make you cringe-o-plenty. The title, which isn’t the original–but changed when released for the US–wants you to compare this to Wes Craven’s [[[Last House on the Left]]], and while there are a few similar elements, this needs to be taken as a seperate, gory slasher film.

The family in question might as well be related to the [[[Addams Family]]] with a Morticia lookalike and a group of deformed brothers that would scare off the cast of any Rob Zombie Flick. The most interesting thing about the film and all of it’s American Horror influences is that the film isn’t American at all, and comes from Italy. This is another case where you will have to do some reading and watch the film in Italian while reading the subtitles, as the America dubbing is pretty awful. I do issue a warning though: the subtitlers become a bit lazy in the last 30 minutes of the film, with spelling and grammar errors galore, so watch out.

The special effects and make up are pretty much what drive this gritty, low-budget film. Some great bleeding limbs after a dismemberment-by-chainsaw and nice, clear shots of stabbing and gunshot wounds. There as surely no shortage of prosthetic skin and corn syrup on this set. Another nice-but-random set of effects was the makeup on the two hillbilly brothers. One has a baseball sized goiter on his neck while the other has half of his face burnt off. Both of these were done pretty well and will make you squirm for their remainder on screen. The cannibalistic child, who was supposed to have these incredibly sharp teeth, ended up just having misshapen baby teeth, which may have still been off-putting, definitely wasn’t scary.

The story isn’t bad up until the last act, in which things become a bit foggy and confusing. There is yet another attempt at a twist ending, but it gets lost in the fray with the tremendous bodycount that accumulates by act three. The final twist, which is really supposed to irk the audience, is a child with prosthetic stumps for limbs, but it is pretty easy to see through the trick, and only looks like a bad Halloween costume. Overall, it may be worth a watch, but if you’re weak at heart, I wouldn’t recommend the film.

Overall Rating: 5/10

Scare Factor: 4/5

Horror Review: ‘Brotherhood of Blood’

brotherhood boxSynopsis:

In this claustrophobic thriller, a team of vampire hunters who must infiltrate a nest of the undead to save one of their own. A beautiful vampire slayer is held prisoner by a powerful, blood-drinking king who is preparing to do battle with a force that sends even the children of the night scurrying into the shadows.

Lowdown:

Much of modern cinema was built on awful horror films of yesterday, from Ed Wood to Roger Corman and even to an extent John Carpenter, so it’s almost reassuring when you hear about a box set of direct-to-dvd horror films, and a film like [[[Brotherhood of Blood]]] is included. The film couldn’t have cost more than $50,000, and most of that had to go to the “big” names attached like Sid Haig, Ken Foree, and even TV’s Victoria Pratt. The film isn’t exactly cinematic art in any way, but still fills the quota for “bad horror films”.

The premise is pretty hard to follow, seeing as how from before the opening titles to the end of the film, there are randomly placed flashbacks to the previous 48 hours. Of course, because of the bar that has been raised by the genre today, there is a twist at the end of the film, which in this case was pretty predictable. No killing or gore was shown on-screen and done with a cut and corn syrup thrown on a wall, which is fine considering the quality.

The acting would be fine if it weren’t for the only two decent genre actors attempting to spit out their lines through the prosthetic vampire teeth. Foree and Haig both sound like they are doing a bad Nixon impression, and come across as cartoony when trying to be haunting and intimidating. The angrier they got, the funnier they became, much like a drunk baby. The dialogue is pretty bad as well, which would be, given that this isn’t [[[Gone with the Wind]]], but even still, it’s almost impossible to sit through.

In an interview done with Rob Tapert, he explained that though the box set is being slated as “hand picked by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert”, there were a few exceptions. It’s almost definite that this was a pick by the pair. Not only does the film give off the same feel as Evil Dead in it’s campiness, but it stars Cleopatra 2525’s Victoria Pratt. A show that was the brainchild of both Raimi and Tapert. Sadly, Pratt attempts to bring her tough-chick persona to the film, but it fails somewhere in the middle, and leaves her confusing and whiney.

The film comes through as a campy, low-budget, vampire flick, and should really be taken as such. Foree and Haig may come together for the first time in years, but they get no screen time together, and as mentioned, it’s pretty hard to understand them when they are drooling through fake fangs. There is bad acting, poor special effects, a convoluted plot, and an even more confusing twist ending. On their own each of those sound pretty awful, but together they make up just about any horror film released in theaters in the past few years, and should be treated as such.

Overall Rating: 3/10

Scare Factor: 0/5

Review: ‘The Night of Your Life’ by Jessie Reklaw

Review: ‘The Night of Your Life’ by Jessie Reklaw

The Night of Your Life
By Jessie Reklaw
Dark Horse, September 2008, $15.95

For the last thirteen years, Jessie Reklaw has been turning dreams – mostly those of strangers – into comics, on his website and in a growing number of alternative weeklies nationwide. (Not to derail my own train of thought, but are there any non-alternative weeklies, to which those “alternative weeklies” are the actual alternative?)

Each comic is a four panel grid, two over two: distilling a dream to its essential elements and telling however much of a story there is to tell. The stories are all bizarre and strange – they’re all dreams, after all – but, boiled down to four panels, they also have a lot of similarities. There’s a reason people call it “dream logic;” that’s the way the human mind organizes itself, so the same kind of transitions and imagery come up in many different people’s dreams.

[[[The Night of Your Life]]] collects about two hundred and forty of those “[[[Slow Wave]]]” strips, in black and white. The strips are printed one to the page – large enough to be clear and readable, but only slightly larger than on the web, so they don’t look blown up in the book. The strips are divided into ten parts, each part named for the first line of text in the first cartoon in that part…but the strips don’t otherwise seem to be organized. It’s clearly not by theme or imagery, and the strips aren’t dated, so there’s no way to tell if they’re in chronological order.

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Review: ‘Captain Action’ #1

Review: ‘Captain Action’ #1

I know way too much about comics. Far more than is healthy. But there are, understandably, a few characters here and there that I either know very little about, either because I never really came across them or I did but found them terribly uninteresting and so dismissed them, soon forgetting what I had learned.

[[[Captain Action]]] happens to be such a character. I remembered he first appeared in the 1960s, wore a costume that resembled a futuristic police officer’s with a chest symbol that reminded me to recycle, and was based on an action figure. And that was it. I remembered nothing else. So when I was asked to review the first issue of the new Captain Action series, on sale today, I thought “Perfect. I can truly look at this as a first-time fan and objectively judge if this would be interesting to someone who has no previous knowledge of the character.”

I read it and found it to be a strange mix of too much information at once and not enough.

We begin with a [[[Superman]]]-like character called Savior. His narration explains who he is and reveals that he secretly blew up a place called A.C.T.I.O.N. Directorate. On page two, we find out that half of what we just read is a lie. This is not Savior, but a person disguised as Savior. This is our hero, Captain Action, who crashes into a statue of his father and proceeds to unleash a massive information dump on the readers in a very awkward monologue.

Apparently, there was once a hero called Captain Action (the original guy from the 1960s). The shape-shifter we’ve just met is his son, the new Captain Action, who has the ability to look like other people and copy their abilities, but only for a short time. Exactly how long he can disguise himself and how long afterward he has to wait before he mimics someone again is not made clear.

The new Captain Action wanted nothing to do with the life of a super-hero, despite his powers, but now feels forced to act since his father was killed by a group of super-heroes that an organization called A.C.T.I.O.N. had “created” to defend the Earth. What “created” means is not fully explained. The new Captain Action informs us that these heroes, Savior included, were somehow turned into sleeper agents, thus why they went rogue later. Exactly how they became sleeper agents is not explained, though a group called Red Crawl is blamed. Apparently, Red Crawl was defeated long ago and everyone believed they were dead, except for the original Captain Action. Now they’re back and causing trouble.

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Horror Review: ‘Trackman’

trackman boxSynopsis:

A perfect bank heist turns deadly when the robbers and their hostages flee to the abandoned underground subway station where they encounter the Trackman, a deformed madman that prowls the darkness. It becomes a fight for survival as the mysterious monster picks off the people, both good guys and bad, one by one.

Lowdown:

Remember the days when horror films didn’t need a twist ending? When Freddy Krueger never turned out to be Nancy’s father, or Michael Myers was never just a part Laurie’s subconscious? Those were the good old days, but since the genre has been changed by things like Saw or the trend of remaking Japanese horror, it’s almost like a rite of passage to have a “mind-altering” twist at the end of the film, and quite frankly, its getting old.

Trackman has some great slasher movie elements to it, buried deep inside of a poorly edited and badly shot film. Having that the film was made in Russia, I may not be up to speed on how things are shot and edited there, but I’m pretty sure taking a page from Zack Snyder’s book of “unnecessary slow motion” is universally unacceptable. At least when Snyder does it, it’ during a moment of deep(ish) drama to accentuate the moment, and not just establishing shots of dark hallways slowed down to fill time. The film weighs in at 80 minutes, but if you were to dump the slo-mo shots, we’re looking at more like an hour.

The beginning kicks off with a very “Inside Man” feeling, with two men going over the plan for a bank robbery. The robbery goes on, some unneeded blood was shed, and the robbers escape with a few hostages for good measure. Their plan, for some reason, involves roaming around an abandoned tunnel system where (here’s when things get fun) they come across the Trackman.

The origin of the “monster” is done through about two lines of dialogue and something about Chernobyl, but is vague and pretty borders on being convoluted. The great thing about the Trackman is that he had just about all of the elements that made Jason Voorhees so scary for decades: covered face, skulky, had the ability to appear and disappear when needed, wielded a pretty big weapon, and even had a memorable rattle (replacing the Ch-Ch-Ch-Ka-Ka-Ka with some pretty heavy footsteps). The twist in the end of the film, however, negates all of this as we learn that the monster may not be all that monstrous.

The gore is done on a pretty low budget for the film. The big shtick that the Trackman has is a makeshift eye-scooper that he uses to rip out the eyes of his victims and keep. The act of scooping is done all off camera with screams, and even the more gory slasher-type kills are done off camera. A bit of a rip off for the fans of the genre who remember the days of Jason hacking away pieces of campers.

While the film does have its flaws, it makes up for it by bottling what we all loved about the slasher films of the 80s. There are some great moments of suspense and horror, and there may even be room for a return of the Trackman, provided they can find another reason to go into an abandoned Russian mining tunnel.

Overall Rating: 6/10

Scare Factor: 4/5

Horror Review: ‘The Substitute’

substitute boxSynopsis:

The sixth grade students of a small town begin to realize that their new substitute teacher is an alien. When the parents don’t believe them, they are forced to take matters into their own hands. It is later revealed that the alien’s goal is to understand Earth’s concept of love and destroy the planet, because her planet knows only of war.

Lowdown:

It’s funny how many one-word horror titles are out there and have the ability to sound so ominous. “[[[The Substitute]]]” has been used a good amount of times to intimidate, if you count the 1996 thriller starring Tom Berenger about a militant sub who straightens out an urban high school(which spawned two sequels), or Martin Donovan’s 1993 TV movie about a substitute teacher with a dark past, or even the sequel to 1990’s Class of 1999, in which a robotic substitute assassinates a group of punks. This film, produced in 2007, certainly attempts to live up to it’s name, but sadly falls short with some poor acting and a confusing plot.

The film hails from Denmark, which means you have the choice of watching the DVD in it’s original language with subtitles (which is horrible for genres like comedy and horror which rely on timing), or you can watch the film with the English dubbing, which due to the cartoonish voices for the children, will make you laugh more than intended. While most of the actors in the film are children, the responsibility to hold things together is on the shoulders of veteran Danish actress Paprika Steen. She may be a big deal over in Denmark, but her overacting as the alien substitute with a hunger for live chickens is outlandish at best.

alien handsWith a plot synopsis reading “an alien takes over a sixth grade class”, there aren’t many places you can go that won’t deliver as obtuse or puerile, but this film manages to go in the opposite direction and take the “confusing and pretentious” path. The end of the film consists of the substitute teacher taking the students on a field trip to her point of origin with plans on doing something malevolent. The first time they arrive, the children plan an escape and almost get away, if it wasn’t for time rewinding twelve hours and nobody remembering anything. They then go for “ending #2” and fight the alien. The rewind ending made no sense and left me trying to figure out what had happened, rather than watching the ending, which was subpar as well.

The special effects are done pretty well in parts, which is good because it’s hard to sell an alien horror film with a weak budget unless your last name is Wood and you’re BFF’s with Bela Legousi. There are a few moments where the computer graphics look a bit wonky, but overall, there was no problem in believing that this substitute was just an alien with a tendency to overact.

With the script by Ole Bornedal, the same guy who brought us a great concept like [[[Nightwatch]]] and let it fall into confusion and obscurity, it only makes sense that a great concept like this film can fall apart inside of the first half hour. The overall moral towards the end was supposed to be that “love conquers war”, but really, didn’t we already know that? It doesn’t take a chicken-eating Danish cougar to explain it to us through a bunch of sixth graders.

Overall Rating: 3/10

Scare Factor: 3/5

Review: ‘Aya of Yop City’ by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie

Review: ‘Aya of Yop City’ by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie

Aya of Yop City
By Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie
Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008, $19.95

[[[Aya]]] was one of the surprise pleasures of last year, a slice-of-life story about three young women and their families and friends in the neighborhood of Yopougon in late ‘70s Ivory Coast. The title character was actually the least involved in the plot, adding to a slight suspicion that the story was partially autobiographical. (Abouet did grow up in Ivory Coast, though she left in the early ‘80s at the age of twelve – so even Aya’s story couldn’t be directly hers. My personal theory is that Aya is based on an older sister or cousin of Abouet’s, one of her strong connections back to her homeland.)

By the end of Aya, Aya herself hadn’t been much changed, but her friend Adjoua had just given birth to a baby she claimed belonged to Moussa, the unmotivated son of local rich man and business owner Bonaventure Sissoko. But it was also clear that Moussa was not the father of Adjoua’s child, and that Bonaventure strongly suspected that.

[[[Aya of Yop City]]] begins almost immediately after the end of Aya; it’s a continuation of the same story rather than being a new, separate graphic novel. (And so the title is appropriate, like a [[[Babar]]] or [[[Madeleine]]] novel, or a line-extending superhero comic: [[[Aya]]], [[[Aya of Yop City]]], [[[The Adventures of Aya]]], [[[The Amazing Aya]]], [[[Yop Comics Featuring Aya]]], [[[The Spectacular Aya]]], and so on.) So it begins with a full-page close-up of Adjoua’s baby Bobby, who is very cute…but also looks absolutely nothing like Moussa.

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