Mortality

I wasn't expecting much from Mortal Kombat II (2026). I was sure it would at least entertain. But I had forgotten that Karl Urban starred.

It starts with Shao Kahn (Martin Ford) attacking the planet Edenia and defeating King Jerrod (not of Subway) in kombat. So he becomes the ruler, and takes the princess Kitana as his daughter. So basically the start of Masters of the Universe plus Thanos/Gamora. 

On Earth, we get to see Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) dominating a kick-ass fight scene. His signature move is to put on his sunglasses, stick up a middle finger and use it to push up the glasses. But it turns out it'a. movie, being shown at a con. Cage is an aging acting star, just trying to treat his fans well and go home. In the garage, he is confronted by Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), telling him that he has been chosen for the big Tournament - and if their team loses, Earth will be owned by Shao Kahn. He figures they are cosplayers, and tries to brush them off. So they transport him to Raiden's temple. 

Meanwhile, Shao Kahn's necromancer has resurrected Kung Lao (Max Huang) and that Aussie asshole  Kano (Josh Lawson). He corrupts Kung Lao's heart, but Kano has none, so - "Loophole!" But he's pretty corrupt already.

Cage gets meets the rest of the Earth team, and hears the story, and still wants out. He's an actor, not a real fighter. He doesn't even have any powers. But when it's time for a match, he gets teleported into the arena, and has to fight - and win or die.

The movie is one part action, one part comedy, one part Mortal Kombat lore. I only know as much lore as you pick up through osmosis ("Finish him!") and the last movie, which I barely remember. The action is great, but I really liked Urban's comic turn. He's another one of Ms. Spenser's favorites, along with Sanada-san, also in this movie. So she wasn't planning to watch, but got sucked in. 

All in all, a fine addition to the fun, silly action-fantasy genre. 

Quoth the Raven

More B+W horror for Deathoween! The Ghoul (1933) stars Boris Karloff, but just barely. For the setup, we see a stealthy Egyptian (notablew for the rug over his shoulder) confront an absinthe-drinking archeologist about a rare amulet he stole from a grave. But he has sold it to rich archeologist and grave robber Boris Karloff.

Karloff, now on his deathbed, demands that he be buried with the amulet in his hand, wrapped in bandages. He claims it will give him eternal life. But if anyone removes itm he'll come back to life and murder everyone! Of course, as soon as he dies, his man-servant Ernest Thesiger steals it. Cedric Hardwicke, the lawyer handling his affairs is acting rather shady, too.  

There are two heirs, distant cousins whose families have always been feuding. They descend on the mansion to protect their inheritance. Of course, she brings her man-hungry. roommate as chaperone. We also run into the Egyptian sheik that she falls for, his baleful bodyguard, a sheriff and a parson. And then Karloff rises from the grave and starts killing people. 

The main problem with this movie is that there is so little Karloff. When he is on his killing spree, he is silent and mostly in shadow. The other characters are OK, but aside from roommate (Kathleeen Harrison) and sheik (Harold Huth), not very memorable. It all ends suddenly, with nothing really wrapped up except the cousins get together snd live happily ever after. Still, fun and worth a watch.

The Black Raven (1943) is hardly horror - it's really a gangster pic. It's a dark and stormy night. George Zucco runs the Black Raven in, up near the Canadian border. Which is handy, because his sideline seems to be running criminals across said border. Glenn Strange plays his dim-witted handyman, always forced out into the rain to park guests' cars. 

His first customer is a criminal who signs the register "John Smith". He wants help crossing the border, but also seems to have a grudge against Zucco. The next is a gangster who is being set u as a scapegoat by the powerful political syndicate. He also signs "J. Smith".

A meek R.-Crumb-looking character, Byron Folger, is headed for Canada, but turned back because the bridge is washed out. He shows up at Zucco's place, with a case that he keeps close at all times, and also signs as Smith. Then there's a couple who want to get married, but her father, head of the syndicate mentioned above, is preventing. So they are headed to Canada, but are forced to stop at the Raven. Then said father, turns up. Then he turns up dead.

In a lot of ways, this is an old dark house movie without the ghosts. Like in The Ghoul, there's a crowd of people, all stuck in one place. But really, the best parts are Zucco, as a friendly gangster, and Glenn Strange, without makeup, as the handyman. I suspect the role was written for a Mantan Morland type - black, ignorant and scared. Color blind casting? 

Not the greatest batch, but fun and short, The seasonal marathon continues!

The Late Ghosts

Due to life stuff, we're getting a late start on Ghostober. I felt like watching some light b&w horror, so I let Prime video make some suggestions. 

First up, The Ghost and the Guest (1943). James Dunn and Florence Rice have just gotten married. Dunn has a California honeymoon planned, but Rice has other ideas. She cancels the trip and plans to take her husband to the house in the country that her father has bought them. Dunn isn't pleased, but what can he do. As his black servant Sam McDaniel (Hattie's brother) says about being stric t with your wife, "That's what I always says I do, but it isn't what I always does."

The house turns out to be a rundown mansion that had been owned by a notorious murderer, and is now owned by Robert Dudley, the hangmen who's last job was that same murderer. He's a kindly old coot, whose habit of playing with nooses unnerves McDaniel. He has some great and gruesome line about fixing the murderer's stiff neck - he never complained about it afterwards.

A coffin is delivered from the penitentiary - It's the murderer. Dudley wanted to give him a nice burial. Then some of his "relatives" show up - actually a bunch of crooks looking for a stash of loot. And nobody notices someone slip out of the coffin and into a secret passageway. I can't remember why the police show up, but they do. A fine honeymoon. 

This was written by Mory Amsterdam, and has a few good gags, mostly involving hanging. Mory's wife, Mabel Todd, plays a man-hungry blonde. I'm sorry to say that nobody else really stands out, but if you like silly movies with gangsters, hidden passages and spooky houses, this will be up your alley.

The Ghost Train (1941) is a British film. It starts on a train. Arthur Askey pulled the emergency brake because he lost his hat. As a result, the train misses a connection, and a small load of passengers are stuck in a small railroad station. It's pouring rain, there's no phone and the nearest inn in miles away. The station master doesn't want them there, and warns them about the unused track out back. If they see the ghost train, don't look - those who do, wind up dead. 

The station master then leaves for the night, and comes back dead, with a knife in his back. 

As for the rest, it's not very exciting. There's a glamorous woman driven mad by the train and her somewhat sinister brother, some train-board romances, etc. Mostly, though, there's Arthur Askey. He was a British musichall, radio and movie personality. His specialty seems to be skipping around like a ninny and singing silly songs - and being annoying. It's an acquired taste. We have not acquired it. 

Sunshine and Lollipops

How come I haven't seen Danny Boyle's Sunshine (2007) util now? I guess it's been a little hard to see - rarely on streaming, no physical release (except an early, defective Blu Ray). Still, meditative/horror SF, with a stacked cast, when I noticed it on Prime Video, I jumped pm it. When Ms. Spenser noticed that Hiroyuki Sanada was in it, she was sold.

It starts with a voice over explaining the set up: The sun is dying. The plan is to drop an A bomb the size of Manhattan and restart it. The first mission, the Icarus, failed for umknown reasons. This is the story of Icarus II. 

The Icarus has been heading for the sun for a few years. Mission physicist Cillian Murphy is sending a message home, before comms become impossible due to the proximity to the sun. Ship's doctor Cliff Curtis is obsessed with the sun, sitting in the observation chamber, watching the sun filtered down to 2%. At 3%, he would be blind in seconds. For him, it is a mystical, purifying experience. 

Chris Evans (post-Johnny Storm, pre-Captain America) is the engineer. We meet him fighting with Murphy for taking too long sending his message home. Rose Byrne, the pilot, and Michelle Yeoh, the biologist, call the captain to break up the fight, reporting an "excess of manliness". Captain Hiroyuki Sanada rebukes Evans, and tells him to get a haircut. Meanwhile, Benedict Wong, the navigator, is making stirfry in the galley with Troy Garity, the comms officer. It's your basic blue-collar spaceship crew, just hanging out.

As they pass Mercury, they catch a faint distress signal from the Icarus I. They have just enough fuel and oxygen to get there, but it would be safer to stick to the original mission. On the other hand, having a second bomb might come in handy. Captain Sanada wants Murphy as the physicist to make the decision. Very reluctantly, he decides to head to Icarus.

Wong changes their course, but unforgivably forgets to angle the sunshield, and now someone has to go out and manually reposition it. And people start dying. 

The Icarus II turns out to be derelict, everything covered in dust ("90% of all dust is dead human skin"). There is a degraded, insane message from captain Mark Strong - exposure to the sun's cleansing light has driven him mad, and probably killed him. But will they be able to get back to Icarus II and continue the mission?

The first two acts are sort of standard SF. The first act is somewhat meditative, like, for ex, Solaris (either version) with some Alien. The second leans towards space disaster, with systems and people breaking down. The last act becomes horror, like Event Horizon. I won't go into a lot of the obvious influences and parallels (the crew dynamics of Alien, for ex). But I do want to mention something that Ms. Spenser noticed: The captain of the Icarus I is named Pinbacker - a callback to Dark Star's Pinback? 

I'm not a super fan of Danny Boyle, but he does great work. The cast of this is insanely stacked, the acting great. The writing is on point - the characters are fallible humans, but completely focused on the mission. Even if they don't like Murphy, for ex, he's the physicist, and they prioritize his safety. And when Michelle Yeoh is looking at the oxygen margins, she refers to some of the deaths by saying, "we're two breathers down." Cold, but practical. 

Glad I got to this. Maybe I'll try rewatching Solaris.

Summer Time

I mentioned that I am a Robert Heinlein fan. I was surprised to find that there was a movie version of one  of my childhood favorites, The Door into Summer (2021). And it was made in Japan.

It stars Kento Yamazaki as a young robotics engineer. He works obsessively at a big drawing board at home, often in the company of his pet cat, Pete, and his high-school aged step-sister, Kaya Kiyohara. He has designed an advanced autonomous robot that his small company is almost ready to go into production. Note that this takes place in 1985 - the past for the filmmakers, but the future for Heinlein.

He is visited by his fiancee, Natsuna, the office manager at the company. She is bitchy and controlling, and jealous of Kiyohara. And she has some paperwork, which transfers some of Yamazaki's stock in the company to her. I'm sure that won't be a problem.

The next day in the office, Kiyohara's partner, who runs the business side of the company, calls a shareholder meeting: that's him, Kiyohara and now Natsuna. Him and Natsuna immediately vote to fire Kiyohara and sell the company, robot and all. Kiyohara is stunned - he rushes to his lab to find all of his notes and prototypes gone. He's been screwed iout of his job and his inventions. 

So he gets drunk, and decides to go into cold sleep for thirty years. In this futuristic 1985, that is an option. He arranges for a sleep cradle for him self and Pete, but is rejected because he's drunk. He'll need to come back sober. But when he sobers up, be decidesto fight instead of run away. 

When he confronts Natsuna and his partner, they drug him and put him into cold sleep, using the paperwork already set up - using a sleazier company, who don't mind taking an unconscious customer. So he wakes up in 2025. He's broke - his investments went south. He is lost, with no friends, no cat, and no way to get in touch with his step sister.

To help ease his transition to the modern world, he is gived a robot companion for five days. This robot, named PETE, played by Naohito Fujiki, is very human, to the point that he seems to be malfunctioning, with humor, whims and sarcasm. 

So, even with his robot friend, he is still stuck in a future he doesn't know. But he thinks about his cat Pete. Pete didn't like snow, and would refuse to go out in the winter. Instead, he would meow at every door in the house, hoping that one would be the door into summer (based on Heinlein's actual cat). So Kiyohara starts looking for the door into summer - and finds it (SPOILER - time travel). 

This is a sweet, fun movie. Our hero is good and virtuous, the villains evil, and his revenge is sweet. The cat actor who plays Pete is appropriately scornful, but could have used a few battlescars. The retro-futuristic way they handled tech is good, especially when we get to 2025 where everyone has a smart phone, and maybe also a robot.

Also, their are plenty of nice, friendly people in the movie. For instance, in 2025, Kiyohara meets the CEO of a robot company who had met him in 1985 as a child, and considered him an idol. So he doesn't need to do everything alone (or with only a possibly malfunctioning robot).

The romance between Kiyohara and his step sister is tricky - it's clear that she is in love with him, but he doesn't seem to have any evil intentions towards her. In the end, due to cold sleep and time travel, they end up the same age, so they can get together - if you don't mind the spoiler.

I have only one minor quibble: In the book, our hero makes a new fortune by designing a robot drafting table. So Heinlein anticipated CAD, but on paper, not on screens. In the movie, Kiyohara is always behind a drafting boatd, but never automates it. I guess you can't put everything into a movie. 

Triple Plus Two

I've tried to watch Triple Threat (2019) a half-dozen times or so. JustWatch.com says you can watch on Amazon Prime video. Then when I get to Prime, they either haven't heard of it, or let me know I could watch if I signed for a trial subscription to Hi-Yaa or some other service. Finally, I realized that I could look under "Other Ways to Watch", and there it was. Thanks, Prime.

Anyways, this is a monster mash of a movie. It stars martial artists Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais, Tiger Chen, Scott Adkins and Michael Jai White. (The German tagline was "Expendables without the retirees"). 

It starts with Tony Jaa and Tiger Chen, local guides, leading a team of western mercenaries, led by Michael Jai White through the jungle. When they get to the village, they attack. One of the villagers, Iko Uwais, wakes up to see his wife get killed. He comes out fighting and starts fighting Jaa. The mercenaries meanwhile break Scott Adkins out of his cell - although everyone warns them that he is a terrorist. Duh. So are they. They leave, and blow the place up, separating Jaa and Uwais - and possibly killing them. 

Some time later, Jaa and Chen are doing some underground fighting for money, having survived the massacre. Uwais finds them, and tracks them down to their small apartment, looking for revenge. But they explain to him that they were tricked and they want the same thing as him: revenge on White and Adkins. So they all get drunk together - then Uwais turns them into the police for illegal fights.

Meanwhile, in Maha Jaya (made-up Malaysia/Indonesian country), rich Chinese heiress Celina Jade is pledging her fortune to develop police infrastructure in her adopted country. This makes her a target of Maha Jayan crime. (Haven't we seen this setup before, maybe with Jackie Chan?) When her car is attacked, she runs to a police station, where she can't communicate - the police speak Bahasa, she speaks Chinese. So they get Tiger Chen to translate. Then Adkins, White and gang show up to get rid of Tiger and Jaa. 

And it's a big fight. When the dust settles, the bad guys have got Jade, and Chen and Jaa are free. Uwais tells them that he had them arrested to use them as bait. So now they are united, and need to get Jade, and their own revenge. 

It's fun to see Uwais, Jaa and Chen, all fighting in their personal styles. Adkins and White make decent villains, although maybe their fighting skills and styles could have been better used. They were sort of generic heavyweights. In fact, a lot of this movie was sort of generic. Not a complaint, really, I enjoyed this. But with that much talent, I might have set my expectation too high. 

Super Duper

I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I liked Supergirl (2026).

It stars Milly Allcock as Kara Zor-El, supergirl. She's on an interplanetary bender - under a red sun, she's no longer super, and alcohol gets her drunk. Superman Facetimes her sometimes to see if she is coming back to Earth, but she's not done drinking. 

On this same planet, a band of Brigands, led by Mattias Schoenaerts, are menacing a farm family. They kill the parents and son, but their young daughter, Eve Ridley, survives.

Allcock is drinking in a mercenary bar when Ridley comes in with a sword and announces that she is after vengeance, and whoever helped her could have the family's valuable sword. It's a sort of "My name is Inigo Montoya" speech. Most of the crowd laughs at her and Allcock ignores her. But one big bruiser just walks up and takes the sword, and goes outside to leave, Allcock finds this impolite, and says she'll go out to talk to him. After trying reason, she beats him up and takes the sword back. Even under a red sun, she can kick ass. 

The next day, while Allcock is nursing a hangover, Ridley shows up at her spaceship RV, and unfortunately, so do the Brigands. In the fight, the Brigands shoot Superpup Krypto with a slow poison. The Brigands use it for torture or extortion - the victim will die in three days unless they can get the antidote from the Brigands. So now Allcock has to catch the interplanetary bus to go after them. Will Ridley tag along? 

On their way, they run into a dirtbag bounty hunter named Lobo, played by Jason Momoa. Ridley wants him to join their quest, but Allcock warns her not to make eye contact, because he's a jerk. Will he be in on the final battle?

OK, the questions are a bit ingenuous. Of course Ridley comes along, and her innocence inspires Allcock to be a bettr superhero. And I mention Momoa, because he's got the best line in the movie. When he meets Allcock later, he says, "Hey, you're that ditz from the dive bar!" and she replies, "Funny, that's what I've been calling you."

I like slightly silly interplanetary adventures with fun characters and interesting dilemmas. I don't really know why everyone hated this - or did they? It didn't do much in theaters, but that happens a lot these days. Then there's the problem some (loud) critics have with strong female protagonists. Or is the problem that she isn't strong enough? After all, she's a drunk with PTSD from losing her whole planet. But a hero "refusing the call" is a standard trope. Some people complained that -SPOILER- Momoa saves her ass in the last big fight, but that's not such a big deal.

And of course, Krypto lives to piss on the Fortress of Solitude again.