A Very Good Pupper 12/10

We watched Alpha (2018) because it’s a dog movie. That’s pretty much it.

It’s set in Europe during the Stone Age. Kodi Smit-McPhee is one of the tribe’s boys who are trying to go on the next hunt. They are judged on the quality of the stone blade they have made. Smit-McPhee isn’t a great hunter - he can’t kill a captured boar. Of course, when his friend is suddenly devoured by a saber-toothed tiger when they are all sitting around the campfire, hunting doesn’t seem like so much fun.

The tribe do a buffalo jump, where they stampede a herd of bison over a cliff and pick up the meat at the bottom. But Smit-McPhee gets pushed over, and winds up a long way down on a tiny ledge with an injured foot. His tribe has to leave him for dead, as rope has not been invented.

Through a series of disasters, he manages to get off the cliff (“Hell, the fall will probably kill ya!”). Alone and injured, he is set upon by a pack of wolves - the Wikipedia calls them Dire Wolves, but my dire wolves are 6-ft tall at the shoulder, and these are just doggie sized. He drives them off and wounds one. The wounded wolf is left behind by its pack, and Smit-McPhee patches him up.

After that, the wolf starts following Smit-McPhee around. Smit-McPhee feeds the wolf, but makes it wait, to establish dominance. He also names it Alpha. Now, they are working together for survival and to get back to the village before snowfall. I’ll spoil it so you don’t get nervous: They don’t make it back before snowfall, but they do make it back. Alpha gets pretty banged up but survives.

So, your basic boy and dog vs. the elements story, with the twist that the boy is a Paleolithic caveman (well, they mostly live in huts, but he does spend a little time with Alpha in a cave recuperating). It fun to see some CGI rhinos, etc, and to hear the made-up Indo-European-ish language the cast uses. Smit-McPhee is a fine young actor, but we’re all really here for Alpha. Played by a combination of Hungarian Vlcaks (wolf-dog hybrids) plus some CGI, Alpha is a sweet and expressive little doggie. We got what we came for.

Widow Maker

We were pretty psyched to see Widows (2018), based mostly on the cast. Can’t say we were disappointed.

It starts with the end of a heist gone wrong, intercut with scenes of Viola Davis and Liam Neeson making love in a clean modern apartment. Neeson and his gang are massacred by the police during their getaway. Through flashbacks we meet the heisters and their wives. Michelle Rodriguez runs a store specializing in quinceanera clothes. Her husband takes money from her. Elizabeth Debicki’s husband knocks her around. Carrie Coon’s husband just ignores her. Now, they are widows.

It turns out the money belonged to Brian Tyree Henry, a black gangster who is going legit and running for alderman. His opponent is Colin Farrell, son of Robert Duvall, who has held the office forever. Henry needs money for his run, and knows it was Neeson who robbed him, so he gives his widow Davis a month to come up with the money.

She has a her husband’s notebooks that detail a $5 million heist that will get her free. So she contacts the other widows, and they plan the heist. She has the plans. She makes Debicki the driver, until she finds out she can’t drive. The scene where she buys the van has just a touch of Angel’s Revenge. Rodriguez buys the guns, and ropes her babysitter, Cynthia Erivo (the lovely singer in Bad Times at the El Royale) in as driver. Coon didn’t show up, and good for her.

There’s a little bit of humor, a lot of action, a great cast, a few twists, and a sweet ending. I haven’t seen any other movies by director Steve McQueen, but this looks like it might be his first action film. It was definitely fun, but I was a little disappointed - it was a bit too much of popcorn movie. It’s possible that there was more going on than I got, or he could have just been making a fun crowd pleaser - like Spike Lee’s Inside Man. If so, it worked. If it was supposed to be more, well, it had Viola Davis, who is indomitable.

In conclusion, one of the bits was when they couldn’t get the safe open, and it turned out that the paper the combination was written on was upside down. The joke is, the number was “86198”, which reads the same either way. At least, I assume it was a joke.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Say “Cthulhu”

Dagon (2001) is both odd and wonderful. The wonderful part is that it is a more or less faithful adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story (“Dagon” and “Shadow over Innsmouth”). The odd is that it seems to be a Spanish TV production.

It stars Ezra Godden as a nerdy young new tycoon, vacationing in a sailboat off the Spanish coast with his girlfriend and another couple. It begins with him diving, discovering a cyclopean stone hole on the seabed. When he descends, he finds a beautiful mermaid (Macarena Gomez) who lures him close and then shows her monstrous teeth. But it’s only a dream, and he wakes up in bed with his girlfriend, Raquel Merono. But a storm is brewer going and they soon find themselves on the rocks. Worse, the woman from the other couple has her leg caught and bleeding. Her husband stays with her while Godden and Merono take the dinghy to the (strangely deserted looking) village they spot.

When they get to the village, they can’t find anyone to help. They find a church, but not a Christian church. The priest suggests that one of them should go to the next town where there’s a phone, while one goes out to the wreck in a fishing boat. Godden goes out to the wreck with some sullen fisherfolk, and discovers that it is empty. When he comes back the priest tells him his girlfriend will meet him in the hotel.

The hotel is disgusting, but also Godden starts noticing shambling, misshapen figures milling around, maybe forming a mob. And this is all before he hears the chanting: “Ia Ia Cthulhu fhtagn!”

Later he forms an alliance with Francisco Rabal, a Spanish character actor in his last role. Rabal is a drunk who claims to be the last human left in the village. Everyone else have given themselves to Dagon!

There is some very gruesome stuff in this movie (SPOILER - Rabal has his face slowly skinned off his skull), but some silly stuff too. In the hotel, Godden notices that there is no latch on the door, so as the weird mob slowly advances, he uses the screwdriver on his pocket knife to unscrew the latch on a cupboard and painstakingly screw it onto the door. There are a lot of scenes where he holds onto the knife with its 2-inch blade for protection. I don’t know if this is in the original stories, but it does remind you that Lovecraft was a sickly type, not strong or heroic.

I’ll leave out the rest of the spoilers, but mention that, while everyone around him is dying horribly, Godden almost gets away. Almost.

In conclusion, it doesn’t seem to matter much that this is made in Spain, except that the eldritch shambles mutter in a foreign language, and the village is called “Imboca”, Spanish for “Innsmouth.”

Z-Day

All we knew going in was, Overlord (2018) was a WWII movie with zombies or maybe vampires. Close enough. If that sounds good to you, you should enjoy this.

It has a great intro: a squad of American paratroopers on a mission into Nazi-occupied France to take out a radio jamming station in a church. They need to do this by a certain time on D-Day. Jovan Adepo is among them, looking very nervous about the situation, though Sgt. Bokeem Woodbine is taking it in stride. Along on the mission is explosive expert Wyatt Russell - the team will get him to the church and he’ll do the rest. But before they get to the drop zone, they starts taking lots of fire - planes all around them blowing up. Finally, just before they jump, their plane is destroyed, and they hit the silk.

The few who survive meet a French woman, Mathilde Ollivier, and get her to hide them. While they are there, the head Nazi, Pilo Aesbeck, shows up to demand sex. Adepo isn’t hardened to war, and he comes out of hiding to defend her. They hold him prisoner while continuing the recon.

Adepo accidentally gets into the church, and finds there’s a whole underground lab where they seem to be resurrecting the dead. He grabs a couple of syringes as evidence. Back at Ollivier’s place, they try to get Aesbeck to tell them what is going on, but he kills one of the Americans and takes off - getting shot in the face in the process.

Adepo uses the syringe to revive their dead comrade, which works. But he is super-strong and violently insane, and they have to kill him again. In fact, they club his head to pudding. Now they have a pretty good idea what is up - the Nazis are working on a super-soldier serum, that can raise the dead, but turns the people who get it insane. So now they know they have to destroy the lab as well as the tower.

By the way, the serum works on the living, and now Aesbeck is running around with half his face blown off, which doesn’t improve his mood.

On the whole, this was a fun movie, but maybe not as totally cool as we’d hoped. It was a nice mix of war and horror, but I don’t think it did much to move the genre forward. Still, it was definitely entertaining, and that’s enough for us.

Nightmare Theater

We’ve been having a good run of Metal Horror Comedies - until we got to Jon Mikl-Thor’s Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare (1987). You may know Mr. Mikl-Thor from the MST3K classic Zombie Nightmare. That was much more coherent, and had better music. JM-T is a body builder, metal musician, and actor, and he’s mediocre to bad at all of them.

This Canadian tragedy starts somewhat like a one subplot of another MST3K classic (maybe our favorite), Pod People. A band is traveling to a remote location to vacation and rehearse. But all is not what it seems. OK, it is - the place is evil and infested with hilariously inept rubber monster puppets. These puppets do evil things that nobody notices and have no effect on anything. Meanwhile the band sings and plays comically bad metal ditties.

I did like the ending though. After everyone else has been killed off, a puppet of the Devil himself confronts JM-T. Ready for the SPOILER? JM-T informs the Devil that they had never really been there, it was always just him and some illusions! Mikl-Thor tells the Devil that he is now the Vindicator (or something) and they fight to the death. Neat twist.

Everything else stunk though. It was pretty clear that this was intended to be so bad it’s good. It very much wasn’t. Mikl-Thor is not particularly charismatic - sort of a Tommy Wiseau with muscles. His metal music is not all that bad - if you like lame hair metal. It might have made a better movie if the music was as silly bad as the special effects.

All in all, recommend avoiding, but check out Zombie Nightmare (with MST3K to help out). JM-T doesn’t talk much, and Adam West is in it.

Time is on My Side

George Pal's The Time Machine (1960) is a movie I've somehow never seen. I've seen the Morlocks in screenshots and parodies and I've seen the Machine itself any number of places (Big Bang Theory, for ex), but not the whole movie, until now.

It stars Rod Taylor as the unnamed inventor. His friends (Sebastian Cabot, Whit Bissell, Tom Helmore and Alan Young) gather at his place, but he isn't anywhere around. His housekeeper, who I swear is named Mrs. Whatsit, hasn't seen him much - he's been in his laboratory. They are starting to eat without him, when he bursts in, ragged and dirty. Then he tells him the tale.

It started earlier in the week - New Year's eve, 1899. He gathers these same friends to tell them that he has invented a time machine, and demonstrates with a model. The model machine disappears with its cargo of a cigar. But has it really travelled through time? His friends are sceptical, and all head out, but Taylor stays behind. He writed a note inviting them to dinner, then climbs into his full-sized machine and heads off to the future.

First, the time machine itself is a lovely prop - a gearpunk time sled. Then we get some of Pal's beloved stop-motion time travel, as Taylor looks out his lab window at the mannequin in the window across the way getting dressed and redressed. He finally makes a big leap and finds that there is now a war on (WWI), and his friend Alan Young has died. His next jump takes him into WWII territory, and another into the late sixties, where Young's son, now an air-raid warden, tries to get him into a shelter - London is being nuked. The gag is, to Taylor, it is all one long war.

The nuking of London is another great chance for some miniature work, with some bright red oatmeal lava covering toy cars under a tiny railroad bridge. At this point, Taylor finds himself trapped under lava and has to travel into the future until it erodes. There he meets the peaceful but apathetic Eloi, including ingenue Yvette Mimieux (her film debut), and discovers that the cannibalistic human underground dwelling Morlocks that feed on them have stolen his sled. Will he make it back in time for dinner? (SPOILER - of course, we saw it in the beginning of the movie.)

I enjoyed the heck out of this, especially the cheesy special effects. My only criticism is, needs more Sebastian Cabot. But you could say that about any movie that isn’t mostly Sebastian Cabot.

As far as Yvette, I wasn’t all that taken with her - but I do have a copy (MP3) of the album she recorded with Indian classical musician Ali Akbar Khan, where she recites several poems from Beaudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (in English). So you’ve got to love her.

Chapter and Verse

We got to see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), the best Spider-man movie yet. But that’s a low bar - Homecoming is the only one I liked at all. But this one is even better.

First, it isn’t so much about the Peter Parker Spider-man. It’s about Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), a high-school kind in Brooklyn under a bit of pressure to excel at school from black police officer father Brian Tyree Henry and Puerto Rican nurse mother Luna Lauren Velez. He sometimes sneaks out to see his cool uncle Mahershala Ali who takes him to a closed off part of the subway so that he can bomb the wall with a “Great Expectations” piece - based on his homework. There, he is bitten by a radioactive spider.

At school, he is trying to be suave with a blonde new girl, but when he touches her hair, his hand sticks and won’t release. He starts to think something is going on, and heads back to the subway. There, he sees the Green Goblin killing Spider-man under the instruction of Kingpin by throwing him into a Super Collider. Although he doesn’t realize it, this creates an interdimensional rift. Soon, he will meet up with another universe’s Peter Parker, an older, divorced sad sack with a beer belly. Also, the blonde from school is Spider-Gwen. Then there’s Peni Parker, an anime girl with a spider robot, Spider-Man Noir (Nic Cage), a black-and-white trench coat wearing spider detective, and of course, Spider-Ham, a cartoon spider who was bit by a radioactive pig.

One nice thing about this movie is that it takes its time, but it’s full of stuff. The story is just getting started. I haven’t mentioned some other super-villains, or Aunt May (Lily Tomlinson), or Doc Ock, who is a woman in this dimension. Then there’s the animation style, which has a comic book style, with halftone dot shading and misregistered colors in some scenes. That didn’t work so great, I thought. Kind of looked like it was in 3D.

There’s some fun meta-stuff, like the repeated telling of a Spider-Man’s origin story, starting “Let’s do this one last time”  - they know how tired we’re getting of the origin story. The Peter Parker from our universe tells his story and includes the infamous disco-Venom Spidey from Spider-Man III. He keeps it low-key, though.

So, this is funny, serious, meta, straight, thrilling, emotional, and full of your favorite bits. The only part that I don't think was 100% successful was the death of Peter Parker, the one and only Spider-man. That was just a bit rushed and maybe didn't have the punch it should have. But there was a lot packed into this movie, and it would have taken away from Miles, the emotional center of it all.

House Party

In some ways, The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018) made a good followup to Mortal Engines. They are both visually inventive movies with a touch of steampunk, written for a younger crowd.

It’s set in the 1950s, New Zebedee, MO. Our hero is 10-year old Owen Vaccaro, a quiet, studious kid who habitually wears Capt. Midnight goggles. He is arriving by bus to live with his uncle since his parents were killed in a car crash. His uncle is Jack Black, a wierdo who wears a kimono and sometimes a fez. He lives in a spooky house filled with clocks and surrounded by jack o’ lanterns (even though it is not Halloween). His neighbor and close frenemy is Cate Blanchett. They insult each other, eat chocolate chip cookies for dinner and play poker with Vaccaro. It seems like a fun place. But in bed he hears a strange ticking sound...

In his new school, he’s kind of out of place. The kids whisper behind his back (probably about the goggles). But one kid, who is running for class president, befriends him - and tells him confidentially to lose the goggles.

To cut to the chase, it turns out that Black and Blanchett are warlock and witch, and the house was owned by an evil wizard and his consort. He killed himself in a bad experiment, but left a curse on the house - the clock in the walls. I’m not too clear on the details, but when the clock runs down, or goes off, or something, well, that’s it for the whole world.

So we have a little orphan, missing his mother, leaving in a crazy house with a weird uncle and strange neighbor, and he just wants to fit in. He also wants to learn magic, of course. It’s not a new story, but it’s a good one.

The best part, fittingly, is the house. It has an animated armchair, a topiary gryphon that poops piles of leaves, and a stained glass window that goes from sailing ship to Canadian Mountie when you aren’t looking.Black’s retro hipster wizard is a lot of fun too. He conjures a star show in the backyard with a free jazz sax solo, for example. Cate Blanchett is beautiful and unsurprisingly soulful as the witch next door, but it’s kind of a difficult part. The script doesn’t want her to be a romantic interest for Black or a mother substitute for Vaccaro. But she’s so warm and lovable, it feels sort of inevitable.

I enjoyed this a lot. Ms. Spenser was a little less enthusiastic - maybe it was a little too rote for her, or maybe she was just a little out of sorts. What did you think?

City Lights

The word on the street is that Mortal Engines (2018) is a ridiculous movie that looks pretty great. I guess I agree, but  we found it much better than it needed to be.

The premise is “Mad Max with cities”. After the 6-Minute War, civilization was destroyed, and the very earth has shifted. Now, a thousand years later, huge mobile steampunk cities prowl the land, devouring weaker cities. London has come over the land bridge to the continent to plunder. It’s leader (but not mayor) is Hugo Weaving, looking rather Rip Torn. As they stalk and ingest a small mining town, a mysterious woman (Hera Hilmar), a red scarf covering all but her eyes, stalks London. When she gets onboard, she tries to stab Weaving. But she is distracted by Robert Sheehan, an apprentice in the Museum, who evaluates high-tech artifacts. But the girl gets away.

Weaving corners her at the garbage chute, and we find out that he killed her mother and scarred her face when she was a little girl. He throws her down the chute. When he finds out that Sheehan overheard, he throws him down, too. Yes, Weaving is the villain.

Hilmar and Sheehan start wandering the land together - her a hardened warrior woman, him an annoying city boy. They eventually meet up with Jihae, an aviatrix and member of the Anti-Traction League, the resistance movement to the cities. Since we have steampunk, that means we better get zeppelins and ornithopters, too. And we do.

So far, I’m liking the visuals, but the story is pretty rote. Then Weaving unleashes an ancient zombie robot called Shrike, and it tracks down Hilmar. Although it kills pretty much everyone it meets, it turns out that it raised Hilmar, and is pretty much her father figure. It plans to build a robot body for her, so they can be indestructible together.

That’s when I fell in love with the movie. Robot zombies, in a movie that isn’t just a robot zombie movie, make everything better. I suppose that characters like Shrike - deadly creatures who nonetheless love and protect a protagonist - aren’t unknown in YA literature (which this movie is based on). But it felt fresh here.

Also, Shrike reminds me of the Shrike in Dan Simmons Hyperion novels - a mysterious metal monster who either kills or grants your heart’s desire. It could be a coincidence - the shrike is a bird that impales live lizards on thorns for a later snack, so pretty scary. But Rod Heath thinks it may be deliberate (brag - Rod Heath answers my comments on his blog).

There’s some ham-handed politics in this movie, like characters arguing about leaving Europe ala Brexit. The colonialist attitudes of the Londoners are portrayed as wrong, but understandable. The ending is somewhat appalling. But the steam punk art direction makes it all worthwhile, and the zombie robot father figure pushes it over the top.

Happy Holiday

It turns out Ms. Spenser hadn’t seen Roman Holiday (1953) so we queued it up. It took several weeks of “Short Wait” at the top of our list, but it finally showed up. In case you haven’t seen it, let me say that it is great.

It starts with Audrey Hepburn as princess of an unnamed European country (Marie of Romania?). It shows her at a diplomatic reception in Rome, unable to sit down while she is greeting dignitaries. She slips a shoe off under her skirt, and can’t get it back on. We also meet Gregory Peck, a reporter for an English language paper, playing poker with some of the boys.

Hepburn has a bit of a meltdown after the reception, and they give her a sedative to help her sleep. It doesn’t work - she just gets loopy. She sneaks out the window and wanders around town. Peck finds her snoozing by a fountain. He assumes she is drunk, and takes her to his apartment to sleep it off. When she passes out on the bed, he dumps her onto the sofa and takes it himself, transferring her back when he wakes up first.

When he goes to work, he finds out that the princess has “taken ill”, and realizes who he has in his apartment. So he decides to show her the town and take his photographer friend (Eddie Albert, acting very bohemian) - and make it into an exclusive story.

Of course, they fall in love. The wonderful thing is that Hepburn and Peck don’t live happily ever after. She has to go back to princessing. He decides not to do the story, and at the end, she shakes his hand at a press conference, and Albert gives her the photos.

I was glad to see that this movie is so good. It was full of those little touches that make classic comedies so much fun, like the scene with the shoes at the start. I want to say director William Wyler looked like Lubitsch or Preston Sturges in some scenes, but maybe it’s just good old classic movie making.

Ms. Spenser liked it too, but she fell asleep for a lot of it. No judgement, just a long day.