Not Brand-X

I'm old, so to me, the X-Men are the original five: Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Angel, and Jean Grey. I had never even heard of Wolverine until the movies. But a few years ago, I got a big iPad and a subscription to the Marvel U and read most of the New Mutants run. So I was ready for the movie The New Mutants (2020).

It starts with Blu Hunt running from her house as it is destoyed from within. Her father encourages her to run, then gets killed. She passes out as the monster approached and wakes up strapped to a hospital bed in a sort of old-fashioned hospital. It turns out to be run by Alice Braga, who is sympathetic but strict. She doesn't really explain anything, but invites Blu to a group therapy session where she meets the other inmates.

• Maisie Williams, a shy but sweet Scots girl 
• Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things), a West Virginia bad boy with a broken arm and trucker hat. I kept thinking it was a strangely de-aged Kevin Bacon until Ms. Spenser told me who it was.
• Henry Zaga, an egotistical Brazilian
• Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma.), a very sarcastic Russian. She has a plush puppet dragon, named Lockheed (after Kitty Pryde's dragon)

The session doesn't go well, and Blu isn't very happy, so she tries to run away. At Taylor-Joy's urging, she runs full-tilt into a force field. When she tries to fight Taylor-Joy, she discovers her power - she can vanish and teleport. As is the current convention, super-hero names are rarely mentioned, but she is Illyana Rasputin, Magik.

Also, a wolf running nearby hints at Maisie Williams power - she's a werewolf.

We also see Heaton tethered to a concrete block, zooming around like a tetherball - he's Cannonball.

The idea is that this hospital (Medfield State Hospital, also seen in Shutter Island) is for the training of mutants whose powers are dangerous or out of control. It slowly becomes clear that the monster that destroyed her village, the Demon Bear, was summoned by her, leaving her wracked with guilt. She tries to kill herself, but Maisie talks her out of it, and they become friends and soon, lovers. But more and more the kids are menaced by creatures out of their nightmares. 

The story is that if they learn to control their powers, they can join the X-Men. But Dr. Braga doesn't seem to be that trustworthy or sympatico. She keeps referring to them as "patients" in a condescending way. Finally, she gets instructions from her superiors (NOT Prof. X) that Blu is too dangerous, and must be put down. That triggers worse monsters, because her power is to manifest people's worst fears -including her own fear of demon bear. 

There are strong elements of horror in this version of the story. The decrepit hospital, the monsters from the id, the evil doctor who wants to control or kill. There's even a scene in the closed school pool, like in It Follows. But it's fairly light, as horror goes. The lesbian love theme is also not really pounded on. It's mostly just a regular superhero origin story. 

This movie had a rough production history, with years of anticipation, false starts, new directions, and so on - finally being released into the mouth of the COVID lockdown. It was, as far as I can tell, completely ignored. But I liked it. Blu and Maisie had a tough sweetness, and Anya T-J is a great bad-ass Illyana. Heaton gets an interesting back story - I know his as a goofy farmboy, but here he killed his father and a bunch of miners going off underground. Zaga doesn't get much more than a moment, but maybe that's for the best. 

I'm guessing that this will be a one-off, which is too bad. I wouldn't mind seeing them, and maybe a couple more members in later movies. 

Tales of Brave Ulysses, That Jerk

A film about Ulysses (1954) with Kirk Douglas in the leading role? That pretty much launched the peplum (sword and sandal) craze? Sign me up!

It starts with Silvana Mangano as Penelope, suffering the suitors as she wove and unraveled her tapestry, along with old Mentor and young Telemachus. Then we find Douglas as Ulysses, washing up on shore, all by himself. He has lost his memory, but is comforted by Rossana Podesta as Nausicaa. At this point, I'm a little miffed - the Odyssey is almost over. But after they fall in love and are about to be married, he gazes out to sea and remembers.

We get a quick rundown on the Trojan Horse, then the men set sail for home. But since they defiled the temple of Poseidon, their ship is thrown off course. Desperate for supplies, they find an island with a cave filled with sheep and set to work on them. This is, of course, the cave of the Cyclops, who eats one of them and traps the rest. Ulysses does the wine and blinding trick, but not the "My name is No Man" gag. Too bad, it's a favorite.

We also get the adventure of the Sirens and Circe's Isle (with Silvana Mangana also as Circe). Meanwhile, Anthony Quinn shows up as Antinous to woo Penelope, and he isn't some rude jerk - he's a powerful warlord who gets what he wants. 

When Ulysses finally gets back to Ithaca, though, watch out.

Once I realized that this story would be told largely in flashback, I settled down - of course the Odyssey traditionally has a full recap of the story every now and then, so that fits. I liked the the whole sword and sandals spectacle, especially the Cyclops, which was directed by Mario Bava, uncredited. Unfortunately, I didn't like wily Ulysses. His outright theft of the sheep, his years of dalliance with various babes on islands when he should have been attending to business - I suppose some of this was to show that things were different then, and some was in the original material. But it all left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. And it was worse for Ms. Spenser, who found the whole thing annoying.  

Annus Horribilis

2067 (2020) is a low-budget time-travel film, that, like at least one character, makes every mistake. 

It is set in the year Eponymous. The world has gone to hell, with all plant life wiped out. That drastically reduces the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, so people have to use artificial oxygen. That's my first gripe. Artificial oxygen isn't and shouldn't be a thing. It's just a simple atom or two. But the artificial stuff is bad for you, and can give you the Sickness. This trope isn't stupid, but it isn't what I want right now.

It stars Kodi Smit-McPhee (the latest Nightcrawler) as a tunnel worker, maintaining the dangerous and clunky yet high-tech nuclear power system. I guess that's a trope I have no real problem with. He has a wife he dearly loves (Sana'a Shaik) who is coming down with the Sickness. 

Then he gets a call from ChronoCorp, the corporation that runs everything. From its name you might guess it has something to do with time travel, and you would be right. But so far, they have only sent something into the future, and that was when Kodi was a kid. Not much to base a corporate empire on.

Kodi has a grudge against time travel and his dad. You see, he used to love his scientist father - he wanted to grow up to be a "science man". Then one day, his father came home, and locked a bracelet on his wrist, one that drew blood and had a red LED. Then his father disappeared for a while, then called his mother to meet him somewhere dodgy, leading her to get killed (we don't learn this all at once). Well done, science man.

It turned out his father went forward in time with the upstream time machine, which then failed. He might have been a rotten father, but wasn't very good at science either? But now, with Kodi all grown up, the time machine in 2067 receives a message, saying "Send Ethan Whyte", Kodi's character. 

Kodi is completely against this, wanting to stay with his sick wife, not abandon her like his dad. But she convinces him to go into the future and send back a cure. Of course everyone assumes there is a cure in the future, not like, some new plants or something.

And when he gets to the future, he finds a lush jungle, but everyone is dead. There's so much oxygen that all his equipment burns up. (Nice touch, I'll grant that.) In short order, he poisons himself on mushrooms, and his buddy Ryan Kwanten pops out of the time machine to save him. The time machine that could only send ONE person. So they just changed their story - it could only send two people.

Anyway, is he here to help Kodi? Kodi has found a skeleton of himself with a bullet through the skull, and Kwanten has the only gun. But wait, how did they get into the past for Kodi to get shot? Never mind.

As you can tell, I was kind of annoyed by this movie. The design was good - director Seth Larney did visual effects for a Matrix sequel and an X-Men movie. The acting was fine, although it gets a little fraught in the climactic crazy scenes. But the plot is just all over the place. The whole father thing, the artificial oxygen, the clunky time travel, just a mess. At least it looked good.

King of Hearts of Darkness

Although I'd heard a lot about how terrible Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration (1980) is, one or two good mentions and I put it on the queue. Maybe I'm just not ready to watch The Exorcist.

It is set in a castle in Oregon (shot in Hungary, because PepsiCo was funding, and had some money there they couldn't get out). This castle was being used as an asylum for soldiers driven mad by the Vietnam War. The opening scenes show Sergeant Tom Atkins trying to get the motley crew of crazily dressed soldiers to line up at attention. Arriving is Stacey Keach, the new commanding officer and chief psychiatrist of this madhouse. He seems withdrawn and melancholy, but is willing to humor the men.

And what a wacky assortment: Moses Gunn thinks he's Superman. Joe Spinell is staging Shakespeare with dogs. Scott Wilson was an astronaut who had a screaming panic attack just before his launch. And the psychiatrist, Ed Flanders, is just about as bad, walking around with no pants because the patients took his only clean pair. 

So the first half is about the kooky goings-on in Castle Nutbar. But Keach is slowly coming out of his shell. He talks a little about his brother, a vicious killer, "Killer" Kane, now dead. Then a new soldier is admitted and recognized Keach as "Killer" Kane. Flanders ("Hi-diddly-ho!") explains that Kane is the killer, who decapitated enemy soldiers in Vietnam. He had a breakdown and believes he is his brother, who is a psychiatrist - wanting to heal people, not kill them, And yes, Flanders is actually Keach's brother, which almost explains why they are letting him get away with all this.

Then it gets dark. But not the way I expected. You see, this being Peter Blatty, I assumed that the occult would make an appearance. Probably involving ancient evil beings living on the moon that the astronaut was so afraid of. But - SPOILER - no. The evil is all in the hearts of men.

When I was in high school, our psych class went to see King of Hearts, about an Allied soldier who comes upon an Italian town that the fascists have retreated from. But first they let out the inmates of the local sanitarium. You see, war is madness, and in war, madmen are the only sane ones, etc. I might have bought this as a high-school kid, but not anymore. Insanity, and in particular, "battle fatigue" doesn't work that way. Of course, they might have been malingering. The castle was a pretty good deal.

Anyway. I mainly wanted to see it for Tom Atkins ("Thrill me!"). And he was barely in it.

No Tribble at All

Save Yourselves! (2020) is a pretty timely movie. The concept it simple: a couple goes to the woods for a digital detox, and doesn't realize that the aliens have conquered the earth while they were away.

It stars Sunita Mari and John Paul Reynolds as a typical high-tech couple. They are always exhausted from their (undefined) high-tech jobs, so they spend all their time staring at their phones. One night they meet up with their much more cool friend, who gave up his job in venture capital to 3D print surf boards in Nicaragua. He offers to let them borrow his upstate cabin to get away from it all. 

They promise they will turn off their phones when they get there. And as they drive up, we notice, but they don't, that odd things are falling from the sky. Then, while Reynolds is trying to figure out man things like chopping wood, Mari sneaks a glance at her phone. She has a lot of messages - mostly panicked texts from her mother about something on the news. But she's always upset about something in the news. When Reynolds comes back in, she hides her phone and they go back to having relationship discussions. 

But in the morning, they discover that all the liquor is gone, and the sourdough starter too. Also, the big round fuzzy pillow they have been calling a pouffe as moved. Mari breaks down and admits that she checked her phone, and when they both do, they find out that alien invaders, who live off ethanol and look like big tribbles, have conquered the earth.

So they fight some of the aliens, and try to escape, but the pouffes have drunk all the cars gas for the ethanol. The cabin has a diesel car, so they do get away - only to spot another car being attacked by pouffes. They can't save anyone in the car, except a baby. They don't want to save it, but they do. And then another survivor steals their car.

Carless and stuck with a baby, they wander into the woods. When they try to change the baby, the smell sends them into sick hallucinations for a while. Yet somehow they survive, but not save themselves. 

This was somewhat funny, but suffered from a common problem - unlikable leads. Reynolds and Mari play completely un-self-aware characters, who really can barely relate to each other. Mari wants to do relationship quizzes she downloaded from online. Reynolds wants to do ... something ... Maybe start a community garden. They aren't evil or spectacularly selfish, but they aren't much fun to be around. And it isn't very funny, just kind of real. The space aliens are more fun, for sure.

Wild Again

Theodora Goes Wild/Together Again (1936) is a nice Irene Dunne double bill. Theodora might have been the first movie I saw at the Stanford Theater, and this was my first time for Together.

In Theodora Goes Wild, Dunne is Theodora, the respectable daughter of a family of small-town Connecticut big shots. Secretly, she is also the author of a scandalous best-seller, which the newspaper is serializing, and the literary society (of which she is a member) deplores. 

She visits New York to see her rakish uncle Robert Grieg, but also to see her publisher. Hanging around the office is Melvyn Douglas, a sort of hanger-on who always shows up uninvited when there's a chance of free food. He accuses Dunne of being a prude who doesn't know anything about the lurid life she writes about. To prove him wrong, she has him take her out carousing.

There's a great couple of nightclub scenes, including a hula show, but she manages to survive and make it back to her respectable Connecticut home. But look who's coming up the sidewalk? It's Douglas, pretending to be a tramp looking for work. To keep her secret, she has to offer him a gardening job and a bed in the shed out back.

So Douglas is hanging around, being annoying (he whistles constantly, making sure Dunne can't ignore him). But of course, through all of this she is slowly falling in love with him. He encourages her to stop living according to other people's expectations and live her own life. Which she finally does - telling everyone in the literary society that she wrote that book, and that she is in love with the gardener.

But instead of being the happy ending, Douglas gets quiet and sour and disappears. So in the next act, Dunne hunts him up in New York. It turns out that he is married (unhappily) and he can't get divorced because his father is running for office. So Dunne moves into his apartment and starts tormenting him. It's a nice twist.

Together Again (1944) is set in another small town, with Dunne again one of the first citizens. Here she is the widowed wife of a much beloved mayor, with a teenaged daughter (Mona Freeman) who dotes on a statue of her father in the park, and shows distain for her boyfriend.

When lightning strikes the head off of the statue, Dunne travels to New York to hire a sculptor to make a new one. She finds Charles Boyer. He takes her out for some gay nightlife, including a visit to a strip club. When she spills something on her dress, a washroom attendant has her take it off to touch it up. And then the police raid the joint, a stripper grabs her dress and jumps out the window, and she gets photographed in her slip (fortunately with her hand in front of her face).

She goes back to her town, and finds that they have all seen the picture of the raid in the papers. She tells everyone that the sculptor is too busy, and by the way, he's old and ugly. Then he shows up. He even moves into her shed to work on the sculpture. There's a merry mix up with the daughter setting her hat for Boyer, which makes Dunne pretend to go for her boyfriend. All the while, Charles Coburn, the dead mayor's father, is trying to get Dunne to be a human and marry Boyer.

Pretty similar to Theodora - there's even a newspaper editor subplot in both. But in place of the twist where Dunne tortures Douglas, we have the cross-generational mixup, which frankly belongs in a 50s TV sit-com. Still, there's a lot to like about it, even if it isn't quite the classic Theodora is. It does have Charles Coburn, plus the washroom attendant is Nina Mae McKinney, a beautiful black woman who get very few roles. . 

Skunk-Ape!

The concept behind Monster Beach Party (2005) - a 1950s-style teensploitation monster movie can be made just as cheaply in the 2000s.

It stars Claire Johnson, Cynthia Evans, and Mary Kraft as a Bangles/Go-Gos 80s girl group (that's a lot of decades...), the Violas. The movie starts with them singing "Shout, Stomp, Scream". After the show, when they are loading up their gear, a fan (Travis Young) tries to chat them up, but they politely blow him off. 

Meanwhile, two deputies in a small beach town are investigating a call about a smelly pile of debris on the beach. They find a small girl wandering with a dazed expression and discover her family brutally killed. The girl won't speak, until she screams: "Them!".

Wait, no, that's Them!

One deputy calls in his nephew, Jonathan Michael Green, who is a scientist, to help out.

Anyhow, the next day we find the Violas cruising along in their aqua station wagon on their way to a gig in Florida. Their car breaks down outside the very town the killings took place in, and get a ride into town by the (very handsome) scientist. And it turns out the town's garage is owned by Young, the fan from the last gig. The girls don't really want to stay in a town with mysterious murders going on, but they don't have any money to fix the car. Young offers to fix it in exchange for them playing at his party that night. The Florida gig is cancelled due to hurricane, I think - which isn't a plot point, but it should have been.

It's no spoiler to let on that the killings are caused by a bipedal cryptid, known to folklore as a Skunk-Ape, a smelly sasquatch. It's also not much of a spoiler if I tell you Claire Johnson, the guitarist and lead singer of the Violas, has sworn off men, but is getting interested in Young. It would be a spoiler to tell you why she swore off men, but they reveal it in a song ("He gave her syph-syph-syph-syphilis...").

I was prepared not to be impressed by this movie. The Coming Attractions on the disc looked terrible. But it was actually a lot of fun and kind of sweet. The Violas are a decent band, and I loved the great psychedelic rave-up at the end of "Hands OFf My Man." Maybe not as great as the Del-Aires in Horror of Party Beach (the first horror-musical), but who are? The men who court Johnson are all respectful, not gross. The sheriff and his deputies are almost as much fun as Ed Wood's cops. All in all, I recommend it.