Rock 'n roll, Supernatural, and other freaky stuff.
ROCKETMAN (2019)
Elton John has been sober for about thirty years by now, and he has spent most of that time in the same relationship - so he had that stability in place by the time I really became aware of who he was. I knew bits and pieces of his history, I have seen videos of the wacky outfits he wore over the years, but I have primarily known Elton John as the sober, happy guy who made some cool rock songs back in the day and got an Oscar for his work with Disney. I had no idea just how troubled and messed up his life had been before the '90s until I watched Rocketman, a musical biopic directed by Dexter Fletcher from a screenplay by Lee Hall.
From what I can tell, Rocketman is a reasonably accurate "Cliff's Notes" version of John's life, following him from childhood through his choice to become sober. Taron Egerton turns in an incredible performance as the adult John, and also took on the task of singing multiple songs and getting his voice close enough to John's without having the audience reject his renditions for sounding different. He actually pulled it off. This movie showed me that John was raised by a pair of cold, distant, self-involved parents, who frequently blew the chances they had to be there for him. He went on to endure a tortured existence for decades, having bad and ill-advised relationships, and pumping himself full of drugs and alcohol. I didn't know he had gone through all this, and was fascinated to learn it.
And while I was gaining a new sympathy and greater appreciation for John, the movie kept a steady stream of good songs pumping into my ears. Many of them I knew, they're some of John's greatest hits, but some of them were deeper cuts than I had ever gotten to.
Fletcher directed the hell out of this movie, making it a dazzling spectacle that's also emotionally involving. He also surrounded Egerton with a terrific supporting cast, including Bryce Dallas Howard as John's mother and Jamie Bell as his long-time songwriting collaborator Bernie Taupin. This is a great film; I was captivated for the entirety of its 121 minutes.
FORBIDDEN ZONE: ALIEN ABDUCTION (1996)
If I had caught Forbidden Zone: Alien Abduction (a.k.a. Alien Abduction: Intimate Secrets) on late night cable when I was an adolescent, the film would have made quite an impression on me. Executive produced by Full Moon founder Charles Band, it is the definitive "Skinemax" movie, packed with nudity from beginning to end - and that's all it really has to offer, despite the titular promise of alien abduction action.
This was the only directorial credit for Lucian S. Diamonde, so I'm assuming that was a pseudonym. Diamonde was working from a script by Vernon Lumley, whose only other writing credit was a '96 film called Dream Master: The Erotic Invader, which sounds like a spiritual companion piece to this movie.
Alien Abduction centers on a group of women who have gotten together in a mostly empty spa to spend the day hanging out and telling each other stories of sexual encounters they've had, these "tales of carnal bliss" being why the movie has that Intimate Secrets subtitle. Oddly, a couple of the women who share their intimate secrets aren't even given character names in the end credits, even though the whole movie is about these friends talking to each other (of course, we're shown flashbacks to most of the sexual encounters they discuss). There's Veronica (Meredyth Holmes), Tedra (Pia Reyes), and Sheri (Darcy DeMoss), but their two other friends are simply credited as Motorcycle Cop Girl (Carmen Lacatus) and Massage Fantasy Girl (Alina Chivulescu).
Maybe Motorcycle Cop Girl and Massage Fantasy Girl didn't get names because they weren't involved with the alien abduction of the title. Through the stories told, we find out that Veronica, Tedra, and Sheri were driving through the countryside one night when their car stalled out. They split up, and each of them had some crazy sexual experiences thanks to an alien visitor. We're not shown world-rocking creatures, the alien has genetically remade himself in the image of a human male, but things do get strange.
I'm not on the prowl for Skinemax thrills anymore; I watched this movie because of the involvement of two people, Band and DeMoss. I had read DeMoss has a role in the Full Moon movie Trophy Heads that calls back to Alien Abduction, and I intend to watch Trophy Heads one of these days, so I wanted to watch this so I could understand the reference. Plus, DeMoss was in Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, and I'm always interested in seeing F13 alumni in other projects. Jason Lives was the only F13 movie to have no nudity, even though DeMoss has a sex scene in it. In this movie, the clothes do not stay on.
Those Skinemax thrills and/or an interest in the careers of people involved are the only reasons to check out Alien Abduction... and if you do watch it, you might be surprised at the judgment and shaming Sheri faces when she tells her friends she had sex with a woman. There is a twist involving the homophobic character, but '96 sure was a different time, even for softcore erotica.
SPACE THING (1968)
Back in the '60s, softcore movies were called "nudie cuties" and they actually got play in theatres. David F. Friedman, who also worked with H.G. Lewis on early gore movies like Blood Feast, served as an uncredited producer and co-director on the 1968 nudie cutie Space Thing, which is another movie I sat through simply because it has a connection to Full Moon: footage from it was used in the recent Full Moon release Barbie and Kendra Storm Area 51.
Credited solely to director B. Ron Elliott (a.k.a. Byron Mabe), who was working from a script by Cosmo Politan (no question that's a pseudonym, is there?), Space Thing begins with a man named James Granilla (Steve Vincent, a.k.a. Bart Black) relaxing in bed, leafing through science fiction magazines... to the chagrin of his girlfriend (Bambi Allen), who's trying to sleep next to him. James responds to his girlfriend's complaints about his overwhelming fascination with sci-fi magazines by having sex with her, then goes back to reading his literature.
That's when the story shifts to James imagining he's on a spaceship in the year 2069. He's a humanoid alien who infiltrates the ship of another race of humanoid aliens, and he decides that he can't fully fit in among this other race unless he observes the sex lives of the ship's other passengers. And that's all there is to it, James watching these aliens / people engage in lengthy softcore sex scenes. He watches straight sex, he watches lesbian sex, and for the S&M fans in the audience he also watches a woman receive a whipping. Once he has taken notes, he engages in some alien sex himself. The names of some of the actors featured in these scenes include April Playmate, Mercy Mee, Ronnie Runningboard, and Legs Benedict.
Space Thing is cheap and cheesy, and it's amusing to think that this was actually supposed to excite people back in the day, it's so goofy, padded out, and dull. Well, at least now I'll be familiar with the Space Thing footage when I watch Barbie and Kendra Storm Area 51.
SUPERNATURAL: SEASON SIX (2010 - 2011)
Season five of Supernatural seemed like a solid ending. The show could have stopped there and it would have felt like a complete story had been told in a very satisfying way. Sure, there would have been a lingering question over the final shot, which served to lead into the season six the world did get, but it still could have worked as a complete story with or without that shot.
In a way, it was meant to be the ending. As of the season five finale, series creator Eric Kripke had successfully told the entire story he wanted to tell. It had taken some twists and turns that he didn't even expect along the way (like the addition of angels), but it turned out how he wanted it to and it was all wrapped up. After season five, Kripke stepped aside and handed the reins over to a new showrunner, Sera Gamble, who had been working on the show as a writer since season one and became a producer as of season three. Gamble was the new boss, the one who had to work with a writers room to move Supernatural forward and make season five not an ending, but just another chapter in an ongoing story.
Season six is a bit of a bumpy ride, and it's been difficult for me to gather my thoughts on it. It took me a while to get through this season; I made it through the first five seasons of the show in about a year. I finished watching season five more than a year and a half ago. That's how much difficulty season six gave me. I'm not saying it was a bad season, but it never overcame the feeling that this was just a bunch of awkward "bonus" episodes that came after the show had already reached its conclusion.
The biggest problem with this season is that it seems disjointed when you're first watching it. It feels like storylines are built up just to be tossed aside, and while most of those stories come together and make sense in the end (when the writers finally decide to let you know what's going on right before the finale), there are characters who are removed from the show at odd times, making me wonder why they were ever involved at all.
The first episode picks up one year after the season five finale and finds that Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) has spent that year leading a domesticated life - which he seems to fear could fall apart at any moment - with on-off girlfriend Lisa (Cindy Sampson) and her young son Ben (Nicholas Elia). His domesticated life finally does fall apart when his brother Sam (Jared Padalecki) - who was a vessel for Lucifer the last time Dean saw him, right before he fell into a hellish cage with an archangel - shows up at his home, alive and Lucifer-free. Someone busted Sam out of Hell for reasons unknown, and the same person has brought their monster hunting grandfather Samuel Campbell (Mitch Pileggi) down from Heaven. For the last year, Sam has been hunting supernatural creatures alongside Samuel and several other members of the Campbell family, and now Dean gets dragged back into the monster hunting lifestyle as well.
It's not long before Dean realizes that Sam isn't quite himself anymore, and that there's some shady stuff going on with the Campbells. We'll come to find out that Sam's soul didn't come return from Hell with him, which is why he's a sex-fueled douche who doesn't have empathy for anyone around him and is willing to risk people's lives, or even kill people, in the course of his hunts. The "soulless Sam" story takes up half the season's twenty-two episodes, while we also find out that the demon Crowley (Mark A. Sheppard) has become "King of Hell" in Lucifer's absence - and, for some reason, is also trying to find a way to tap into Purgatory, where the souls of vanquished monsters go. There's a whole lot of talk about gaining access to Purgatory throughout the season, but it's never clear why we're supposed to be worried about whether or not someone does open a doorway to Purgatory. This never seems like a threat, and neither does Crowley when he appears to be defeated halfway into the season.
Meanwhile, Sam and Dean's old angel buddy Castiel (Misha Collins) pops in and out of episodes, always mentioning that he's taking part in a civil war that's being fought among the angels in Heaven, which descended into chaos after Sam and Dean cancelled the apocalypse. Again, it takes a while for the show to make it clear how much that war in Heaven really matters, because it doesn't seem to matter much when Castiel can step away from it, hang out with Sam and Dean for a while, then disappear to go back to the fight.
It is clear that there's something strange going on with the monsters of the world, because creatures are changing appearance and behavior patterns, all new creatures are showing up, some are in locations far from where they normally operate, and monsters that haven't been seen in hundreds of years are now back at work. Then there's a storyline about the "Mother of All" monsters, Julia Maxwell as Eve, being set loose on the world to wreak havoc. It looks like Eve is going to turn out to be the major threat of the season, despite the fact that she's not even introduced until the second half, but the whole Eve aspect of the season turns out to be a build-up to not much payoff.
Major storylines just dead end. Characters who should have been part of the finale don't make it there. Interesting ideas are presented - like the reveal that Sam and Dean's father figure Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver) has an ex (played by Kim Johnston Ulrich) who happens to be a creature who's hundreds of years old and was accidentally freed from Purgatory by horror author H.P. Lovecraft back in the 1930s - but aren't properly explored.
Season six does have some great episodes, though, and Sam and Dean have quite a variety of creatures to face off with. There's Crowley, djinn, shapeshifters, the goddess of truth, skinwalkers, dragons (don't get your hopes up for them), a spider monster called an arachne, mind controlling worms, Fate herself, a phoenix (again, this probably isn't what most viewers would expect), and hybrid creatures that Dean calls Jefferson Starships. Meg the demon (Rachel Miner) shows up once again. The civil war in Heaven also leads to the staff of Moses causing some trouble on Earth. Standout episodes include one in which horror icon Robert Englund has a role and Dean has to take over Death's job for a day - accompanied by Reaper Tessa (Lindsey McKeon) from previous seasons - with Sam's soul at stake; one where it's revealed that fairies are the truth behind UFOs; and a vengeful spirit story I was surprised to see was directed by Jaws 2's Jeannot Szwarc. As it turns out, I shouldn't have been too surprised, because Szwarc directs a whole lot of television. Like previous seasons, this one has a time travel episode, where a quest for a certain item that may cause damage to Eve requires Sam and Dean to go back to 1861. A time travel episode in season four was reminiscent of Back to the Future, and this one clearly drew some inspiration from Back to the Future Part III, even lifting one idea directly out of that film.
The fairy episode and the time travel episode both come with their own unique title sequences. The title sequence on the fairy episode is done in the style of The X-Files, while the episode that mostly takes place in 1861 pays tribute to Bonanza with its title sequence.
There are some really wacky episodes as well (and that fairy one could certainly qualify as wacky), like one in which Sam and Dean have to deal with the repercussions of Castiel's fellow angel Balthazar (Sebastian Roché) deciding to go back in time and prevent the Titanic from sinking, and another where Balthazar sends Sam and Dean into an alternate reality in which the Supernatural TV show exists and the brothers find themselves taking the place of actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles. This show has had some fun playing with meta concepts in the last few seasons - season four introduced an author / prophet who had written novels about Sam and Dean's monster hunting adventures, season five showed us that fans of those books gather at Supernatural conventions. This season goes even further with this episode that takes Sam and Dean into a world where Supernatural is just a TV show... That's really pushing the edge of going too far with it all, but the episode manages to scrape by with a sense of humor.
His story was told, but Kripke did come back to the show to write one single episode of season six, the season finale. That was not one of my favorite episodes, because it spends a large portion of the season's last hour focusing on Sam as he deals with memory issues and interacts with characters who don't even exist. It was frustrating, and yet it did seem fitting for this season, because the big scheme of the season is kept unclear for so long, why not have the conclusion of the overall story come off as an afterthought as well?
Season six is entertaining, I enjoy watching Sam and Dean at work even when the stories are below par, but this was definitely my least favorite of the seasons so far. One thing about it that didn't pale in comparison to preceding seasons is the soundtrack of classic rock songs. Music in the season six line-up included Bob Seger, Deep Purple, Kenny Rogers, Bauhaus, Molly Hatchet, David Bowie, Aerosmith, Jethro Tull, Nazareth, Blondie, Hot Chocolate, Jefferson Starship, The Rolling Stones, and - as always - Kansas.
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