We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
'80s comedy, Marvel, '50s horror, and flawless victories.
POLICE ACADEMY (1984)
The Police Academy movies are known for being really ridiculous and dumb, but the original film is actually based on a true story. Producer Paul Maslansky witnessed a group of police cadets he felt weren't fit to become officers due to things like weight and age, people he described as "ludicrous-looking", being "dressed down by a frustrated sergeant". He found out that the mayor of the city they were in had lifted restrictions for police academy applicants, forcing instructors to "wash out" people they felt shouldn't be in the academy in the first place. Maslansky was inspired to turn this story into a goofball comedy that sides with the ludicrous recruits. As luck would have it, the idea turned out to be incredibly appealing to the movie-going audience, and the film Police Academy launched one of the biggest franchises of the 1980s.
Directed by Hugh Wilson from a screenplay by Neal Israel and Pat Proft (that he did some work on as well), the first Police Academy centers on Steve Guttenberg as Carey Mahoney, a guy who frequently gets into trouble with the law for things like destroying private property and disturbing the peace. After he vindictively wrecks a jerk's Trans Am in the parking lot he works at, he's facing jail time. Luckily for him, his father had a friend on the force who sends him to the police academy as punishment instead of putting him behind bars. Mahoney figures he can get kicked out of the academy on the first day for bad behavior - but then finds out that a deal is in place that will force him to complete the twenty-four week course. He can't get kicked out no matter what he does.
Meanwhile, George R. Robertson and G.W. Bailey are Chief Hurst and Lieutenant Harris, the hard-edged authority figures who are determined to make sure the unfit recruits drop out of the academy. Harris is rough on the cadets, and Mahoney's irreverent attitude makes him a particularly troublesome thorn in Harris's side. The more Harris and his lackeys give Mahoney grief, the more he does his best to humiliate them.
Not all of the top cops are against the "losers", "scumbuckets", and "dirtbags" (as Harris calls them) in the academy. Good-natured Commandant Lassard (George Gaynes) thinks they should all get a fair shot. In addition to Mahoney, Metropolitan Police Department recruits include Kim Cattrall as Karen Thompson, a rich woman who has joined the academy mainly just because the filmmakers felt Mahoney needed a love interest; David Graf as gun enthusiast Eugene Tackleberry; Bruce Mahler as the severely accident prone Douglas Fackler; Marion Ramsey as the mousy, soft-spoken Laverne Hooks; Bubba Smith as intimidating giant Moses Hightower, who was a florist before deciding to become a cop; and Michael Winslow as Larvell Jones, who is always making sound effect noises with his mouth. These characters, along with instructor Sergeant Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook), are almost impossible for an '80s kid like me to objectively evaluate, because I saw these people on the screen constantly throughout my childhood. My earliest years were spent watching them in this movie and all of its many sequels, so when I go back and watch a Police Academy movie it's like I'm visiting old friends.
The Police Academy movies get a lot of grief, but the fact is that everyone does well in their roles, whether they're making their silly characters endearing to the audience or if they're Bailey turning Harris into a memorable and amusing villain. I can't really see why the first film was such a sensation, I don't find it to be hilarious, but it does try to keep the viewer smiling. There's not much to the story, it's just scene after scene of something laughable happening at the academy, or to people who attend the academy. Of course, being an '80s movie, it does have a bit of questionable content, like the scene where Mahoney tricks Harris's cadet goons Blankes (Brant Von Hoffman) and Copeland (Scott Thomson) into going to a gay bar called The Blue Oyster because a straight man stepping into a gay bar was presented as being a super humiliating situation in the '80s. When Blankes and Copeland realize what sort of establishment they're in, the leather-clad men surrounding them won't let them leave. Until they do some dancing. At least there are no insults or slurs directed toward the men in the bar. There are homophobic insults at other points in the film, because it was the '80s, but not in that scene. There's also a mistaken identity blowjob scene that's handled as well as an '80s movie could possibly handle such a thing.
Watching this movie, I never would have guessed that it would lead to six sequels and a couple TV shows, but it is a fun way to spend an hour and a half.
MARVEL'S BEHIND THE MASK (2021)
Marvel's Behind the Mask is a quick (62 minutes) and interesting documentary that focuses on one of my favorite things about Marvel Comics, probably one of the reasons that I have been so drawn to Marvel's characters ever since I was a little kid: the fact that so many of their heroes were just regular people before they became heroes. Even after they become heroes, they still have to deal with personal issues as they make their way through their lives in, usually, real world locations. They have incredible powers, but they're still relatable, and we're given reason to care about them. They're interesting because of who they are "behind the mask".
Directed by Michael Jacobs, the documentary uses interviews with many people who have worked at Marvel over the years to dig into the concept of the dual identities Marvel characters have, and the fact that the creative forces behind some of the greatest characters had dual identities of their own: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were not given those names at birth, they took those names so their work would be more accepted at a time when their Jewish surnames could have caused them to be look down upon. They could be seen as "outsiders" and "others", and they created characters who reflected themselves. This also inspired them to include others who might not be represented elsewhere in their comics; for example, Marvel had Black characters in their books when that wasn't the norm.
The documentary then goes over the history of inclusivity and diversity in Marvel, the noble effort to have the comics mirror our own world and give a wider range of readers characters they can see themselves in. Black characters, stronger female characters, gay characters, allegorical mutants, all the way up to the creation of Kamala Khan, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel.
It all comes down to a beautiful piece of writing Stan Lee did in 1980, in which he said, "None of us is all that different from each other. We all want essentially the same things out of life. A measure of security, some fun, some romance, friendship, and respect of our contemporaries. That goes for Indians, Chinese, Russians, Jews, Arabs, Catholics, Protestants, Blacks, Browns, Whites, and green-skinned Hulks. So why don't we all stop wasting time hating the other guys? Just look in the mirror, mister - that other guy is you! Excelsior! Stan."
THE CRAWLING EYE (1958)
There are two different titles for this sci-fi horror film from director Quentin Lawrence, but neither one of them sound quite right to me. It's called The Trollenberg Terror, which is off-putting because you don't know what Trollenberg is going into the film, and it's called The Crawling Eye, which makes it sound like a goofy B-movie. The Crawling Eye has gotten the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, probably because of that title, but it's not really a goofy B-movie. It's actually better than either of its titles.
Scripted by Jimmy Sangster and based on a British TV show that aired two years earlier, the story takes place on and around a mountain called Trollenberg in Switzerland. There has been a mist lingering around the mountain lately, and the climbers who disappear into that mist are never seen again. This is something Professor Crevett (Warren Mitchell), who has a cosmic ray observatory set up on the mountain, has seen before, three years earlier in the Andes. So he makes a call to Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker) from the United Nations, who also saw what happened in the Andes. Brooks catches a train to Trollenberg, and happens to share a train compartment with two sisters - Janet Munro and Jennifer Jayne as Anne and Sarah Pilgrim - who are touring Europe with Anne's mind-reading act. As soon as Anne sees the mountain, she feels compelled to depart the train at Trollenberg: and now all the pieces are in place for a repeat of what happened in the Andes.
Crevett and Brooks will come to deduce and reveal that alien creatures - which we see do indeed look like giant, tentacled eyeballs - are descending to Earth in radioactive clouds and lingering around mountains, where they proceed to attack any climbers that cross their paths. But these creatures have a particular vendetta against clairvoyant people, which means they're on a collision course with Anne Pilgrim. And here's my favorite thing about the situation: the aliens prove capable of taking control of human corpses and sending them to kill these clairvoyants. So a dead climber ends up killing people with a pick axe and going after Anne, before the big ending involving multiple "crawling eyes".
There is some goofiness to the concepts in the movie, sure, but they play very well in context, and the film moves along at a good pace. You get alien creatures, mountain climbers getting their heads ripped off, a weapon-wielding undead killer, and people tossing fire bombs at monsters, all within the same 84 minute film. What's not to enjoy about all that?
MORTAL KOMBAT (1995)
In the early '90s, Ed Boon and John Tobias wanted to make a Jean-Claude Van Damme video game, but even after it became clear that their fighting game wasn't going to have any connection to Van Damme or his career, they still kept pushing it forward. The result was Mortal Kombat, one of the most famous games ever released. For what it is, the game has the perfect plot: Emperor Shao Khan of the realm called Outworld wants to invade and conquer Earth, enslaving its population. The only thing stopping him is the fact that the Elder Gods who created the realms put a rule in place that one realm can only invade another realm after they have defeated their target in ten straight Mortal Kombat fighting tournaments. Outside of the game, that sounds kind of silly, which is probably why director Paul W.S. Anderson and screenwriter Kevin Droney clearly felt safe coating their film adaptation of the game in a heavy layer of cheese. Droney wrote some ridiculous lines for the characters, and Anderson let his actors ham it up as they delivered those lines.
For me, the cheesiness of Anderson's Mortal Kombat was off-putting even as I sat in the theatre on opening weekend at the age of 11. But despite the cheese, Mortal Kombat is still considered one of the best video game movies ever made - and I have to agree that it is, because video game movies are so often baffling disappointments. Mortal Kombat may be silly, but it still works as a martial arts action movie.
The titular tournament is held on the otherworldly island of soul-collecting sorcerer Shang Tsung (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), a place that's accessible by a leaky boat from Hong Kong. Our heroes are Liu Kang (Robin Shou), Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby), and Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson), each of them drawn to the island for different reasons. A former monk from the Temple of Light in China, Liu has been hearing stories of this fight for the fate of the world his whole life, but he has entered it not to save the world, but to avenge the death of his brother at the hands of Shang Tsung. Johnny Cage is an actor, a character inspired by Van Damme, and Tsung manipulated him into joining the tournament to show the people who doubt his martial arts skills that he really can fight. Sonya is a Special Forces officer who has only come to the island because she's on the trail of crime boss Kano (Trevor Goddard), who has lured her there for Tsung. Tsung knows these three people are destined to compete in this tournament, the outcome will depend on them... and Lord Rayden (Christopher Lambert), the god of lightning and protector of Earth, a god who is worshiped at the Temple of Light, knows this as well. Some of these casting choices were perfect, while others have always struck me as odd, especially Lambert as Rayden. Lambert is great, don't get me wrong, he just doesn't seem right for Rayden.
The tournament commences and Liu, Johnny, and Sonya have to fight their way through some nobodies as well as Kano; the fire-spewing Scorpion (Chris Casamassa) and the ice-controlling Sub-Zero (Francois Petit), ninja enemies who have both been enslaved by Tsung - and for some reason this movie turns Scorpion's harpoon-like kunai spear into a living creature that emerges from his palm; Princess Kitana (Talisa Soto), the Emperor's adopted daughter, who doesn't want to see her father succeed; Reptile, a creature brought to the screen with some lousy CGI; and Prince Goro, a four-armed giant created with some incredible practical effects courtesy of Amalgamated Dynamics. Repeatedly, popular characters from the game are defeated way too quickly and easily, and it's occasionally difficult to tell if these fights are supposed to be part of the official tournament or not. Sometimes they happen on a beach or in a ring while Tsung watches, obviously part of the tournament, and sometimes they happen in random locations like a wooded area, a room in the palace, or a crazy-looking place filled with dusty ladders and scaffolding. Well, anyway, it all counts, and a good stretch of the running time plays a lot like watching someone play the game, with fight after fight.
I don't think Mortal Kombat is very good, but it does provide some mindless fun, and that makes it entertaining enough to achieve the level of being one of the best video game movies ever.
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