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.
Marvel and Full Moon.
MOON KNIGHT (2022)
The Marvel Comics character Moon Knight has a back story that could have allowed a film or TV adaptation to be action-forward from the start. Moon Knight’s alter ego is Marc Spector, who served as a Marine and a CIA agent before becoming a mercenary. Clashing with a fellow mercenary who murdered an archaeologist in Sudan, Spector is killed... but when his body is placed in front of a statue of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu, he is healed and revived as the Moon Knight, the Fist of Khonshu, a protector and avenger of the innocent. Starting with all that is the approach most writers would have taken to the material. That story could have made for a great opening sequence of a movie or first episode of a TV show. But when writer Jeremy Slater was tasked with bringing Moon Knight to the screen, he decided to dive into the bizarre.
You see, the Moon Knight character also happens to have dissociative identity disorder. Different personalities surface at different times. So the first personality we meet in the Moon Knight TV show that premiered on Disney+ is Steven Grant, played by Oscar Issac putting on an English accent. Steven works at a gift shop in the British Museum in London, even though he has so much knowledge of Ancient Egypt that he could work as a tour guide. He’s a meek, put-upon fellow... who wakes up every morning shackled to his bed, although it’s not clear why until he starts having blackouts – waking up in the midst of an action sequence involving followers of cult leader Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in the Austrian Alps, fighting for control of his body, blacking out and losing control again, losing time. It’s a unique way to present an action sequence, but also a bit irritating and disruptive. The episode hasn’t exactly been thrilling up to that point, so I could have used a bit more straightforward action. Also incredibly annoying are the visions we’re shown of Khonshu, represented as a CGI creature voiced by F. Murray Abraham, barking out lines of dialogue.
Steven is soon able to figure out that he shares his body with the personality of mercenary Marc Spector, a capable man of action played by Isaac with his normal speaking voice. Marc is the Fist of Khonshu, the avatar of the god, who can supernaturally summon a suit that makes him sort of look like a white-costumed Batman. When people encourage Steven to summon the suit, he finds that he can also make one supernaturally appear, but this is just a white dress suit and a white ski mask. Arthur Harrow is a former avatar of Khonshu who has jumped ship to serving the goddess Ammit and is now searching for her tomb, planning to resurrect her so she can “purge humanity of evil by wiping out everyone who has committed or will commit evil deeds.” So Marc has to drag Steven along on his mission to Egypt to stop Harrow and his followers from resurrecting that god – and in the meantime, Khonshu is considering switching avatars, this time to Marc’s wife Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy), who was aware of the Moon Knight part of his life but not of the Steven personality. She also didn’t know all the details of how Marc became Moon Knight, and that back story (the stuff that would have started the average adaptation) isn’t revealed until we’re almost at the end of the show’s six episode run.
Don’t expect this show to get straightforward even once our hero(es) have a clear mission, because it still goes in some strange directions. Including a stay in a psychiatric hospital, complete with an appearance by the hippo goddess Taweret. I should also mention that, while on the mission, Marc and Layla cross paths Anton Mogart, who is the costumed character Midnight Man in the comics but is just a dude named Anton on this show. He’s played by Gaspard Ulliel... and if there was any thought of Anton becoming Midnight Man in a future project, Ulliel sadly won’t be able to see those plans through. The actor passed away in a skiing accident before Moon Knight even made it to the air.
Although I have been a Marvel reader since I was a kid, I haven’t had a lot of exposure to the Moon Knight character over the years. I’ve really only encountered the character when he was having crossovers with heroes I was following, like Ghost Rider and Spider-Man. Still, I was excited to hear that he was getting his own Disney+ show, because he seemed promising. My hopes were raised even further when Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke were cast as the hero and the villain. Unfortunately, the way the adaptation was brought to the screen made this one of the most difficult Marvel Cinematic Universe projects for me to get into. The friends I tried watching the show with couldn’t even make it through. They bailed on it halfway, leaving me to finish the last three episodes by myself. And I can’t say I had a blast doing so. The story never really connected with me... and the more time we had to spend with the Steven Grant personality, the more annoying I found him to be. I got much more enjoyment out of watching the Marc Spector, mercenary hero segments of the show than I did watching Steven bumble his way through episodes. And way more than I did out of watching order-barking gods and psychiatric hospital shenanigans.
Despite being a fan of Marvel and some of the actors on this show, I found the Moon Knight series to be an irritating slog to sit through. I’d say that if this properly represents the Moon Knight character, I guess I’m not a fan of the guy, as I was not left eager to see him again. But from what I gather from fans of the comic books, the show only reflects the source material in very basic ways. So someday I’ll read more Moon Knight comics to get a better idea of who he is.
BABY OOPSIE PART 3: BURN, BABY, BURN (2022)
Demonic Toys character Baby Oopsie is feasting on souls, hanging out with a pair of newly created killer dolls (Cowboy Roy and Frownie Clownie), and aiming to open the gates of Toy Hell and unleash a creature known as The Toy Master in the third part of her spin-off trilogy from writer/director William Butler. The first Baby Oopsie saw doll enthusiast Sybil Pittman (Libbie Higgins) falling under the spell of the evil baby doll, then Sybil was able to regain her senses in Baby Oopsie Part 2: Murder Dolls. Murder Dolls didn’t have much of an ending, but Baby Oopsie 3: Burn, Baby, Burn picks up just moments after the last scene of the previous installment, with Sybil trying to figure out how to stop the killer dolls and exorcise her possessed buddy Ray-Ray (Justina Armistead).
Parts 2 and 3 don’t really feel like separate movies at all, and there’s a good reason for that. Butler made all three of these movies as chapters of a web series, and while the chapters that were assembled into the first Baby Oopsie movie were made during one batch of filming, the chapters that make up 2 and 3 were the next block of filming. It wasn’t certain Baby Oopsie would get a direct follow-up, so it had to tell a satisfying story by itself. The other chapters were greenlit in response to the success of Baby Oopsie and could have been assembled into a single feature with a running time of 100 minutes or so. Instead, they were split into two movies that have a running time of around 50 minutes each. That’s why 2 was so unsatisfying on its own – the ending to that story was split into another movie. Since 3 is made up of chapters that were meant to be the exciting climax, it does mean that this one moves at a quick pace and is packed with action.
Detective Klink (Joe Kurak) has more to do; a man of God - LeJon Woods as Father McGavin – gets involved; and we find out where the story with Twinkle Toys representative Skipper Beasley (Madison Pullins) is going. People get killed by dolls, demons spew slime and obscenities... it’s not a bad way to spend less than an hour of your time. It all builds up to an ending that’s reminiscent of Ghoulies II – which not only had the same producer as this movie (Charles Band), but also featured Butler as a cast member.
BLOODSTONE: SUBSPECIES II (1993)
The vampire Radu, played by Anders Hove, seemed to have been definitively destroyed at the end of the first Subspecies movie... but the movie was successful enough for production company Full Moon to greenlight two back-to-back sequels, so Radu quickly proves to be as resilient as the version of Dracula played by Christopher Lee in the Hammer classics. Although Radu was staked in the heart and decapitated, it only takes a couple minutes for him to rise from the dead at the start of Bloodstone: Subspecies II, as he’s assisted by the small creatures that can form from his severed body parts or drops of his blood. A special skill he has, since his mother was a sorceress. Immediately after getting the stake out of his heart and his head back on his shoulders, Radu executes the hero of the previous film. He’s about to stake vampirized heroine Michelle (now played by Denice Duff) as well, but he’s interrupted by sunrise. When he awakens the following night, he discovers that Michelle has escaped from his castle - and she has his coveted Bloodstone, a mystical stone that drips the blood of the saints.
On the run, Michelle goes from Transylvania to Bucharest, where she calls home to America and begs her sister Becky (Melanie Shatner) to come get her. Radu has contacted a relative of his own: his shriveled mummy of a mother, played by Pamela Gordon – and while Mummy has plans for the Bloodstone, Radu has plans for Michelle. He wants to keep her as his plaything. As Radu schemes, Michelle struggles with the complications of being a vampire (like the authorities mistaking her for a corpse while she’s sleeping during the day and losing the Bloodstone while her thirst for blood increases), and Becky arrives in Romania to search for her sister with the help of Mel Thompson (Kevin Blair, credited these days as Kevin Spirtas) of the US Embassy, Romanian policeman Lieutenant Marin (Ion Haiduc), and local expert Professor Popescu (Michael Denish).
Subspecies II is a solid, moody follow-up to Subspecies that brings some interesting new characters into the mix, but it also moves along at quite a slow pace. Subspecies director Ted Nicolaou returned to direct both sequels and this time took over the writing duties as well, but so little actually happens over the course of this movie’s 86 minutes that it sort of comes off like he didn’t want to use up all his ideas on part 2 because he knew he had to make part 3 at the same time, so he held back on this one a bit. It’s actually a smart approach, because we saw with other back-to-back Full Moon sequels – Puppet Master 4 and 5, Trancers 4 and 5 – that filmmakers often have difficulty making the second film in these pairs as interesting as the first.
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