Worth Mentioning - Put Your Fists Where Your Mouths Are

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. 

Cody watches a Lovecraft adaptation, a Delaney adaptation, and a Karate Kid continuation.

SUITABLE FLESH (2023)

Re-Animator. From Beyond. Castle Freak. Dagon. Masters of Horror: Dreams in the Witch-House. Stuart Gordon directed some of the most popular H.P. Lovecraft adaptations ever made... and even though Gordon passed away in 2020, his collaborators Dennis Paoli (who worked on the scripts for all of the films listed above), Barbara Crampton (who had acting roles in Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Castle Freak), and Brian Yuzna (producer of Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon, director of the Re-Animator sequels) have kept his Lovecraft series alive by teaming up with director Joe Lynch to make a Lovecraft adaptation that pays tribute to Gordon.

Scripted by Paoli and based on the story The Thing on the Doorstep, Suitable Flesh stars Heather Graham as Dr. Elizabeth Derby, a psychiatrist who becomes instantly fascinated with a young man named Asa Waite (Judah Lewis) when he comes into her office claiming that his father Ephraim (Bruce Davison) has found a way to take control of his body. Asa undergoes an extreme change in personality during his time in her office... and I really hope that the way Elizabeth handles the Waite case isn’t indicative of the way she handles most of her cases, because it doesn’t take much for her take an inappropriate interest in this guy. Although she appears to have a healthy relationship with her husband Edward (Johnathon Schaech), she’s soon having fantasies about Asa. 

Asa wasn’t imagining things when he said his father is taking control of his body, though. Ephraim is a scumbag whose willing to cause his son to no longer exist just so he can continue to live in Asa’s young, healthy body. Not really understanding what’s going on, Elizabeth is there to witness when Ephraim takes control of Asa’s body and Ephraim’s body appears to drop dead... but she goes ahead and has sex with Asa right there with the elderly corpse on the floor. Then more body swapping insanity ensues, as Elizabeth’s consciousness jumps over to Asa’s body while Ephraim’s consciousness jumps into her. They’ll continue to swap bodies back and forth while Elizabeth, now realizing the evil she’s dealing with, struggles to get Ephraim out of her life.

It’s a wild story told in an interesting way by Lynch and Paoli. I didn’t fully buy that Elizabeth was under any sort of spell when she was behaving in an unprofessional way toward Asa early on, but once the body swapping horror really kicks in around the 30 minute point, the movie became a very entertaining ride. Graham did a fine job playing her character, but Lewis really owns the film with his performance as Asa and Ephraim. Thankfully – because it’s always great to watch her in anything – Crampton, who produced the movie with Yuzna serving as executive producer, has a prominent supporting role as another therapist who is friends with Elizabeth. Crampton’s Dr. Daniella Upton gets pulled deep into the craziness as the story goes along.

It’s a bummer that we won’t have any more Stuart Gordon movies to look forward to, but Suitable Flesh is a great tribute to the man and his Lovecraftian work. Lynch did great work with it, delivering a film that’s a lot of fun to watch and is worthy of sitting in a collection alongside Gordon’s own Lovecraft adaptations.

THE GIRL BEFORE (2021)

A couple years ago, I read a book called The Girl Before by JP Delaney, which I hadn’t heard about before there was announcement that it was receiving a four-episode limited series adaptation. So I read and enjoyed the book, and soon after reading it I watched the limited series. Although there were changes on the way from page to screen, the series version of the story does stick quite close to the source material – which makes sense, given that Delaney wrote the scripts for the episodes with Marissa Lestrade. The episodes were then all directed by Lisa Brühlmann.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Jane, a single woman who moves into an unusual house designed by an eccentric architect named Edward Monkford (David Oyelowo), who has tenants agree to a strict list of two hundred rules to make sure they’ll stick to his idea of minimalism. If you move into this house, you’re not to have children, books, carpets, rugs, magazines, etc.  Regular inspections are carried out to make sure the rules are being followed. Despite these restrictions, Jane isn’t the first person to move into this place. Three years earlier, Emma (Jessica Plummer) moved in there with her boyfriend Simon (Ben Hardy). As the episodes play out, they jump back and forth between the lives of Jane and Emma in the new home they’ve both lived in. It soon becomes clear that something terrible happened to Emma in that house, which is why she doesn’t live there anymore – in fact, she’s not alive anymore at all. 

If something happened to Emma in there, there’s a chance the same thing could happen to Jane. So she does her best to figure out what happened to her home’s previous resident... and here’s hoping that Edward Monkford didn’t have anything to do it, because Jane is pursuing a relationship with the odd fellow. Just like Jane did. And by the way, Emma and Jane look a lot like each other, and the casting director on this show did a great job of finding two actresses who have a strong resemblance to each other.

Delaney had already crafted a great mystery in his novel, so all the limited series had to do was not drop the ball when carrying the story over to the screen. It turned out very well. It’s not quite as good or engrossing as the book, but it’s definitely worth a watch. I have no regrets about the time I spent reading The Girl Before, or the four extra hours I spent watching the adaptation.

COBRA KAI: SEASON FIVE (2022)

I feared the worst when the TV series Cobra Kai, a continuation of the Karate Kid franchise from the ‘80s, was first announced. Although it was cool that Ralph Macchio and William Zabka were going to reprise their Karate Kid roles of Daniel LaRusso (the Karate Kid himself) and his nemesis Johnny Lawrence, the show was coming from the creative team behind the Harold and Kumar movies. I figured this was going to be a comedic mess, something that would make a mockery of the Karate Kid franchise. Thankfully, the Harold and Kumar guys (Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg) have gone on to prove me very wrong season after season, making a show that’s so entertaining and captivating that it has become one of my all-time favorites, and displays such a heartwarming reverence to the Karate Kid films of the ‘80s that watching Cobra Kai has even enhanced my own appreciation for those movies.

Cobra Kai season 4 ended with a heartbreaker. The titular dojo, which is now run by the scumbag Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) – who took it out from under the scumbag John Kreese (Martin Kove), who had previously taken the revived dojo out from under his misguided former student Johnny – defeated Daniel and Johnny’s dojos Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang in a tournament, and Daniel and Johnny had to close their dojos due to a deal they had with Kreese and Silver. But Daniel had a back-up plan that involved calling in the help of his Karate Kid Part II enemy Chozen (Yuji Okumoto), who he made amends with back in season 3. I have to admit, when I saw that Daniel and Chozen were going to be teaming up at the end of season 4, it didn’t get me very hyped, especially not in comparison to the hype I felt when I saw that Daniel and Johnny were setting aside their differences at the end of season 3. But given Chozen a prominent role in season 5 worked out great, as Okumoto gives a great performance as this hardcore-but-amusing ass-kicker.

Cobra Kai teaches the Way of the First, a style of karate developed by a man named  Kim Sun-Yung, a style that’s based on deception, with no honor and no mercy. The dojo has to be taken not only because Silver is a criminal, but also because it’s a bad influence on the kids that practice there. For a large portion of the season, Daniel is at a loss on how to properly handle his mission against Cobra Kai, while Johnny is content to give up the fight because he has to focus on making peace between his son Robby (Tanner Buchanan) and his student Miguel (Xolo Maridueña), who have had a complicated / violent relationship throughout the series, but need to get along because Johnny is romantically involved with Miguel’s mom Carmen (Vanessa Rubio), who is now pregnant. Meanwhile, Miguel’s is having relationship problems with Daniel’s daughter Samantha (Mary Mouser), a gifted karate student who doesn’t even want to hear the word karate after losing the tournament to Cobra Kai (not knowing she only lost her match because Silver paid off the referee). Yes, it’s quite a tangled web, and I didn’t even mention the brief subplot where Miguel heads into Mexico to meet up with the criminal father who doesn’t even know he exists.

Our heroes will eventually get it together, but while they’re scrambling and/or distracted, Cobra Kai is becoming bigger and more powerful, preparing to compete in a world tournament. In the build-up to this tournament, Silver reaches out to Kim Da-Eun (Alicia Hannah-Kim), granddaughter of Kim Sun-Yung, and even makes her 50% owner of Cobra Kai.

At its core, Cobra Kai is about dueling karate dojos, and to most people this wouldn’t matter at all. Who cares what type of karate a dojo is teaching? Even to some characters in the show, this rivalry seems ridiculous... at least, until they learn more about people like Silver and Kreese. But Heald, Hurwitz, and Schlossberg, along with their writing team, do a great job at making this dojo rivalry seem incredibly important, a high stakes situation. They make people like Silver so despicable, that when the rivalry escalates to something like two characters having what looks like it will be a duel to the death with a sword and sais, it totally makes sense that things have reached this point. But as intense as the show gets at times, it also always has a great sense of humor running through it.

 

One of the greatest things about the show is getting the chance to see actors reprise their roles from the Karate Kid films, and the showrunners have gone above and beyond all expectations in that area. Macchio, Zabka, Kove, Griffith, Okumoto, they’re all from the movies. Elisabeth Shue and Tamlyn Tomita have made appearance as their characters, as have most of Johnny’s friends from the first movie. They’ve even gone so far as to have Traci Toguchi show up as her character from The Karate Kid Part II, a child (Toguchi was 11 when the movie was released) who wasn’t even named in the credits, but got saved by Daniel during a typhoon. The return of the actors/characters from the films continues in season 5, as Robyn Lively makes an appearance as Daniel’s The Karate Kid Part III friend Jessica Andrews, who is revealed to be the cousin of Daniel’s wife Amanda (Courtney Henggeler), and Sean Kanan reprises the role of Silver’s Part III lackey Mike Barnes, who is in a very different place in his life now.

Cobra Kai has been a blast to watch since the start, and season 5 keeps up the quality. It’s a shame that season 6 is meant to be the show’s last, as I’m going to miss watching these characters (here’s hoping some will stick around for spin-offs), but it is about time the titular dojo gets taken down for good.