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.
DR. STRANGE (1978)
In the late 1970s, the CBS television network was looking to get into the Marvel Comics adaptation business in a major way – even though they were also embarrassed to be working with comic book properties. They launched The Amazing Spider-Man in 1977, but didn’t let Spidey face off with any of his popular villains, because that would be going too far into comic bookish-ness. They also launched The Incredible Hulk, filtered through the vision of a showrunner who didn’t like comic books and drew more inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Then, they hired Philip DeGuere to write and direct a TV movie based on the Marvel character Dr. Strange – the idea being that they might order a Dr. Strange series if this pilot / movie turned out well. In the end, they decided not to move ahead with a series, but at least we got a 1970s Dr. Strange movie out of the deal.
At the center of this story is Morgan Le Fay (Jessica Walter), an enchantress, the Dark Queen of the Sorcerers, who was worshipped by a devil cult back in the 15th century – but then had a bad run-in with a wizard and got banished from Earth. Now, the demonic entity she serves has given her the chance to get back into his good graces by going back to Earth and killing the Sorcerer Supreme named Thomas Lindmer (John Mills), who passes the time hanging out with his friend Wong (Clyde Kusatsu).
Few will be impressed by Morgan’s assassination attempt. She strikes at Lindmer while he’s out on the town by taking possession of college student Clea Lake (Eddie Benton of Prom Night and The Boogens) and having her knock Lindmer over the side of a park bridge. He takes a tumble, but does not die, and when he returns home, Morgan starts trying to invade his magically-protected home through the use of a possessed cat.
Clea is left stricken with terrifying nightmares after her brush with Morgan and ends up in a psychiatric ward where her doctor happens to be a man named Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten). While he cares for Clea, Strange eventually comes into contact with Lindmer, who suggests that the assistance Clea really needs can only be provided through astral projection. And so begins Strange’s journey to becoming a sorcerer – but he doesn’t do a whole lot in this movie, and even when there is an action scene, those scenes aren’t very thrilling. Strange has confrontations with Morgan and other entities, but they don’t amount to much.
Marvel’s creative leader Stan Lee said Dr. Strange was the ‘70s adaptation he was able to provide the most input for, but even then, it turned out to be a rather dull and uneventful movie. It has been said that DeGuere was given an “ample budget” for this TV movie, but he really didn’t use that budget to show viewers anything dazzling. It’s easy to see why CBS chose not to move forward with any further Dr. Strange stories: this one makes it look like there’s just nothing interesting to tell about the character.
‘79 brought the end of The Amazing Spider-Man and the airings of two Captain America TV movies. The Incredible Hulk was, by far, the greatest success CBS had with Marvel properties, while the Dr. Strange TV movie has almost been forgotten.
MOONTRAP (1989)
If you’re anything like me, you might watch the videos of drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs hosting a “cheesy sci-fi night” double feature of Metalstorm and Logan’s Run for a 1996 episode his TNT series MonsterVision and wonder how you could expand the experience into a triple feature. One option would be to turn to an earlier episode of his The Movie Channel show Joe Bob’s Drive-in Theater, where he hosted a screening of the movie Moontrap... which absolutely fits the description of “cheesy sci-fi.”
Fresh off of working with the production company Shapiro-Glickenhaus on the horror classic Maniac Cop (a movie that he doesn’t show nearly enough respect for), Bruce Campbell took on a role in the Shapiro-Glickenhaus sci-fi thriller Moontrap, directed by Robert Dyke from a script by Tex Ragsdale. Campbell plays astronaut Ray Tanner, who is cruising around space with Colonel Jason Grant (Walter Koenig) when they come across a derelict space ship with a strange pod and a rotten corpse on board. They take these things back to their home base on Earth – and then the pod comes to life and crafts a cyborg body using lab equipment and the foundation of the rotten corpse. This cyborg proceeds to go on a rampage through the base, with this event helping the experts figure out that a race of cyborgs has been living on the moon for 14,000 years. These things are dangerous and can’t be allowed to continue to exist out there, so Grant and Tanner are sent to the moon on a search and destroy mission.
Rather than a cheesy sci-fi movie, Joe Bob actually described this one as a “fairly lame sci-fi flick,” and unfortunately, that’s a rather fitting description. It has a set-up that could have been turned into B-movie gold: Walter Koening and Bruce Campbell fighting cyborgs on the moon! It only lives up to the potential of that concept a couple of times, though. For the most part, Dyke seemed to think he was making a much more prestigious movie that he actually was, taking a slow 2001: A Space Odyssey approach to something that should have been presented as more of a goofball sci-fi action horror movie.
For the most part, Moontrap is a shockingly dull movie, even spending some time on a weird romantic subplot between Grant and a moon woman, Leigh Lombardi as Mera.
This one was promising in theory, but turned out to be a disappointment. Still, if you want to watch some cheesy sci-fi, it’s an option.
BAD MILO! (2013)
When I was a youngster in the 1990s, I loved to watch a sketch comedy show called The State on MTV. It wasn’t around for long, only from January 1994 through October 1995, but it had a big impact on me – and over the decades since, I’ve always enjoyed seeing members of The State show up in other projects. Thankfully, they’ve been all over the place, going on to create comedies like Reno 911! and Wet Hot American Summer, and any time they show up on my screen, it immediately takes me back to the good ol’ days of watching The State in the ‘90s.
One of the troupe’s members was Ken Marino, who starred in the 2013 horror comedy Bad Milo!, one of the best oddball tiny terror movies to be made by someone other than Full Moon. Directed by Jacob Vaughan, who wrote the script with Benjamin Hayes, Bad Milo! centers on a highly stressed man named Duncan, who is juggling all sorts of issues in his life. He has been having severe gastric problems and a polyp has been spotted in his intestines; he has no relationship with his father (Stephen Root); his mother Beatrice (Mary Kay Place) is with a man who’s around Duncan’s age (Kumail Nanjiani) and shares too much information about their sex life at the dinner table; he and his wife Sarah (Gillian Jacobs) are weighing the option of having children, and there are suspicions that they don’t have children yet because Duncan suffers from E.D. (he swears that he doesn’t); he has had to start seeing a therapist (Peter Stormare); he has been given a new office at work that used to be a small restroom and still has the toilets in there; and his boss (Patrick Warburton) has assigned him to start laying people off.
Soon, Duncan realizes that the polyp in his guts isn’t a medical issue, but rather a living being – a two-foot-tall creature that’s the physical manifestation of all his street. This creature, which he comes to refer to as Milo, starts exiting his body through his anus and going out into the world to attack and kill anyone who causes Duncan stress, with the media reporting that its victims have been killed by a rabid raccoon. Once Milo has eradicated a stress-causer, he crawls back up Duncan’s anus and rests in his guts until he’s needed again.
So yes, we have a movie that’s about Ken Marino dealing with a funny little butt monster and trying to navigate this new challenge in his life. There are some very amusing moments – and yes, of course, some gross ones as well, like when Milo drops into an outhouse pit, or when Duncan has to stick a mouse up his rear to feed the little guy.
You may not have high hopes when you hear that a movie is about a butt monster, but Bad Milo! is a really good one.
No comments:
Post a Comment