"Messiah of Evil" isn't one of those movies that gets talked about a lot, even by cult movie enthusiasts. Made by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (who would later go on to infamy by making "Howard the Duck"), it was released in 1971 to a sort of general disinterest. Which is a shame, because it's a surprisingly creepy and chilling little movie whose atmosphere of dread lingers long after you've finished watching it.
The plot concerns a young woman named Arletty (who's narrating the entire thing from inside an insane asylum) who moves to the tiny town of Point Dune to find out what happened to her father. He was a painter who lived in Point Dune, but he's gone missing, leaving behind only a cryptic diary that hints at bizarre occult rituals and hideous physical transformations. Arletty moves into his old house, and winds up giving crash space to Thom, a folklorist who came to Point Dune to investigate tales of a "dark stranger" who visited the town a hundred years ago, and to Thom's two friends/girlfriends/hey-look-it's-the-Seventies, Toni and Joanne. Arletty finds herself attracted to Thom, but isn't sure she wants to get involved in the complex dynamics of his relationships.
As time passes and the hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the stranger approaches, the townsfolk become increasingly creepy and murderous. Joanne and Toni both die two of the best deaths in horror-movie history (Joanne finds out that supermarkets at midnight are exactly as eerie and unnerving as you'd expect, while Toni goes to see a movie in a deserted theater, and is so engrossed in the film she doesn't even notice it slowly fill up with the transformed townspeople. By the time she does...) Arletty slowly succumbs to the same process that changed her father, and although she hasn't yet become insane and murderous, she knows it's just a matter of time.
Finally, things come to a head as the townspeople attack. Arletty and Thom are surrounded, and are forced to swim for it, but then Thom is pulled under. Arletty gives up and swims back to Point Dune, just in time for the dark stranger to return from his home underneath the waves and claim her as his bride. Afterwards, she is allowed to live and to spread her tale of the coming evil, but only because the messiah knows nobody will believe her...
The thing that makes the movie special is the way it understates. Key plot points are only hinted at, giving the film a dream-like atmosphere of paranoia and mystery that stays with you long after the credits. The dark stranger's face is never glimpsed...but he looks tantalizingly similar to Thom, and only appears after Thom is pulled under the waves. The transformation of the townspeople is different enough from typical horror-movie zombies/vampires/werewolves to be haunting. And the use of familiar settings to accentuate the horror is absolutely brilliant (one character is murdered under the neon lights of a 24-hour gas station.)
This one's worth checking out, with the understanding that it's not going to give you the answers a conventional horror film might. It's Lovecraftian without actually being a Lovecraft adaptation, which alone should be enough to entice some people into watching it.
Showing posts with label personal favorites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personal favorites. Show all posts
Monday, June 21, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Personal Favorites: Vengeance on Varos
Some part of me feels a little guilty rhapsodizing about Doctor Who--after all, I've been a Doctor Who fan so long that I just assume that everyone already knows about every episode. I feel like I could almost just say, "Vengeance on Varos--pretty awesome, right?" and everyone would know what I was talking about.
But then I remember that not everyone comes to this blog through Doctor Who fandom. Some people might only have seen the new series, or not seen the show at all. So for those folks, let me sum up Vengeance on Varos for you a little bit better than, "pretty awesome, right?"
Vengeance on Varos is one of those stories that seems a little bit smarter every year. It's set on a mining colony (a staple of Doctor Who) that was originally a prison colony, a la Australia. There's a lot of social unrest, with the workers constantly in thrall to the "company store" (an off-planet mining consortium run by slimy aliens. The alien representative, Sil, is one of the series' few genuine special effects triumphs; the actor who played him, Nabil Shaban, was born without legs, and the costume is designed around that. There's a great scene where he's resting on a platform that you assume houses the actor, and then his manservants pick him up while he continues to talk and gesture.) As a gesture to ease the unrest, the ruling class televises the execution of prisoners in a grotesque form of reality television (a good decade or so before the term was coined.) Prisoners must run a demented obstacle course called "The Punishment Dome", with numerous fatal traps for the unwary. The audience delights in the spectacle of watching them match wits against the designers of the traps.
The Doctor and his companion, Peri, stumble into all this when the TARDIS malfunctions, and the Doctor needs the mineral Varos produces in order to restore it to working order. Of course, the TARDIS materializes square in the heart of the Punishment Dome, and to escape, the Doctor winds up assisting a group of rebels who are trying to overthrow the social order. There's lots of fun to be had with the metatextual layers of story; after all, we're watching the Doctor struggle for his life against the Dome, putting us in the position of the miners in a sense. (The ultimate example of this is the frankly brilliant cliff-hanger at the end of Part One. The Doctor has entered a virtual reality trap that convinces him he's dying of thirst in the middle of a trackless desert; his slow, agonizing struggles against the seamless illusion are contrasted with the TV execs cutting from camera to camera, finding the best angles to catch his death throes. He collapses, and the director says, "Perfect. And cut it...now." And on cue, the end credits roll.)
In the end, this is probably the only Sixth Doctor story to really make good use of the era's strengths. The violence is grotesque and over-the-top, much like the rest of the Sixth Doctor's run, but here it seems genuinely disconcerting, instead of simply layered on for shock value. The Sixth Doctor is manic, unstable, self-righteous and arrogant, but he's fighting a system so obscene that his theatrical gestures (and nearly un-Doctorishness tendency towards violence) seem in keeping with the story. And the actors (particularly Martin Jarvis, playing an ineffectual governor who's trying to change the system from within) do real justice to the script. If you ever want to watch a Colin Baker story, but have been turned off by the reputation of his time as the Doctor, this one is the one to watch to get a real feel for the potential of what his era could have been.
But then I remember that not everyone comes to this blog through Doctor Who fandom. Some people might only have seen the new series, or not seen the show at all. So for those folks, let me sum up Vengeance on Varos for you a little bit better than, "pretty awesome, right?"
Vengeance on Varos is one of those stories that seems a little bit smarter every year. It's set on a mining colony (a staple of Doctor Who) that was originally a prison colony, a la Australia. There's a lot of social unrest, with the workers constantly in thrall to the "company store" (an off-planet mining consortium run by slimy aliens. The alien representative, Sil, is one of the series' few genuine special effects triumphs; the actor who played him, Nabil Shaban, was born without legs, and the costume is designed around that. There's a great scene where he's resting on a platform that you assume houses the actor, and then his manservants pick him up while he continues to talk and gesture.) As a gesture to ease the unrest, the ruling class televises the execution of prisoners in a grotesque form of reality television (a good decade or so before the term was coined.) Prisoners must run a demented obstacle course called "The Punishment Dome", with numerous fatal traps for the unwary. The audience delights in the spectacle of watching them match wits against the designers of the traps.
The Doctor and his companion, Peri, stumble into all this when the TARDIS malfunctions, and the Doctor needs the mineral Varos produces in order to restore it to working order. Of course, the TARDIS materializes square in the heart of the Punishment Dome, and to escape, the Doctor winds up assisting a group of rebels who are trying to overthrow the social order. There's lots of fun to be had with the metatextual layers of story; after all, we're watching the Doctor struggle for his life against the Dome, putting us in the position of the miners in a sense. (The ultimate example of this is the frankly brilliant cliff-hanger at the end of Part One. The Doctor has entered a virtual reality trap that convinces him he's dying of thirst in the middle of a trackless desert; his slow, agonizing struggles against the seamless illusion are contrasted with the TV execs cutting from camera to camera, finding the best angles to catch his death throes. He collapses, and the director says, "Perfect. And cut it...now." And on cue, the end credits roll.)
In the end, this is probably the only Sixth Doctor story to really make good use of the era's strengths. The violence is grotesque and over-the-top, much like the rest of the Sixth Doctor's run, but here it seems genuinely disconcerting, instead of simply layered on for shock value. The Sixth Doctor is manic, unstable, self-righteous and arrogant, but he's fighting a system so obscene that his theatrical gestures (and nearly un-Doctorishness tendency towards violence) seem in keeping with the story. And the actors (particularly Martin Jarvis, playing an ineffectual governor who's trying to change the system from within) do real justice to the script. If you ever want to watch a Colin Baker story, but have been turned off by the reputation of his time as the Doctor, this one is the one to watch to get a real feel for the potential of what his era could have been.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Personal Favorites: Hawk and Dove #4
Feeling a bit uninspired today (more from lack of sleep than any sort of ennui), so I figured I'd take it easy while wallowing in nostalgia with another reminiscence of a personal favorite comic. Someday, these will include things other than comics, by the way. It's just that when I thought about cool moments that always bring a smile to my face, Hawk and Dove #4 (written by Karl and Barbara Kesel, penciled by Greg Guler, inked by Scott Hanna) is perennially high on the list.
It's a charming, light-hearted, self-contained comic, the kind that DC doesn't really do a great job of publishing anymore in its "mainstream" universe. Hawk and Dove come up against a group of bank robbers calling themselves "The Untouchables", because a) they dress up like 1920s gangsters and use tommy-guns, and b) they have devices in their belt buckles that let them become intangible. Because of this, robbing banks is ludicrously easy, even when super-heroes get involved (it's made pretty clear that the gang robs more for the thrill than the money.)
Hawk gets annoyed by the way the gang humiliates the duo with the ease of their escapes, and decides to track them down. He comes up with a clever plan (a rarity for Hawk--he's not stupid, but he's impulsive and direct and tends to like the simplicity of the frontal attack.) To wit, he looks up information on old speak-easies from the Prohibition era, and goes to each one attempting to change into his super-heroic identity (something they can only do when danger threatens.) When he suddenly finds himself transforming outside of a boarded-up building, he suspects supervillainy. He calls Dove and gets her out there to whomp some bad guy butt.
With the advantage of surprise on their side, the duo easily take out most of the gang. Only one of them even has the chance to put on her belt and grab her gun. Still, that's one woman with a machine gun against two heroes who aren't bullet-proof. She sprays machine-gun fire all over the warehouse in a lethal burst. While Dove distracts her by providing a convenient target, Hawk rips the belt off, leading to the awesome moment that gives me a warm, happy glow remembering it even now, twenty years later.
"You should have taken the gun!" the mock-gangster shouts, drawing a bead on Dove. Dove just stands there, fixing the woman with a cold stare.
"I can think of fourteen ways to keep you from firing that gun," she says. "Six are painful. Face facts. It's broad daylight, you can't turn intangible, in order to get out of here, you have to get past Hawk and me, and your gun is empty." Dove smirks. "You did know that, right? No bullets? I've been counting." (Because unlike the simple, direct Hawk, Dove develops super-perception and insight on how to use her environment tactically and strategically. She becomes, in essence, a master planner when she changes.)
There's a certain brilliant, quiet simplicity to a single-issue story with great dialogue and stellar art. You don't need game-changing metastories, epic world-shattering events, or shocking deaths. All you need is a good idea, well executed. And this issue had that in spades.
Dang, I miss that series.
It's a charming, light-hearted, self-contained comic, the kind that DC doesn't really do a great job of publishing anymore in its "mainstream" universe. Hawk and Dove come up against a group of bank robbers calling themselves "The Untouchables", because a) they dress up like 1920s gangsters and use tommy-guns, and b) they have devices in their belt buckles that let them become intangible. Because of this, robbing banks is ludicrously easy, even when super-heroes get involved (it's made pretty clear that the gang robs more for the thrill than the money.)
Hawk gets annoyed by the way the gang humiliates the duo with the ease of their escapes, and decides to track them down. He comes up with a clever plan (a rarity for Hawk--he's not stupid, but he's impulsive and direct and tends to like the simplicity of the frontal attack.) To wit, he looks up information on old speak-easies from the Prohibition era, and goes to each one attempting to change into his super-heroic identity (something they can only do when danger threatens.) When he suddenly finds himself transforming outside of a boarded-up building, he suspects supervillainy. He calls Dove and gets her out there to whomp some bad guy butt.
With the advantage of surprise on their side, the duo easily take out most of the gang. Only one of them even has the chance to put on her belt and grab her gun. Still, that's one woman with a machine gun against two heroes who aren't bullet-proof. She sprays machine-gun fire all over the warehouse in a lethal burst. While Dove distracts her by providing a convenient target, Hawk rips the belt off, leading to the awesome moment that gives me a warm, happy glow remembering it even now, twenty years later.
"You should have taken the gun!" the mock-gangster shouts, drawing a bead on Dove. Dove just stands there, fixing the woman with a cold stare.
"I can think of fourteen ways to keep you from firing that gun," she says. "Six are painful. Face facts. It's broad daylight, you can't turn intangible, in order to get out of here, you have to get past Hawk and me, and your gun is empty." Dove smirks. "You did know that, right? No bullets? I've been counting." (Because unlike the simple, direct Hawk, Dove develops super-perception and insight on how to use her environment tactically and strategically. She becomes, in essence, a master planner when she changes.)
There's a certain brilliant, quiet simplicity to a single-issue story with great dialogue and stellar art. You don't need game-changing metastories, epic world-shattering events, or shocking deaths. All you need is a good idea, well executed. And this issue had that in spades.
Dang, I miss that series.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Personal Favorites: Flash #50
Today, I just wanted to take a moment to talk about something I love; don't think of it as a formal review, so much as me talking about something awesome and saying, "Isn't that COOL!" like a six-year-old. Because let's face it, sometimes we all need to let out our inner six-year-old. This does mean there'll be spoilers, BTW, so if you just want to experience the issue unspoiled first and then come here and reminisce about it with me, I'd advise running to a comics shop and finding the back issue before reading this.
The subject of my gushing adoration is Flash #50, published in May of 1991, written by the wonderful (and woefully underused these days) William Messner-Loebs, penciled by the talented Greg LaRocque and inked by the equally talented Jose Marzan Jr, with Tim Harkins providing the lettering and Glenn Whitmore handling the coloring, and the underappreciated Brian Augustyn taking care of editing duties.
To fully appreciate this story, you have to understand that Messner-Loebs had been building up to it for a while. Vandal Savage, immortal super-villain, had returned, and he was well and truly making Wally West's life a living hell. He'd kidnapped Wally's friends and family, turned a Russian super-speedster into his drug-addicted slave and dubbed her "Lady Flash", feeding her a super-speed drug called "Velocity 9" to make her as fast as the Flash, and finally set a trap for Wally out in the desert. Actually, it was more sort of a dare than a trap. At the end of Flash #49, Vandal Savage displayed his latest gizmo, a kinetic absorption platform. Standing on it sucked away the Flash's super-speed, leaving him no faster than a normal man. The dare was this: Vandal Savage would let the Flash's loved ones go if he just went and stood on that platform. After that, if he could get back off of it before Vandal Savage could shoot him, he could do whatever he wanted.
So the Flash stepped onto the platform...and Vandal Savage shot him in the chest. (Best. Cliffhanger. Ever.)
We open the issue with Wally bleeding out in the desert sands, as Vandal Savage (true to his word) returns Wally's loved ones to safety. But Messner-Loebs has been setting this up for a while, and one of the things he set up was that the machine intellect Kilg%re, a former-enemy-turned-enlightened-being, promised Wally one big favor. Turns out that favor was a nanite colony in his body that would give him a one-time instant heal from any injury, no matter how apparently fatal. Nice deal, really, and Wally returns to life feeling just fine (albeit slightly freaked out at watching machines erupt out of his chest and fix his wounds.) In fact, he's feeling better than ever--his near-death experience has finally liberated him from his fears of being in Barry Allen's shadow as the Flash.
Meanwhile, Vandal Savage is using Lady Flash to clear out his competitors in the drug trade. He's planning, in his own way, to be altruistic--he's going to corner the drug market, then flood it with tainted product and end the drug problem by killing all the addicts. (He's got a bit of an issue with drugs, since an accident with Velocity 9 is burning up his immortality.) He is, to say the least, confident with the Flash out of the way.
Now is where things kick into gear. Wally goes to STAR Labs and gets a slick new costume (Lady Flash has his old one), and then uses a hologram generator to contact Vandal Savage, telling him that he's not dead, and that he's coming for him at noon tomorrow. "Why did you do that?" one of Flash's allies asked. "You lost the advantage of surprise!"
"I replaced it with something better," Wally says in the second-best line of the issue. "Fear."
Noon tomorrow, and Savage thinks he's ready for the showdown. He's got his desert mansion ringed with the speed-sapping devices, he's got armed gunmen, he's got Lady Flash hopped up on V-9 and ready to fight. Whatever's coming, he can handle it.
He's wrong. The Flash races across the desert so fast the sand is melting to glass under his feet, sending up plumes of liquified sand behind him as he runs. He slams into the speed-sappers at Mach Ungodly, instantly overloading their capacity to absorb energy and causing them all to go up in a massive explosion that knocks half the gunmen out of commission with its shockwave and leaves the whole place a blinding mix of smoke, flames, and blowing sand. In the ensuing eyeblink, the rest of the gunmen go down. It's just the Flash, Savage, and Lady Flash.
Gun out, Savage snarls defiance, ordering Lady Flash to kill him. But she refuses--she's fallen so low, but deep down, she wants to live up to the costume she wears. She wants to be a hero, and the first step is breaking her shameful subservience to Savage. She finds within her a nobility of spirit that she'd lost, and refuses to fight.
Savage is furious. He empties his entire pistol into her at point-blank range, less than an inch away from her skin. They both look down at the same time...but her skin is unmarked. "How--" Savage gasps. "Even with your speed, you could not have--"
From his position twenty feet away, the Flash opens his hand. Six bullets fall out onto the dust. "I caught them," he says, in the best line of the issue. "I could have caught them from fifty feet away, a hundred yards away, two miles away." He starts walking, slowly and confidently, towards Savage. "People always told me that I could be just as fast as Barry, if only I believed it. They're right." He grabs the barrel of the gun, and brings Savage's arm up to point the pistol at his own head. "Care to try another six shots? I've reloaded the gun for you."
That moment is immortalized in my mind, even eighteen years later.
Savage gives up on victory at that point and tries to flee, only to be stopped by his old foe the Immortal Man (whose own powers are in flux, thanks to his connection with Savage--he looks about twelve at the moment.) Their mixed-up powers react on contact with each other, and the explosion leaves neither of them to be seen...but Wally's stopped his drug trade and broken his empire, while finally casting off his self-doubts and becoming the hero he was meant to be.
Many people point to Mark Waid's run on the series as the point where Wally became a legitimate Flash, but I think it began here--certainly, Messner-Loebs seemed to feel he'd done enough, as he left the series a few issues later (although as with any writer's departure, it could have been involuntary.) But I think that this issue capped off a stellar run by a great writer, and it remains a favorite of mine to this day. If you can track it down in back issue boxes, it's well worth reading. (Okay, so there's a bit of "review-ness" to this. But only a bit.)
The subject of my gushing adoration is Flash #50, published in May of 1991, written by the wonderful (and woefully underused these days) William Messner-Loebs, penciled by the talented Greg LaRocque and inked by the equally talented Jose Marzan Jr, with Tim Harkins providing the lettering and Glenn Whitmore handling the coloring, and the underappreciated Brian Augustyn taking care of editing duties.
To fully appreciate this story, you have to understand that Messner-Loebs had been building up to it for a while. Vandal Savage, immortal super-villain, had returned, and he was well and truly making Wally West's life a living hell. He'd kidnapped Wally's friends and family, turned a Russian super-speedster into his drug-addicted slave and dubbed her "Lady Flash", feeding her a super-speed drug called "Velocity 9" to make her as fast as the Flash, and finally set a trap for Wally out in the desert. Actually, it was more sort of a dare than a trap. At the end of Flash #49, Vandal Savage displayed his latest gizmo, a kinetic absorption platform. Standing on it sucked away the Flash's super-speed, leaving him no faster than a normal man. The dare was this: Vandal Savage would let the Flash's loved ones go if he just went and stood on that platform. After that, if he could get back off of it before Vandal Savage could shoot him, he could do whatever he wanted.
So the Flash stepped onto the platform...and Vandal Savage shot him in the chest. (Best. Cliffhanger. Ever.)
We open the issue with Wally bleeding out in the desert sands, as Vandal Savage (true to his word) returns Wally's loved ones to safety. But Messner-Loebs has been setting this up for a while, and one of the things he set up was that the machine intellect Kilg%re, a former-enemy-turned-enlightened-being, promised Wally one big favor. Turns out that favor was a nanite colony in his body that would give him a one-time instant heal from any injury, no matter how apparently fatal. Nice deal, really, and Wally returns to life feeling just fine (albeit slightly freaked out at watching machines erupt out of his chest and fix his wounds.) In fact, he's feeling better than ever--his near-death experience has finally liberated him from his fears of being in Barry Allen's shadow as the Flash.
Meanwhile, Vandal Savage is using Lady Flash to clear out his competitors in the drug trade. He's planning, in his own way, to be altruistic--he's going to corner the drug market, then flood it with tainted product and end the drug problem by killing all the addicts. (He's got a bit of an issue with drugs, since an accident with Velocity 9 is burning up his immortality.) He is, to say the least, confident with the Flash out of the way.
Now is where things kick into gear. Wally goes to STAR Labs and gets a slick new costume (Lady Flash has his old one), and then uses a hologram generator to contact Vandal Savage, telling him that he's not dead, and that he's coming for him at noon tomorrow. "Why did you do that?" one of Flash's allies asked. "You lost the advantage of surprise!"
"I replaced it with something better," Wally says in the second-best line of the issue. "Fear."
Noon tomorrow, and Savage thinks he's ready for the showdown. He's got his desert mansion ringed with the speed-sapping devices, he's got armed gunmen, he's got Lady Flash hopped up on V-9 and ready to fight. Whatever's coming, he can handle it.
He's wrong. The Flash races across the desert so fast the sand is melting to glass under his feet, sending up plumes of liquified sand behind him as he runs. He slams into the speed-sappers at Mach Ungodly, instantly overloading their capacity to absorb energy and causing them all to go up in a massive explosion that knocks half the gunmen out of commission with its shockwave and leaves the whole place a blinding mix of smoke, flames, and blowing sand. In the ensuing eyeblink, the rest of the gunmen go down. It's just the Flash, Savage, and Lady Flash.
Gun out, Savage snarls defiance, ordering Lady Flash to kill him. But she refuses--she's fallen so low, but deep down, she wants to live up to the costume she wears. She wants to be a hero, and the first step is breaking her shameful subservience to Savage. She finds within her a nobility of spirit that she'd lost, and refuses to fight.
Savage is furious. He empties his entire pistol into her at point-blank range, less than an inch away from her skin. They both look down at the same time...but her skin is unmarked. "How--" Savage gasps. "Even with your speed, you could not have--"
From his position twenty feet away, the Flash opens his hand. Six bullets fall out onto the dust. "I caught them," he says, in the best line of the issue. "I could have caught them from fifty feet away, a hundred yards away, two miles away." He starts walking, slowly and confidently, towards Savage. "People always told me that I could be just as fast as Barry, if only I believed it. They're right." He grabs the barrel of the gun, and brings Savage's arm up to point the pistol at his own head. "Care to try another six shots? I've reloaded the gun for you."
That moment is immortalized in my mind, even eighteen years later.
Savage gives up on victory at that point and tries to flee, only to be stopped by his old foe the Immortal Man (whose own powers are in flux, thanks to his connection with Savage--he looks about twelve at the moment.) Their mixed-up powers react on contact with each other, and the explosion leaves neither of them to be seen...but Wally's stopped his drug trade and broken his empire, while finally casting off his self-doubts and becoming the hero he was meant to be.
Many people point to Mark Waid's run on the series as the point where Wally became a legitimate Flash, but I think it began here--certainly, Messner-Loebs seemed to feel he'd done enough, as he left the series a few issues later (although as with any writer's departure, it could have been involuntary.) But I think that this issue capped off a stellar run by a great writer, and it remains a favorite of mine to this day. If you can track it down in back issue boxes, it's well worth reading. (Okay, so there's a bit of "review-ness" to this. But only a bit.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)