Category: 1994
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The issue opens with a sci-fi story–from Watt-Evans and Robinson–about a female space traveler who finds a world filled with adorable little creatures out of a Disney cartoon. It turns out they’re very amorous to the human female, which provides for a rather amusing story. Watt-Evans’s story is well-paced and always thoughtful. There are the…
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This issue might be the first where there’s nothing great, but nothing bad. Everything is just solid. In fact, everything is ambitious too. Well, except maybe Star Riders, which appears to be a tie-in to a roll playing game. Johnson and Dringenberg’s opener is about an Imperial Japanese artist who’s a little too good at…
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Let me try to think of something nice to say about Buoy 77‘s finale. Lopez is back to the weak art, so no compliment there. Boyd’s conclusion is all about how the white man ruins native peoples (I’m shocked they didn’t put in a prose notice of it), so not there either. All in all,…
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Lloyd’s got a very well-illustrated story here. It’s a thriller–con artist out to murder his rich wife–told after the fact (guess what, the husband gets busted through a very Hitchcockian twist). The art’s more important than the story. Lloyd gets the tone perfect. If it were a longer piece, with more characterization, it might be…
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Well, Hermes’s slump continues. Campbell’s problem might be the villains—the Eye of Fate (or something… the skeleton head guy) is a lot more interesting than anyone else in the story than the Eyeball Kid. So we want the Eyeball Kid to win (even though Eye of Fate doesn’t) and Eye of Fate to win… but…
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I’m not sure what happens this installment of Hermes. It almost seems like a bridging installment. Hermes, who hasn’t really had a lot to do since the first installment, is preparing his attack and the supervillains are splintering. It’s a fine installment, but it’s the first one where Campbell didn’t “wow” me. The opening story,…
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I watched Phantasm III because I wanted to see what Coscarelli would do without studio interference on a Phantasm sequel. Apparently, what he decided to do was add an annoying little kid who kills people (they’re bad people, but they’re people just the same–and it’s never clear he was in any physical danger) and a…
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I think this must be the first issue where Seth doesn’t feel the need to show his protagonist nude from the waist down. He did it in every previous issue at some point or another. Honestly, I can’t remember anything from this issue and I just finished reading it a minute ago. It ends with…
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This issue continues the story started in the previous one. Well, no, it doesn’t. Not exactly. Seth seems incapable of resolving a cliffhanger, so this issue spends about half its pages just being another story about Seth, the character, following the last issue. There’s nothing to make it a chapter in the same story. Even…
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I read The Tale of One Bad Rat in one sitting. It was originally published as a limited series, but it’s in three parts and the first part is too long for an issue so it didn’t seem like a natural stopping point. Talbot weighs the book uniquely, with the first act taking far longer…
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I tried, I really did. However, I’m not sure how anyone could tolerate Zorro. It’s beyond awful, beyond boring. I can’t figure out how the thing sold enough issues to get up to ten, or however long the series ran. I mean, it was the 1990s and all, but come on… no one would like…
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Oh, good grief, McGregor makes a Batman “joke” about the cape this issue. It’s kind of embarrassing, really, given he’s a writer of some reputation. Then a Spider-Man “joke,” then a Spawn “joke” (I forgot about Spawn… they still make those, right?). Otherwise, it’s a very pedestrian done-in-one featuring Zorro saving a kidnapped lady (who’s…
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Marvels, quite simply, can’t live up to the potential of the first issue. The present action is about thirty years. Thirty years, four issues. It’s not going to be a solid narrative. Busiek has a couple opportunities to tie the first and fourth issue and doesn’t. It would have worked better without the same narrator…
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The Galactus issue. Way too many full page fight scenes here (Ross must have been getting tired) and no real story. It’s all centered around the one event, around the Fantastic Four fighting off Galactus. I’ve never read the Fantastic Four issues this one retells, so I don’t know if the lame excuses for no…
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I think this issue of Marvels might qualify as cheap. I mean, while the first one thrilled and exhilarated, in this one Busiek puts a young girl in harm’s way as a dramatic plot. I’m not saying the issue does hit you in the stomach and hard, I’m just saying… it’s easy. I mean, bigot…
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Marvels, as I argued fifteen years ago and apparently am going to continue to argue today, feels more like a DC title than a Marvel one. It’s a combination of things–there’s something about Busiek’s narrator; he’s too common to be a Marvel protagonist, he’s too ugly, too sensitive. It’s also Ross’s art. Marvel comics have…
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Dark Horse’s Robocop ends here. Finally. It’s not a bad issue, definitely the best in this series and probably overall (the competition isn’t particularly steep, however). It helps Jeff Butler handles some of the art chores. I don’t know who he is or what else he’s done, but he’s better than Byrd. There’s some unintentionally…
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Byrd’s art is pretty awful, but it’s a surprisingly okay issue. Even taking all the stupidity into account, Arcudi does manage a couple all right moments here, like when Robocop goes back to the scene of his own murder. There’s also a lot of cop talk, not related to Robocop, and it passes the panels.…
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Twenty-four pages of story and nothing really happens. I mean, clearly, things happen. There’s a fight, there’s an argument with the dumb detective, there’s Robocop’s girlfriend–she’s not his girlfriend but whatever (Byrd draws her middle aged, clearly not basing her off the very young Jill Hennessy who played her in the movie), there’s a surprise…
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Barcelona would be, if Whit Stillman had made more than three films and could be accurately categorized, Whit Stillman-lite. The film’s hilarious, with almost every scene ending on a humorous note. These comic moments don’t add up to much. Cousins Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman have a conversation at one point about the lack of…
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Ed Wood is a biopic of the unsung. The “misfits and dope addicts” of impossibly low budget American filmmaking. The film’s epilogue, following up with the characters, puts the film on the same level as all other big Hollywood biopics. Except this one is about someone who really didn’t do anything (and didn’t even get…
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I never know how to describe Ashes of Time. The first–and probably last–time I tried, I described it as a mix of Magnolia and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As difficult as it is to describe, it’s got to be impossible to advertise–a character-based martial arts film, where fight scenes lack any visceral impact. Wong stylizes…
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With irregular fade outs, elevator muzak for a score, bad direction and a British cast pretending to be Spanish, Uncovered plays like a mix between a British television movie and a–Canadian–after school special (albeit one with a European approach to nudity). I’ve read the source novel, an intricate thriller, and this filmic adaptation is absent…
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For a painfully brief period in the 1990s, Ron Howard was one of the best filmmakers working. It didn’t last. The Paper kicked off his run. Howard and the Koepp brothers (I can’t remember for sure, but I think Stephen worked at a newspaper) imbue the film with the traditional Hollywood newspaper movie idealism, but…
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Thirty-nine years old when Wyatt Earp was released, all Kevin Costner needed to do to de-age himself twenty years was smile. During the young Earp days, Costner looks younger than costar Annabeth Gish, not to mention Linden Ashby (playing his younger brother). The extended version of Wyatt Earp clocks in at three and a half…
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As low-budget, semi-amateur films go… A Fistful of Fingers is on the low-end. It’s certainly not as accomplished as Desperado in terms of visual storytelling, it doesn’t have enough narrative content to fill its eighty minutes (like Clerks) and it appears just a little bit cheaper than The Evil Dead. Edgar Wright apparently spent most…
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To say Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla has it all is an understatement. It has more than that. It has dirt bikes, black holes, a “Muppet Babies” version of Godzilla, a superwoman, walks on the beach at sunset, and, apparently, the first butt shot in a Godzilla movie. It’s a wacky mess, proving having no story is…
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A Good Man in Africa is about the British practicing a modified form of the age-old British diplomacy in Africa (duh) in modernity. As such, when I saw John Lithgow’s name in the credits, I did not expect him to be playing a Brit. However, Lithgow does play one and he does so quite poorly.…
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Given Men of War’s blind earnestness, the daddy issues, and John Sayles being one of the credited screenwriters, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was going to be Steven Spielberg’s first war movie. I first read about Men of War when IMDb came around and I looked up Sayles. A John Sayles written…
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Bland but pretty sci-fi adventure epic about the aliens who built the pyramids coming back with a vengeance and only Egyptologist James Spader and Special Forces G.I. Joe Kurt Russell being able to save the planet. Spader’s fine, Russell’s iffy but has his moments; the script–by director Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin–is crap but not…
The Stop Button 