Spider-Man: Night of the Clones and Escort to Danger (1978, Fernando Lamas and Dennis Donnelly)

Night of the Clones and Escort to Danger is a strange way to watch a couple episodes of “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Without anywhere near enough episodes for syndication, the show’s producers packaged a couple episodes together so they would have TV movies for syndication. Well, TV movie length, anyway. Some of these duets would come with newly shot footage to tie the episodes together; not so for Clones and Escort. One episode ends, the next begins. Seemingly the next day?

Night ends at a costume ball for the not-Nobel Prize committee; Danger begins with Robert F. Simon chastising Nicholas Hammond for spending the whole night at a party with a glamorous movie star and not getting any pictures. The unseen and in the compilation seems potentially more interesting than the rest of it. In addition to no connective tissue between the first and second halves of Clones and Escort, there’s also no character development. In the first half, Simon is mentoring Hammond. In the second half, Simon is pissed at Hammond (presumably about the movie star thing, but there’s lots more as the episode—sorry, half—progresses). Cop Michael Pataki is down on Hammond the first half, then turns around and defends him twice in the second. But it also ends up being a not-bad way to watch “Spider-Man,” if only because you can see things improving.

In particular, whiny know-it-all Hammond becomes far more likable in the second half. The first half has him puppy-dogging around mad scientist Lloyd Bochner, who’s perfected cloning and gets to play two parts. Bochner’s evil clone taking over happens pretty early on, so it’s hard to know how Bochner would be as the “good” guy. He’s occasionally camping as the villain, but he’s got his moments. He’s particularly terrifying when the Mr. Hyde version targets Morgan Fairchild, who grew up with Bochner Prime as a surrogate father.

Fairchild’s atrocious. Almost comically. She gets through the part—and the writing (script credit to John W. Bloch is terrible)—but she’s really bad. It’s a complicated bad too. First, she’s playing Karl Swenson’s granddaughter and the de facto event coordinator for the not-Nobel Committee. They’ve looked Bochner over for five years because they thought his cloning experiments would end with him cloning an evil version of himself. The evil Bochner is going to kill them all in retribution, including Fairchild. It’s unclear. Once Bochner attacks her and locks her and Spider-Man in an abandoned building’s still-working bank vault, we get much less of his perspective.

At least until he clones himself another Hammond, who hates regular Hammond, which is hilarious, and makes Hammond more sympathetic, carrying over to the second episode. But Hammond’s also sympathetic because Fairchild—after being saved by Spider-Man—capes for Bochner, even as the police investigate. She’s sure it’s all a misunderstanding, and Spider-Man… chased her into the vault. It’s a nonsensical part with lousy writing. There’s nothing Fairchild could do. But she’s still pretty bad.

In fact, her dialogue seems to be written for someone with a Swedish accent. It’s so strange.

Or maybe it’s just worse than it seems.

Danger is all about Hammond getting involved with a South American dissident BarBara Luna’s attempt to avenge herself (and her recently deceased displaced despot brother) on the new democratic president, played by Alejandro Rey. Rey’s in New York because his Stanford coed daughter (Madeleine Stowe) wants to be the next Miss Galaxy. Luna wants their country—Tavilia—to return to a dictatorship under her rule and has hired infamous international assassin Oddjob (no, really, it’s Harold Sakata, and he’s got a hat thing going) to kidnap Stowe to force Rey to abdicate. Not sure it’s how transfers of power work, but it does turn out no one really knows how those work.

“Spider-Man” aged well thanks to the world being so much stupider than anyone thought back in the late seventies.

Anyway.

Can Hammond save Stowe in time? It makes for a decent enough episode—with a phenomenal car chase (the stunt drivers)–primarily thanks to the cast. Rey’s not good, but he’s earnest and sympathetic. Ditto Stowe (who somehow gets even less to do than Fairchild). And Pataki’s fun. Sakata and sidekick assassin Bob Minor aren’t great (Minor’s better than Sakata), but it’s fine. It’s a “Spider-Man” show; it’s fine. And Hammond’s likable. After seeing him get shit for trying to save Fairchild’s life (and never getting thanked), having him get positive reinforcement ain’t bad.

Plus, Chip Fields gets more to do in the second half. She’s in the first episode a little—sort of taking over Fairchild’s screen time for the conclusion (Fairchild seems miserable in the episode, and her negative chemistry with Hammond is awkward to watch)—but then in the second, she and Hammond get to do hijinks. She’s Simon’s assistant, and outside some “I get to give him sass because affirmative action” framing, she’s a delight. And she’s fun with Hammond.

I’m curious to see how these compilations work when the second episode isn’t such a noticeable improvement, making for a bullish viewing experience, but Clones and Escort is way more successful than it ought to be. Especially since the show reused footage between the episodes (the not-Nobel hotel is the same as Rey’s hotel, with no one remembering they’d been there yesterday for another episode). Lots of reused Spider-Man stunt footage too. Lots. And editors John A. Barton and Thomas Fries—despite that fantastic car chase—are lost with fight scenes. They misapply good ideas. It’s very frustrating.

But, by the end of a very eventful week for Hammond, it’s not bad.

Oh, also—Irene Tedrow as Aunt May (there was an Uncle Max in CBS’s Marvel Television Universe, but no mention of Uncle Ben, foreshadowing the MCU, no doubt). Tedrow’s replacing Jeff Donnell from the pilot movie, and, well, imagining growing up with Tedrow… Hammond’s whiny, know-it-all persona makes sense. So, bad, but only from a particular point of view.

Kind of like the rest of it.

History of the World: Part I (1981, Mel Brooks)

History of the World: Part I is funny about twenty percent of the time. The eighty percent of the time, it isn’t funny, it’s either because the jokes are too homophobic, sexist, racist, or punny. If you’re not laughing out loud, you’re ready to hiss.

Since twenty percent doesn’t quite qualify as a mishmash, it’s good the film’s a technical success. The matte paintings alone are an achievement, but Woody Omens’s Panavision cinematography is a delight. Writer, director, producer, and usually star Brooks does an okay job with the direction. Of course, if he doesn’t, he’s got Omens, editor John C. Howard, or composer John Morris to cover for him. But—at least as far as direction—Brooks is solid.

The film’s a pageant, starting in the Stone Age with a profoundly ahistorical 2001 sequence led by caveman Sid Caesar. Orson Welles narrates the whole movie, but never more than the caveman sequence. Welles’s outtakes are probably hilarious. Following that sequence, it’s off to the Ten Commandments and Brooks. It’s a short, funny scene, which Brooks brings back later. Despite Moses, the Last Supper, and the Spanish Inquisition, History’s pretty hands-off with religion, even though every time Brooks touches on it, the scene’s a winner.

Especially the Spanish Inquisition musical number.

But History spends the most time in Ancient Rome and the French Revolution—also note there’s no American history—which go on so long Brooks, the writer, needs rescuing. Literally.

In Ancient Rome, Brooks is a stand-up philosopher who gets a gig at Caesar’s Palace. The casino. Get it? He teams up with escaped slave Gregory Hines and vestal virgin Mary-Margaret Humes (who deserved an Oscar for pretending to lust after Brooks) for misadventures involving emperor Dom DeLuise and empress Madeline Kahn. Kahn’s mostly great. DeLuise is fine, but way too many of the jokes in his scene—it’s a billed cameo—are homophobic. Brooks, the writer, often runs out of ideas once he gets to a scene and tries to cover it with bad jokes and cleavage.

The Spanish Inquisition musical number comes between Rome and the French Revolution. It’s Brooks’s best writing in the film and, since it doesn’t have a chance to go stale, his best performance.

The French Revolution sequence involves Brooks playing both the King and the King’s pissboy, who holds the bucket for nobles to pee in. When the Revolution’s clearly on the horizon, noble Harvey Korman has Brooks, the pissboy, stand in for the King at the guillotine. Korman’s good—though Andréas Voutsinas’s much funnier as his sidekick—while Brooks is one-note. Pamela Stephenson plays a busty young woman who needs to curry the King’s favor (physically). When she discovers the pissboy isn’t going to force her, they have a few scant moments to become love interests before the Revolution—led by Cloris Leachman as Madame Defarge (which could’ve been the whole movie)—knocks down the door, leading to another chase sequence.

The finale’s contrived and hurried—despite a gigantic cast and elaborate production, Brooks entirely runs out of ideas before the ninety-minute mark. It only worsens in the epilogue, which promises Part II and completely deflates Part I.

The best performance is easily Hines, followed at a distance by Kahn, Voutsinas, and Korman. Both Stephenson and Humes are fine; they’ve just got terrible parts. Stephenson’s better, though. Despite the more objectified, exploitative part, she’s got some character, while Humes is just… madly in love with Brooks.

History’s got its moments, but nowhere near enough. Especially since the bad jokes are really bad. Again, thank goodness Brooks has his crew to make up the difference.

Miracle Mile (1988, Steve De Jarnatt)

Miracle Mile is an actors’ movie without any great performances. There are affable performances, good performances, (bad performances), but no great performances. Lead Anthony Edwards occasionally tries hard—it’s the end of the world, after all, he’s got to emote—but he’ll frequently hit a wall and start moving his mouth like a Jimmy Stewart impression will be enough.

It’s never enough.

Then at some point, Edwards gives up and lets co-star Mare Winningham do the work. Except Edwards isn’t just the protagonist, he’s also the narrator. And Winningham is his manic pixie dream girl—she’s the first girl thirty-year-old Edwards has ever gone for, as she’s the first girl who shares his big band interest. Edwards is in L.A. playing gigs with his big band. Winningham is a waitress. During the opening titles, they have a solid meet cute at the La Brea Tar Pits Museum. Given how important that location ends up being, it’d have been nice if the movie had spent some time on it instead of summarizing.

Though… as Edwards’s attention-grabbing approach is to hijack a school trip and talk to the kids while their teacher isn’t present and Winningham thinks it’s hot… maybe not.

They have a whirlwind romance—they’re to their third date by the present action, so maybe they cut something—including Edwards meeting Winningham’s grandparents, played by John Agar and Lou Hancock. Agar and Hancock haven’t spoken for fifteen years but live in the same apartment complex. That detail is mainly important to complicate Edwards’s mission and gin up a reasonably nice scene in the late second act.

Edwards is supposed to pick Winningham up after her shift, only he threw away a single-puffed cigarette, and a bird picked it up, brought it up to its rooftop nest on some power lines, set its nest on fire (presumably the bird’s okay), which knocked out the power, which knocked out Edwards’s manual alarm clock, so he naps through meeting Winningham. It’s their third date, so she tells him to get some rest. She’ll have just worked a six-hour shift at an L.A. diner, which seems unfair, energy-wise.

We get some quick scenes of Winningham being sad Edwards didn’t show, and his motel’s phone is out of service—the power outage—so she goes home and takes some Valium and conks out. Edwards wakes up at a quarter to four (in the morning; he was picking her up at midnight) and heads to the diner, expecting her to be waiting for him there.

The film’s a fascinating relic of many eighties-specific flexes, mostly male entitlement, but there’s also a bunch of racism and transphobia. Writer and director De Jarnatt goes out of his way to proclaim he’s not a homophobe, however. But it’s for a sitcom-level “comedy” beat.

Anyway.

In the diner, Edwards meets a variety of early-morning folks who have very little reason to be hanging out at the same diner. Especially when the film establishes they’re regulars. There’s stockbroker Denise Crosby who has the personal numbers of multiple U.S. senators yet likes to spend the opening bell being sexually harassed by Claude Earl Jones. Jones is a street cleaner on a break; Alan Rosenberg is his sidekick. O-Lan Jones is the waitress (who knows Edwards, which also implies cut scenes), and Robert DoQui is the cook. At first, it seems like it’ll be a good part for DoQui. It’s not.

While trying to call Winningham in the phone booth outside the diner, Edwards picks up a wrong number—it’s the end of the world, says the caller. The U.S. is firing the nukes; they’ll hit Russia in fifty minutes. The Soviet response will arrive in seventy. So Edwards tells the diner, causing a stir, which becomes a panic once Crosby can’t get ahold of her politician friends because they’re already headed to Antarctica.

The film’s initially Edwards’s quest to get to Winningham, but then becomes their quest to get to the airport and onto a flight to “safety.” Along the way, Edwards meets a handful of interesting characters. First, it’s Mykelti Williamson, one of the film’s few Black characters with lines. He sells stolen goods, of course, but at least he loves his sister, Kelly Jo Minter, enough not to let her get nuked. Minter’s not in it enough. Williamson’s better than the part deserves. Then we don’t meet anyone for a while because Edwards’ quest to get Winningham from her apartment doesn’t have many obstacles once he’s going.

Later, he meets Kurt Fuller—as a whacked-out yuppie who doesn’t believe the nuke hype—and powerlifter Brian Thompson. Thompson probably comes into Mile in the last twenty minutes and has maybe two minutes of screen time, but stands out. Both because he’s good, and De Jarnatt saddles him with a bunch.

Along the way, Mile has its ups and downs. De Jarnatt’s script only commits to six-minute subplot arcs, which keeps the movie busy without ever being full. Characters recur, but similarly without any significant arcs. Even when there’s something seemingly salient, its import evaporates. Both in De Jarnatt’s script and the performances.

Technically, the film’s low middling. De Jarnatt’s composition sometimes deserves better than cinematographer Theo van de Sande’s lighting; sometimes not. The Tangerine Dream score initially seems like it might bring something to the picture. It does not.

Both Edwards and Winningham are sufficiently sympathetic considering the circumstances, so Mile does stay engaging. It’s just way too obviously got De Jarnatt’s hand spinning the wheel to keep it going.

Project Wolf Hunting (2022, Kim Hong-sun)

Watching Project Wolf Hunting (sadly not a Good Will Hunting reference), I kept wondering if the human body holds as much blood as the film suggests. It’s violent to the extremis, with every mutilated corpse creating a standing river of blood. It takes the film a while—well, at least ten minutes—to start gushing blood everywhere, but there’s the implication of it from the start.

Hunting beings as a police procedural, set in 2017. The Philippines has flown some Korean criminals home on extradition; one of the returning criminals’ victims blows himself up along with pedestrians at the airport (and presumably his target). We never find out what the criminal did exactly, but the implication is… financial fraud. The post-exposition shot features a river of blood (of course) and a blown-off leg. Hunting’s going to be gruesome.

Fast forward five years, and the Korean government’s making another run, except this time, they’ve learned their lesson. They’re going to take the criminals back to South Korea on a cargo ship, and there are going to be experienced cops on board to keep the prisoners in line.

Now, right away, there are some issues. Like why the cops—outside boss Park Ho-san and female detective Jung So-min—are questionably competent. There’s also the question of why you’re putting regular cops in charge of the transport instead of corrections officers or even the Special Service, led by Sung Dong-il, who take over the command room in Busan port to monitor the ship. But also, why isn’t the transport outfitted for these dangerous criminals, because they’re not financial criminals, they’re splatter-punks. Led by Seo In-guk, they like to eviscerate their victims, hacking or bashing them to literal pieces.

The whining cops seem like sitting ducks if anything were to happen, especially once doctor Lee Sung-wook sneaks below deck and gives some blood-encrusted guy in an ice bath an injection. The guy—Wolf Hunting (no, not really, but… sort of)—also has his eyes sewn shut, because Hunting isn’t for the faint-hearted. Though the eyes are never particularly gross or even disquieting, maybe because once the creature awakes, he’s covered in so much blood it’s hard to make out details.

Choi Gwi-hwa plays the creature. He’s supposed to stay asleep for the trip from the Philippines to South Korea, but once Seo stages his breakout and the ship’s corridors run with blood, it makes its way down to the Choi’s holding cell and drips on him, resurrecting him.

The voyage starts with a dozen cops, two dozen prisoners, and an indeterminate amount of crew members—who apparently voted to allow the Korean government to use them as a prisoner transport, much to their regret—but they’re down to a dozen by the hour mark. Hunting runs just around two hours; if you just cut out the graphic violence, it’d probably be eighty. Tops. The whole point is the blood and gore.

Except director Kim’s not really into it. I mean, his special effects team does fantastic work, but Kim doesn’t do anything with it. His action scenes are boring, all about characters you don’t care about dying horribly, but since there’s always ultra-violence, it doesn’t garner any immediate sympathy. Kim—who also wrote the film—even establishes the cops as assholes (before revealing the criminals are all splatter-killers).

The film’s also got some very obvious limits. For example, none of the violence against women is sexually motivated; the handful of ladies get butchered without any lewdness, though there’s some low-key homophobia (in some of the sequel setup).

Despite being a bad action director and a worse horror director, Kim’s fine with the rest, which is sort of a Jurassic Park movie. No one who’s too annoying lives long enough to impact the film, and the survivors working their way through are all solid enough, if not sympathetic. Female cop Jung and quiet family killer Jang Dong-yoon have an unspoken bond, mainly because they’re the only two competent people in their group.

Sung ends up having a much bigger part than implied initially, and he’s a tad tepid, like a metaphor for director Kim’s own disinterest. But the other main cast is all right. Like, Seo’s scary, and Park’s okay. The acting’s fine.

Good photography from Yun Ju-hwan and great special effects.

The third act’s got way too many reveals and way too many sequel setups, but the film’s entirely competent until then. It’s gruesome without being exploitative, unpleasant but not enthusiastic enough to be repugnant.

If you’re looking for something so bloody and gory you become numb to disemboweling, Project Wolf Hunting’s just the ticket.

Richard III (1995, Richard Loncraine)

Richard III takes place in an alternate history where the British are five hundred years late with their royal wars, but still in the 1940s for technology and rising fascism. The film doesn’t update Shakespeare’s dialogue, so it’s the cast performing while dressed—increasingly—as Nazis. Except they’re British.

Well, not Annette Bening or Robert Downey Jr. Bening and Downey don’t do accents, implying there’s an accent-free United States out there. The people they’re playing in the play (who are people from history) were not American. There wasn’t a United States when the events took place. So I thought there might be some subtext to them being American. Nope. Richard III doesn’t do subtext, but it especially doesn’t do it with Bening and Downey.

Bening is not good, but she tries. Downey’s terrible. It’s unclear how hard he’s trying. He performatively fidgets in the backgrounds occasionally, presumably to keep himself in the movie, since it doesn’t do anything for his character development. Bening tries with the character development.

Doesn’t go anywhere, but again, she does try. And there are hints of better scenes. For example, in the second half of the film, when Ian McKellen is taking over, Bening gets together with the other women for an establishing shot and then a cutaway, but presumably, they’re very upset.

No one in the movie gets a good part except McKellen, but it’s not like Richard doesn’t fail him too. The first act’s dynamite, with McKellen plotting against brothers John Wood and Nigel Hawthorne and forcing the audience to conspire with him. They handle the plays asides with McKellen directly addressing the camera, tickled pink with his plotting. This device almost entirely disappears by the finish, apparently an appropriate adaptation of the source play.

But it’s not a good adaptation of it.

Similarly, no one really thought through the third act’s visual clashes—attempted usurper Dominic West (not good, not too bad) is dressed as a British commando from a WWII movie, complete with beret, off to fight… the British Nazis. Director Loncraine is initially bad at the war action but gets much worse for the finale. Richard III coasts through most of its run time on McKellen, trying to keep ahead of the film being entirely out of steam. It seems like it’ll make it; then comes the battle finish and Loncraine’s terrible work on it.

The film has big visual problems throughout, but Loncraine at least seemed to be trying to do something. Unfortunately, the finish is a smorgasbord of thoughtless bad.

Other than McKellen, who’s great when the film lets him be, the best performances are Kristin Scott Thomas (who should’ve had Bening’s part for sure) and Maggie Smith. Smith’s got about three scenes and seven lines. Scott Thomas has about double. Nowhere near enough for either.

Jim Broadbent plays McKellen’s chief sidekick and is relatively bland and obvious. It should be a better performance. There are excellent supporting players like Wood and Hawthorne, but also Jim Carter, Bill Paterson, Tim McInnerny, and Edward Hardwicke. All the actors are game (well, not Downey); it’s just Loncraine and company doesn’t put it together.

Peter Biziou’s photography is okay. Not the occasional composite shots. But Paul Green’s editing is jerky, and then Trevor Jones’s smooth jazz score is a (bad) choice.

Also, real quick—they reuse the same slamming door sound for about three minutes straight, regardless of door, and I’m wondering if it sounds so familiar because it’s from DOOM or something. DOORSLAM.WAV.

Anyway.

Richard III’s a slightly interesting but quickly pointless staging of the play. It’s never stagy, I suppose, but whatever they do instead doesn’t work either. McKellen’s first-act performance is singular, though. The rest is okay to good, but he has a unique first act.

Wayne’s World (1992, Penelope Spheeris)

Wayne’s World ought to be a no-brainer. Slick, soulless media exec Rob Lowe turns public access metalhead slackers Mike Myers and Dana Carvey into real celebrities; only they don’t like the deal they’ve made with the devil. Along the way, Myers meets metal rocker chick Tia Carrere, and they fall in like until Lowe tries to steal her away with the promise of success. It’s a ninety-four-minute movie; it shouldn’t be that hard.

Yet Wayne’s World manages to fumble entirely, all the way to the disastrous third act. The film’s “documentary crew follows around real people” bit, which director Spheeris profoundly underutilizes, ought to have defined World as a precursor to, you know, the early-to-mid aughts found footage. Instead, the movie completely forgets about it. Even though when Myers and Carvey are talking to the camera, they’re never more likable. Especially Carvey, whose performance is atrocious. No doubt, Spheeris is bad directing actors, but there’s not a single moment of Carvey footage in the regular film they shouldn’t have reshot. He looks inordinately uncomfortable the entire time.

Spheeris is only slightly better at directing his or Myers’s “SNL” gags. They’re some of the film’s more genuinely funny moments because writers Myers, Bonnie Turner, and Terry Turner can’t seem to find any situational comedy in the situations. The Turners have major sitcom credentials too, which adds to World’s inexplicable fumbling.

As for Spheeris. I always—read: when I was thirteen or fourteen—thought Spheeris got the gig because she was really good at directing American verité and musical performances. Based on the Alice Cooper performance in World, she’s not good at the latter. It’s unclear about the former because World’s got no reality after the first act or so, when they flex shooting on location in Aurora, Illinois. In the second “act” (World would be a frustrating and pointless narrative to chart), the action moves between various sets with some exterior establishing shots in or around Chicago. In another genuinely inexplicable move, all the doors open out. Not sure who was responsible for that choice, but it’s a bad one. When they all go over to see Lowe’s fancy apartment, and Carrere can get impressed, Lowe opens the door out into the hallway to let them in.

What.

Okay, Spheeris. In hindsight, it seems more like she got the job so a woman could co-sign on the foundational misogyny of the film. It’s sometimes friendly, validating misogyny, but, hey, Myers and Carvey are so cute it’s not like they’re bad guys. Especially not since Lowe was still on his rehabilitation tour with World. He looks like he wants to strangle his agent for talking him into the gig. And his outfits, which everyone says are great, are cartoonish in hindsight. Or they cut the scenes about him wearing suits for someone 6’ or taller.

Carrere is a heavy metal babe who’s going to go with whatever guy loves her for her looks AND her music. Though her big performance is a cover, which makes very little sense but it’s in the third act where nothing matters anymore. Carrere works her ass off in World. She’s not very good. Maybe her Chinese accent doesn’t help. But she knows it’s a primo gig, and she tries. As long as she’s willing to strip down and occasionally slut out, World’s a fine showcase.

Unlike Lara Flynn Boyle, who the film repeatedly humiliates as a gag because sad girls deserve to be publicly mocked and derided. Wait, she didn’t originate the part on “SNL”? I assumed she was a weird continuity carryover. It’s so much worse when she’s not.

Also, the movie’s super shitty to Colleen Camp for some reason. Like, screw you, Wayne’s World. You had to get Brian Doyle-Murray because Bill didn’t return your calls.

The best performers are Myers and Carvey’s film crew, who have a half dozen lines total but care about getting future gigs, especially Lee Tergesen. He’s a delight.

Myers and Carvey (mostly Myers) have enough stupid charm to get the thing through, but just barely.

An “SNL: Wayne’s World Best Of” is likely a better use of time. Probably not ninety-four minutes of it, but….

Black Adam (2022, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Black Adam opens with kid narration. At first, it seems like the narrator kid is Ancient Kahndaqi Jalon Christian, who’s sick and tired of living under a tyrannical king who has his people mining eternium for him. Eternium is not a “Masters of the Universe” thing; it’s more like the DC Universe version of vibranium. Except not really, because it doesn’t do anything. They set it up like it gives people superpowers, but… no.

But the narrator is not Christian because the flashback’s not in English. The present-day Kahndaqi people all speak English (and are apparently a Christian Middle Eastern nation-state in the DC Movie Universe—they’re Muslim in the comics, but the movie people don’t have the stones to make sympathetic Muslims).

Anyway. The narrator is Bodhi Sabongui. His mom is renegade university professor Sarah Shahi (dressed like a less objectified “Tomb Raider”); she’s trying to keep Intergang from getting all the Eternium. Including a magic crown, which we saw in the prologue. The evil king wants to be a demon lord and needs the crown, but then the people’s hero comes to stop him.

In the comics, Intergang was a criminal organization in Metropolis who gave Superman trouble. In Black Adam, they’re Blackwater, except they’re called Intergang. And they’re committing war crimes daily, but there’s no United Nations to send Jean-Claude Van Damme and whoever in the DC Universe. Instead, there’s the Justice Society, and they don’t give a shit about Intergang committing war crimes. They’re about maintaining the status quo, globally speaking.

So when Shahi resurrects Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson from his tomb to save her from a bunch of bad guys, Viola Davis calls Hawkman Aldis Hodge to go keep the West’s oil interests safe or whatever. The first act of Black Adam—besides the introduction to the superhero team, which is basically just an X-Men sequence (or Deadpool 1)—is a little like Terminator 2. Sabongui is going to teach Johnson it’s not okay to kill people. Except, not really, because Sabongui’s country is being occupied by a criminal organization who made speeder bikes because they really liked Tron. It’s a complicated situation and might need Johnson’s killer instincts, which Pierce Brosnan realizes, but no one listens to him despite him being a hundred years old with a magical gold helmet to tell him the future.

Now, I really hope Davis gets two million dollars a minute in these movies on the condition she films on her iPhone in the bathroom, but Brosnan’s hacking through this movie. He gets some energy when he’s opposite the other actors, including Hodge, who’s an intentional charisma vacuum (he’s playing the straight edge who gets in the Rock’s way), and especially Johnson. Still, Brosnan looks exasperated with all the superhero business.

So, interesting casting choice.

Quintessa Swindell and Noah Centineo play the young superheroes. Centineo is a legacy hero and a lovable, slightly dopey bro. Swindell has a way too intense origin recap, seemingly just so she can privilege-check Centineo. Black Adam’s got three credited screenwriters, but it feels like Many Hands contributed. Because despite that first act “young John Connor and his pet Terminator” setup, the second act’s mostly a superhero fight movie. Johnson’s dealing with the mercenaries while Hodge tries to stop him and let the mercenaries go back to killing civilians.

But there’s also the magical archeology subplot with Shahi and then the secrets of Johnson’s origin story.

The movie’s got a surprisingly effective plot structure. Director Collet-Serra front-loads the best action sequences, set to either pop songs or scene-appropriate selections; the rest of the action’s middling, occasionally a little better. Johnson turns on the charm a little earlier than he should—narratively speaking—but the movie needs it, and he obliges.

Oddly catchy score from Lorne Balfe; it’s not particularly good, but it earworms all right. The special effects and technicals are all competent, though there’s way too much going on in the third act without enough actual content. Characters have big, action-packed story arcs just to delay them from participating in the main plot. It’s weird. They also use a lot of slow and fast motion effects to distract from the finale’s limited scale.

Johnson’s the whole show and he’s much better than anyone else in the movie. His closest competition is Brosnan and Brosnan’s not close. Centineo and Swindell are likable, but in a TV show supporting cast sort of way (which is appropriate since they’re TV show supporting cast). But Shahi and Sabongui—occasional affability aside—aren’t good. And whatever Hodge is doing isn’t working.

With some very specific caveats, Black Adam’s far from a fail.

Halloween Ends (2022, David Gordon Green)

While I had some expectations about Halloween Ends’s plot going in, based on the previous entry, the franchise, and behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt, nothing prepared me for a soft remake of Nightmare on Elm Street II.

Halloween Ends is not about Jamie Lee Curtis getting out the butcher knife granddaughter Andi Matichak gave her in the last movie to kill Michael Myers (once again James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle) with Will Patton helping like they’re an adorable old couple hunting serial killers. It’s about local boy Rohan Campbell who accidentally killed a little kid he was babysitting a year after the last movie’s events. On Halloween, obviously. So, Ends’s opening kill is a child’s graphic, accidental death.

It’s incredibly manipulative but also really compelling.

The action then moves ahead three more years. Curtis has given up the prepper life (which seems entirely unlikely given Ends would then take place in 2022, post-Covid—but just like with its immortal septuagenarian spree killers, it doesn’t take place in the real world). She and granddaughter Matichak live together in a charming house where Curtis works on her true crime memoir. Matichak’s a nurse, so she didn’t slow down with college after her entire life was destroyed. Despite being Matichak’s best performance in the series, she and Curtis still don’t have a rewarding cinematic relationship. They’re just too slasher movie broken for it to work, and the movie doesn’t even try.

Curtis happens across Campbell in the present—some high school seniors in the marching band are bullying him—and introduces him to Matichak, who’s apparently been dating a bunch of dudes since Courtney murdered her boyfriend last movie. Her most recent beau is a shitty cop—shitty even for cops—Jesse C. Boyd. Luckily for Matichak, thanks to the bullying, Campbell’s about to snap and has no qualms about picking fights with a cop. Not when he’s a bad boy who zooms around town real fast on the motorcycle he’s fixed up.

Ends fearlessly rides a motorcycle over its shark tank, no qualms about all the eighties horror movie tropes it implements (in addition to Nightmare II, Boyd also does a Christine-esque transformation). It’s shameless, which works for it. Especially since Matichak finds her newest Bonnie in Campbell, and they have eighties teen movie montages riding around on his bike, trying to escape their respective traumas.

The movie pays a lot of lip service to trauma and recovering from it. Curtis has a bunch of narration about it, including narrating clips from the other Halloween movies. It’s a little weird to have a forty-year-old franchise, but they’re only using the clips from the first one, H40, and Kills. They should’ve CGI’ed something else together for it. There’s not a lot of flash in Ends, all things considered. It’s a muted finale.

Albeit one with some bizarre plot decisions. Like having everyone in town hate Curtis for the 2018 massacre—she spent her life bullying a man with brain damage, what did she think would happen—or Patton basically being a cameo. If it weren’t this Halloween series with its deceptive opening titles vise a vie cast importance, he’d be unbilled.

Best music of the H40 trilogy from Cody Carpenter, John Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies. Solid photography from Michael Simmonds and especially editing from Timothy Alverson. Green’s direction is fine. He’s not mimicking the original movie anymore, not with Campbell as the new protagonist, which helps.

It’s not good or successful, but it’s also not terrible, and it’s definitely the most engaging of the H40 series.

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022, Taika Waititi)

Thor: Love and Thunder ends like all Thor movies, promising the next one will—finally—deliver on the promise. The first movie follow-up fumbled when co-star Natalie Portman didn’t rate an Avengers 1 gig, the second movie when Portman didn’t rate an Avengers 2 gig, the third movie had Avengers 3 entirely upend it (with Portman not bothering coming back). Well, she’s back for Love and Thunder and given how she’s got such a lousy arc, it won’t be a surprise if she’s gone for good this time.

Of course, they didn’t stop messing with Chris Hemsworth’s character arc—which now apparently wraps back around to the first movie, only not really—with the latest Avengers. The most recent one sent Hemsworth off with The Guardians of the Galaxy, who barely show up in Love and Thunder. Chris Pratt gets the most lines, but the others seem like they showed up for a couple hours, plus and minus the makeup chair. They’re just around long enough for Hemsworth to head back to Earth, having found himself between Avengers 4 and this one.

Only not really, because when he gets back to Earth, he discovers Portman has the power of Thor. She’s been superheroing it up on Earth; only we don’t see any of it. Once Hemsworth’s back in the movie, Portman’s downgraded to a girlfriend part. Worse, she’s demoted to an ex-girlfriend whose emotional experience isn’t part of the story. And their reuniting arc is all about them getting back together.

Shame she’s only Thor because Hemsworth made his old hammer promise to look after her, which includes after it got broken in Thor 3 and Portman ingloriously got cancer at the beginning of this movie. It’s got to be really hard on the character, whose single bit of character development—besides Kat Dennings coming back for a cameo—is flashbacks to the character’s mom dying of cancer. It doesn’t even rise to middling soap opera; Love and Thunder could give a shit about Portman.

To be entirely fair, it’s unclear what Love and Thunder does give a shit about. Special guest star villain Christian Bale, who starts the movie in an apparent homage to the beginning of Star Trek V, which is a flex, is potentially compelling, but once the film spends any time with him, it’s clear he’s… just as dangerous as Josh Brolin in the Avengers movies. So, why doesn’t Bale get a fourteen-movie arc or whatever.

The film’s very wishy-washy on the Marvel movies’ gods—with Russell Crowe showing up for a Zeus cameo (leading to the film’s most successful moment, as long as you stick around long enough)—but they don’t do jack shit for their worshippers. They like it that way just fine, thank you very much. Bale’s mad his daughter died in a desert while his god had an oasis nearby and didn’t intercede.

Conveniently, Bale then finds the power to kill all the gods in the universe, pretty quickly going after Tessa Thompson and the Asgardians living on Earth. Specifically their children. He kidnaps their children and puts them in a spider cage on an asteroid in a black and white universe.

Kieron L. Dyer plays the lead kid, son of now-dead Idris Elba, who can communicate across the universe with Hemsworth. Given where Love and Thunder ends up, there ought to be an arc for Dyer and Hemsworth. There’s not. There’s barely an arc for Hemsworth and Portman.

Actually, given the end of the movie, it seems like Dyer could’ve been the film’s protagonist or at least jockeying for the spot. He doesn’t. Despite Love and Thunder having a Guns N’ Roses-heavy soundtrack and Dyer being a new, enthusiastic Guns N’ Roses fan, the two things are unconnected.

Director Waititi narrates the film in his role as Hemsworth’s CGI sidekick. The film’s more successful in summary than in scene, which isn’t great.

There are some iffy effects throughout—Waititi’s got these vaguely boring intergalactic settings (not sure who thought black and white universe was the way to go with an outer space fight)—but the finale’s got some fantastic visualizing of a tough Marvel Comics character to visualize realistically.

They get away with it, on Portman and Bale’s professional competency and Hemsworth’s easy charm. And the setup for next time is beyond cloying and trendy; they’ll finally do a great one. Promise.

The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942, Joseph H. Lewis)

I spent the first fifteen minutes of The Mad Doctor of Market Street wondering why the movie didn’t have a better reputation. Yes, the title’s bad even before it was marginally ableist, but director Lewis has been rediscovered; why not Market Street. It starts as a traditional, albeit modern Universal horror picture with “pseudo” scientist Lionel Atwill killing some unwitting dope. Atwill wasn’t trying to kill the guy; instead, he used invermectin to put him in suspended animation, then revive him later. And it didn’t work.

So Atwill shaves his sinister guy beard into a mustache, puts on a dinner jacket, and gets mildly debonair on a cruise ship. He’s sailing to New Zealand under a false name, with detective Byron Shores also onboard, trying to sniff him out. Except Atwill’s shaved, so he’s basically invisible.

The movie then sets up its ensemble cast: leading lady Claire Dodd, leading man Richard Davies, Una Merkel as Dodd’s comic relief aunt, Nat Pendleton as comic relief lunkhead with a heart of gold, and John Eldredge as dipshit officer. Merkel’s going to New Zealand to finally get married, Pendleton’s going for a fight, Dodd’s accompanying Merkel, Davies is an M.D. working his way to an internship in Australia, and Eldredge doesn’t like Davies liking Dodd.

Thanks to Merkel and Pendleton, it feels like some weird MGM comedy, and for a while seems like it’ll be about the passengers finding out Atwill’s not what he appears.

Only, no, there’s a shipwreck, and they end up on a tropical island, and it turns out Market Street is a racist South Seas picture. Atwill saves Rosina Galli, one of the superstitious natives (who wear the latest swim trunks), and declares himself “the God of Life.”

It’s real bad—everything with the natives. So the reason Market Street has never been rediscovered is it isn’t some early moody, low-budget suspense thriller from Lewis; it’s just a cringe-worthy mess of racism.

Though there’s a surprisingly affecting scene later between Galli and Atwill when she thanks him for resurrecting her, something the film never quite explains.

Anyway.

After becoming the local deity, Atwill decides he will need to take a bride, and Dodd’s the lucky girl. It’s just as Dodd and Davies start getting cozy. So, lots of drama, fisticuffs, and bad wisecracks from Merkel.

Market Street becomes a screwball thriller, at least in how Lewis and cinematographer Jerome Ash shoot it. Lots of characters in static, very long medium shots, bantering and reacting. The ship sequence is well-directed and inventive with budget. The island stuff is mind-numbingly middling. It’s the identical setups and stagings, over and over again.

Atwill starts the movie as a caricature and then becomes its subject, not its lead, which works. He’s unpleasant to be around, in a good way. Also, in a bad way, when he’s running the island and bossing around chief Noble Johnson.

The cast is almost entirely likable. Eldredge is too much of an asshat, but otherwise, even Merkel eventually becomes sympathetic. Some of her problem is lousy timing from director Lewis, who doesn’t know what to do with humor. There’s one moment where Pendleton delivers a witty retort to Merkel, and it ought to be great, but Lewis is entirely confused.

Given it being a racist South Seas movie, however, it’s better there aren’t many pluses. There’s also something to be said about pre-World War II Hollywood racist characterizations being very similar to the mid-sixties mainstream sitcom ones.

In other words, Market Street’s a messed up three-hour tour. Even without the racism, it’d be a mess, though it’s one of those stories you can’t do without the racism.

Icky bad.

But also not a terrible movie. Just a surprisingly disappointing and mortifying one.