The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: 1978
-
The Star Wars Holiday Special elicits a lot of sympathy. Not for the goings on, but for the cast. The easiest cast members to pity are Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and Harrison Ford. Not only are they stuck in this contractually obligated ninety-some minute nightmare of terrible television, director Binder doesn’t even know how to…
-
Spider-Man Strikes Back is the international theatrical release of a two-part “Amazing Spider-Man” episode. It’s unclear if any significant changes were made (or insignificant ones). Though I really hope the frequent sequences without much sound are the result of editing and not composer Stu Phillips dropping the ball. Phillips does a Morricone-lite version of his…
-
After a somewhat linear, pratical first act, FM begins to meander through a series of vingettes. Occasionally these end in a fade to black, usually when there’s supposed to be some deep meaning to the scene, but occasionally just when it’s time to move an interminate period into the future. A day or two. Or…
-
Somewhere in the second half of The Bastard, the mini-series starts to wear you down and you just give in. The first half is set in 1772 Europe, first in France, then in England. Andrew Stevens is a French boy with a secret. His mom might just be Patricia Neal, inn keeper, but Stevens is…
-
Dawn of the Dead is relentless and exhausting. Director Romero burns out the viewer and not by the end of the film but probably three-quarters of the way through. He establishes the ground situation with a sense of impending doom, not just with the principal cast and how they’ll fare in the zombie apocalypse, but…
-
Carmine Infantino on Howard the Duck. It works out rather well. He’s got Frank Giacoia on inks. They have fun. It helps the story is fun too–these people who run into Howard go to the same psychiatrist, which wraps the flashbacks. Howard’s story has him breaking in to an army base. The army is experimenting…
-
Well… last things first. Winda gets assaulted and Gerber shucks it off page. After her startling–and entirely unnecessary–attack, Gerber just mentions her in Howard’s summing up of the issue’s misadventures. Most of the comic involves him running around with the Circus of Crime and how he gets away from them. Gerber, Colan and Janson do…
-
House Specialty chronicles the last few minutes of a day at a pastry shop in a small French town. The short’s credits are incomplete, but it appears the lead–the clerk–is played by Dominique Lavanant. She’s an attractive young woman surrounded either by old men or almost old men. The difference is the almost old men…
-
The point of Grease isn’t the story, which is good, because screenwriters Bronte Woodard and Allan Carr do a disastrous job plotting. They also do a terrible job of writing their characters–ostensible protagonists John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John have the worst characterizations in a film full of bad characterizations. It doesn’t help the supporting cast…
-
What’s there to say about KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park? It moves pretty fast. Wait, I didn’t specify nice things to say about the movie. Oops. There’s a lot of bad things to talk about. The easiest targets are KISS, who frequently seem lost–supposedly they got fed their lines immediately before shooting–but also…
-
There's definitely a good movie somewhere in Jaws 2; maybe just one without so much shark. Sadly, most of its narrative problems seem obvious to fix. For example, if the shark isn't confirmed and Roy Scheider might just be suffering post-traumatic stress… maybe they didn't want to go dark. Instead, the filmmakers go bright, shiny…
-
I’m sure writer Gerry Conway wasn’t trying for a “Scooby Doo” homage, but he doesn’t quite come up with anything better. This issue features Batman and the mystery gang. Or something along those lines. Mystery Adventurers Club maybe. It’s a bunch of Gotham citizens and celebrities who solve mysteries together, with Batman sitting–in cape–on a…
-
The television version of Halloween has an interesting story–the original film ran so short, when the network wanted to run it on TV, there wasn’t enough film after they cut out the violence. Carpenter was producing Halloween II at the time so he came back and filmed some more scenes to pad it out. Most…
-
Xenogenesis doesn’t just have lengthy opening titles for a twelve minute short, it then has exposition explaining it as directors Cameron and Frakes pan over some sci-fi illustrations. There are some amazing things about the short, but they’re all related to the stop motion animation. First there’s a giant robot maid, though its size is…
-
Foul Play ends with a celebration of itself. Over the end credits, clips of some of the film’s more memorable moments and characters play. It’s incredibly egotistical–I mean, Foul Play is director Higgins’s directorial debut, it’s Chevy Chase’s first leading man role… it’s an unproven commodity. Except, of course, Higgins has every right to be…
-
The best thing about Hardware Wars, in terms of actual quality and imaginative creative impulse, is recasting Chewbacca as a brown version of the Cookie Monster (except here it’s the Wookie Monster). Director Fosselius introduces it sort of as a gag, but then develops it. The puppet gives costar Bob Knickerbocker (as the Han Solo…
-
I’d forgotten John Guillermin directed Death on the Nile. The opening credits, a static shot of the river, suggest a much different experience then the film delivers–between Guillermin directing, Jack Cardiff shooting it and Anthony Shaffer handling the adaptation. I suppose I should have remembered Shaffer also adapted Christie’s Evil Under the Sun to similar…
-
While Within the Woods is well-known as a precursor to The Evil Dead—Raimi has a number of sequences he uses again, once he’s got a budget—it’s more significant for its differences. First, it’s a monster movie. While gory, it has more in common with an old Universal horror picture than it does Evil Dead. Second…
-
I had the misfortune of trying to watch Irwin Allen’s director’s cut of The Swarm. As I understand it, Allen’s director’s cut simply adds a half hour of terrible dialogue, completely overshadowing the killer bee aspect of the film. I’m not sure how much better a shorter version of the film would really… ahem… be,…
-
If watching Richard Donner’s director’s cuts have taught me one thing, it’s Donner probably shouldn’t have final cut. His director’s cut of Lethal Weapon, for example, is atrocious. He adds about nine minutes to Superman and, much like Coppola’s revision of Apocalypse Now, it’s a testament to the original film it can weather the additions.…
-
Dr. Strange aired in September, Superman came out in December… and they both have the same flying techniques, at least for couples, though Superman does have a longer flying sequences… Dr. Strange just kind of hints at it. A number of things put Dr. Strange above the standard seventies television movie. First, it rarely has…
-
Wolfman edited Spider-Woman too? I guess I hadn’t paid much attention. Now a lot more makes sense. Without any editorial oversight, Wolfman can keep going with whatever he thinks works (to be fair, Spider-Woman did run fifty issues–five years–so he must have been in sync with readers) and what does he go with? A dream…
-
Can this series make any less sense? I mean, I’m not even going after Wolfman’s characterization of Spider-Woman as a social outcast who has a great vocabulary, not even mentioning the whole, everyone hates Jessica Drew thing. I’m getting the feeling I’d hate Jessica Drew too, if Wolfman were scripting her. I don’t even know…
-
At least Spider-Woman’s stalker doesn’t show up in this issue. It’s kind of sad how phoned-in Infantino’s artwork is on this series. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do Marvel before and he’s just completely disinterested. Some of his subsequent DC work is a lot better, so it’s not like he couldn’t do the…
-
Vixen. A spiteful or quarrelsome woman. Vixen. Marv Wolfman refers to his protagonist as a vixen in this issue. Not so sure he knows what the word means and for someone so flatulent in his writing, he really ought to have a dictionary handy. I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with this comic book, whether…
-
Wow, does Wolfman like to write exposition. I mean, he just loves it. It really made this issue incredibly boring. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I had no idea–until a few pages into it–the issue is taking place in London. I’m also not sure if Jessica Drew is English or not. I mean, does…
-
According to John Travolta (who was originally cast and probably wasn’t just making it up–as it was pre-Battlefield Earth and he was still somewhat legitimate), when ABC wouldn’t let him out of his “Welcome Back, Kotter” contract, Malick was forced to cast Richard Gere and shredded the majority of Days of Heaven‘s screenplay, instead going…
-
Halloween is a technical masterpiece. It’s absolutely spectacular to watch. Carpenter’s composition is fantastic, but Dean Cundey’s cinematography and the editing–from Tommy Lee Wallace and Charles Bornstein–creates this uneasy, surreal experience. The way Carpenter uses the wind in the film is probably my favorite, since he establishes it early on and keeps it going until…
-
More than anything else, I think Pino Donaggio’s score sets Piranha apart. Initially, anyway. The film’s a very self-aware Roger Corman Jaws “homage,” but Donaggio’s score very quickly establishes it on firm ground. The score’s delicate, without any spoof-related cynicism (there’s no attempt to mimic the famous Jaws theme, Donaggio has some piranha attack music,…
-
The Big Fix is a fundamentally different detective movie. While there are some elements updating it to time period, a lot of it is still a detective investigating in LA, meeting all sorts of people all around town and so on. It’s still Raymond Chandler to some degree–with Dreyfuss playing his (marginally) goofy, but caring…
The Stop Button 