Halloweek: Halloween 5 (1989)

Like Halloween II, Halloween 5 (its subtitle, The Revenge of Michael Myers, was used in promotional materials but isn't in the actual movie) was made soon after its predecessor and flows directly from the preceding story, even opening with recycled scenes from the previous movie. It doesn't take place later the same night (instead, a year has passed), but it does build on the characters and situations that were established when Halloween 4 reignited the franchise. Unlike Halloween 4, though, Halloween 5 isn't out to replicate the tone and style of the original film. It's much more lurid and over-the-top, and although it's pretty ridiculous, its exaggerated style makes it a bit more entertaining than the grimly functional Halloween 4.

Once again, it's young actress Danielle Harris who carries the movie and elevates it above the trash heap, with her expressive eyes and skill at portraying terror. She even goes half the movie without speaking, as her character, Michael's niece Jamie, has been rendered mute after the traumas of the previous movie. It's a little disappointing that the filmmakers backpedal on the twist ending of Halloween 4, in which Jamie donned the same Halloween costume as a young Michael and stabbed her foster mother to death, and seemed poised to become the new version of Michael. Here we learn that the foster mother is still alive and Jamie has not become evil, but is troubled enough to have stopped speaking and be placed in a children's clinic.

Jamie is pretty much the only character who gets any development, though; her foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell) has returned from the previous movie as well, but she gets killed off quickly, and the other teen characters are interchangeable fodder for Michael's knife. Donald Pleasence is back again as Dr. Loomis, and I did appreciate how Loomis seems to get crazier and crazier in each movie. Here he constantly berates young Jamie for not doing enough to help him catch Michael, since she apparently now has some sort of psychic connection to her uncle (whatever). At the movie's climax, he actually brandishes Jamie like a human shield to get Michael to follow him. The performance has gone from an intense depiction of a troubled man to full-on camp, but in the context of horror crap like this, it's pretty entertaining.

The camp factor redeems other parts of the movie, too, although Swiss director Dominique Othenin-Girard sometimes goes overboard, as with the pair of bumbling cops who have their own wacky sound effects that play whenever they do something dumb. But he shoots with lots of low angles and crazy camera movements, giving the visuals a sort of funhouse feel (he does use the trademark point-of-view shots for Michael as well, but relatively sparingly). Jamie's psychic freakouts when Michael prepares to kill someone are especially gonzo.

The movie is entertainingly stupid until the finale, which is just stupid, and hinges on a mysterious stranger whom we never see above the waist, who comes to town and apparently breaks Michael out of jail at the end. Combined with a series of unexplained symbols that appear on Michael's and the stranger's wrists, as well as in the old Myers house, it's a clumsy attempt at drumming up intrigue that only comes off as confusing and dissatisfying (although apparently it's addressed in the next movie). Halloween 5 is a mess, but I found that messiness preferable to another futile effort to copy the restrained effectiveness of John Carpenter's inimitable original.

Halloweek: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

The failure of Halloween III: Season of the Witch may have killed the idea of the Halloween franchise as a sort of anthology series, but it eventually resurrected the idea of continuing the story of Michael Myers, albeit without original creators John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who bowed out and sold off their interest in the series after their idea for Halloween 4 was rejected. Instead the series continued under the guidance of producer Moustapha Akkad, who decided to go back to basics for the fourth installment: Michael Myers, killing a bunch of people on Halloween in Haddonfield.

Halloween 4 quickly goes about undoing the resolution of Halloween II: Despite being shot probably dozens of times and thoroughly immolated, Michael is alive but comatose, and has been held in a state hospital for the past decade. Dr. Loomis, too, is alive, the only signs of his own immolation being a limp and a scar on the side of his face that seems to change shape in every scene. Just as in the first Halloween, Michael escapes while being transferred between facilities, and he heads to Haddonfield to stalk and kill a relative of his. In this case, it's Jamie (Danielle Harris), daughter of original heroine Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is hastily written out as having died in a car accident along with Jamie's father. That means that teenage Laurie got married and had a daughter all within three years of the events of the first two films, since Jamie is seven years old in this movie.

So the continuity is shaky, but it's all just an excuse to get to the important stuff, which is Michael killing people and Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence, the only actor returning from the first two films) ranting and raving while chasing after him. In that sense, Halloween 4 delivers, but only in the most rudimentary fashion. Michael has become so invincible and unstoppable at this point (he kills a man in one scene by literally pressing his thumb into the guy's skull) that there's virtually no suspense to the plot, and Loomis is a cartoonish figure played campily by Pleasence. The heart of the movie is Harris as Jamie, whose connection to Michael is contrived but imbued with real sadness. The one clever touch is having Jamie dress up for Halloween in the same clown outfit that young Michael wore when he killed his sister, which gets an extra level of creepiness when the twist ending has Jamie committing the same kind of murder her uncle did at her age, carrying on his legacy of evil. It's sort of unmotivated by anything we've seen the character do up to that point, but it's still a nice gut punch in a movie that is otherwise a parade of nothing but the expected.

Halloweek: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

After the success of the first two Halloween films, John Carpenter and Debra Hill were only willing to work on a third film if it had nothing to do with Michael Myers, whose story they felt had come to an end. Instead, they decided to reinvent the franchise as a sort of anthology, with the intention being to release a different unrelated horror film each Halloween. Obviously that never happened, and so Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a curious footnote in the Halloween series, an anomaly that has nothing to do with the installments that came before or after. Something like that seems ripe for rediscovery and reevaluation, but it's clear on watching Season of the Witch that public interest in Michael Myers wasn't the only reason the anthology concept didn't take off; the main problem is that Season of the Witch is often hilariously bad.

Instead of a slasher movie, Season of the Witch is more of a supernatural thriller, with a doctor and a young woman investigating a sinister toy factory after the woman's father's mysterious death. The factory is producing three Halloween masks (the "Halloween three," a sort of lame tie-in to the title) that seem to have some dangerous intent behind them. The movie is known for being about killer Halloween masks, but it isn't until near the very end that the masks' actual purpose becomes clear, and instead of a movie about evil masks like I was expecting, it's mostly a movie about two people lurking around a small town trying to figure out what's going on. The suspense is minimal, and while the focus on atmosphere over gore is admirable, the story is so silly and full of plot holes that the gore is just about the only thing it has going for it.

There is some camp value, though, especially in Tom Atkins' performance as the doctor who's determined to get to the bottom of the mask situation. Atkins manages to make his Dr. Challis into both a douche and a hero. With his porn-star mustache and soap-star swagger, Challis seduces the vulnerable daughter of the man whose death sets off the entire investigation. She's 25 years younger than him, recently grieving and scared for her life, but the movie takes time out for an icky sex scene between the two of them in the midst of all the investigating. Meanwhile, Challis' ex-wife keeps nagging him because he's blowing off visits with his kids to drive to some scary small town and stop an evil toy manufacturer. It seemed clear to me that he really just wanted to bed the hot daughter.

It's probably best that there are sex scenes to distract from how much the plot doesn't make sense, because boy is it stupid. There's the fact that the villain has stolen one of the giant rocks from Stonehenge to carry out his evil plot (how'd he smuggle that into the country?). There's the evil plot itself, in which the magical masks will melt children's faces off and cause bugs and snakes to crawl out of them, accomplishing what exactly? Then there's the climax, in which the heroes must race to stop a commercial that triggers the masks' evil mechanism from airing at exactly 9 p.m.; never mind that they're in California, and that the movie has just shown a montage of kids across the country wearing the masks, and that kids in the Eastern time zone would have already had their faces melted off three hours before. You get the picture.

Writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace tries to throw in some sophisticated touches: There's a nice homage to Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the name of the town (Santa Mira) that houses the evil factory, the pod-like androids who serve the villain, and the maniacal ending with Challis ranting directly into the camera like Kevin McCarthy warning that the body snatchers are coming for you next. And the original Halloween gets nods by being shown on TV in the background of a couple of scenes. Still, the stupidity far outweighs the sense of history, and Season of the Witch mainly lives up to its anthology ambitions by being like a dud episode of the new Twilight Zone that you'd skip past during an all-day marathon.

Halloweek: Halloween II (1981)

Halloween II is a movie that's benefited from diminished expectations over the years. When it was released, most critics saw it as a disappointing follow-up to John Carpenter's original, but years of much, much worse sequels have made the second installment look pretty good by comparison. Being aware of the crap that is to come, I suppose I was a little more forgiving of Halloween II than its contemporary critics were, but I still found it largely forgettable.

It helps that John Carpenter and partner Debra Hill are still involved, as both screenwriters and producers. The tone here follows pretty smoothly from the first film, and the plot continues directly on from the original, even recycling the last few minutes of the first movie for its opening, and then taking place over the course of the same night. Michael Myers is still on the loose after being shot six times, and Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) is still after him, while Michael is still after teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). The problems with Halloween II were probably unavoidable: In order to continue the story, it has to build up the Michael Myers mythology (this is where we first learn that Laurie was Michael's sister), and in order to jolt audiences it needs to offer up more victims and more gore than the first movie did.

So Michael kills more than twice as many people this time around, mostly in the severely understaffed hospital where Laurie is taken following her initial ordeal. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis roams around town acting increasingly hysterical about the need to apprehend Michael, and Pleasence tips his performance from creepy to campy. Director Rick Rosenthal apes some of Carpenter's signature moves, including effectively using point-of-view shots to depict Michael's perspective as he stalks his prey. But despite his best efforts, and a decent job of creating the same atmosphere of everyday foreboding, Rosenthal just can't capture what made the original so effective. There's little room for character development, since almost all of the characters are slaughtered shortly after being introduced. Even Laurie spends the first two-thirds of the movie mostly unconscious, and Curtis (wearing an obvious wig to approximate her hairstyle from the first movie) doesn't have nearly as much to do as she did the last time.

Still, there's some creepiness to Michael's relentlessness, and the eerily empty hospital is a good setting. But this feels more like an extended coda to the original story than a movie that stands on its own; I actually prefer Rob Zombie's 2009 version of this movie, which engages more with the idea of what it would really be like to be a slasher-movie "final girl." Here we just get the final moments of the story stretched out to feature length, and the padding really shows.

Halloweek: Halloween (1978)

This week leading up to Halloween, I'm looking back at the original Halloween series of films, starting with John Carpenter's 1978 original. I've seen Carpenter's Halloween more than almost any other horror movie, and it impresses me every time I watch it. It's a model of economy and suspense, with every moment contributing to the overall sense of dread and discomfort. At the same time, Carpenter doesn't ever overplay his hand, and he spends plenty of time on character development, giving the main three teen girls real personalities before they come up against the horrors that await them. He and co-writer Debra Hill provide a low-key, realistic dynamic for the characters played by Jamie Lee Curtis, P.J. Soles and Nancy Loomis, and the three actresses have a genuine chemistry that allows the audience to easily identify with them. Curtis' Laurie doesn't even face the homicidal Michael Myers until 15 minutes before the movie ends, but by that point we're thoroughly invested in what happens to her.

Although Halloween has plenty of iconic elements, including Carpenter's moody, minimalist score and the hulking, masked look of Michael Myers himself, it doesn't really have any lines or moments that have been repeated to death in various pop-culture venues, and thus it can feel a little fresher than, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street when watched from the jaded perspective of 2010. Michael himself is a deliberately blank, unknowable villain (in contrast to the overexplained victim of Rob Zombie's 2007 remake, or the convoluted mythology that eventually emerges in the sequels to Carpenter's original). Even the excellent opening sequence, shot from the point of view of the 6-year-old Michael, merely illustrates his actions without providing any explanation. As Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis says, he's "purely and simply evil." And that's a scientific opinion.

New York Comic-Con round-up, part two

Here's the second part of my look at the indie and self-published comics I picked up at the New York Comic-Con a couple of weeks ago. The level of quality was surprisingly consistent and high, especially among the books I picked out and wasn't just handed for free. Check out the first part here.

Dinoman (Ben & Jeff Cohen/Jeff Cohen, BrainFood Comics) Now this is just awful. This eight-page preview book features terrible writing and amateurish art in its story of the titular superhero, whose nonsensical origin story takes up the first two pages. I guess this is supposed to be funny, with Donald Trump as the villain and his hairpiece as a sentient alien parasite, but it's just jumbled and unnecessarily vulgar. The character design is really ugly, and artist Jeff Cohen's spatial sense is completely off, making the art look flat and static. Definitely one to avoid.

King! (Thomas Hall/Daniel Bradford, Blacklist Studios) This comic about an Elvis-impersonating ex-pro wrestler who fights demons is basically a Hellboy rip-off, right down to its color palette full of earth tones and its jagged, angular art style. But it's an amusing little Hellboy rip-off, with a few good quips from the main character, a cool-looking demon battle and creative character designs. Daniel Bradford's art may owe a lot to Mike Mignola, but it's still quite good, and his storytelling is solid. The plot is silly and simple but entertaining. I could definitely see these guys doing a book for Image or Dark Horse.

Shocking Gun Tales (Various, Cellar Door Publishing) Like most anthologies, this is a mixed bag, although overall the bad outweighs the good. Based on the title, I was expecting a series of dark noir tales, but only two of the five pieces fit in that category. One, by George T. Singley and Ethen Beavers, has stylish art but a very confusing story, while the other, by Vinton Heuck, is overwritten in a pulpy way but captures the noir visual style in a way reminiscent of Sean Phillips' work on Criminal. The rest of the stories are a mix of one-joke gags and odd misfires, including a lame heavy-handed anti-gun control sci-fi piece by Mark Winters.

Toxicity (Victor Ochoa, Draw More Inc.) I read through this comic twice, and I am still completely baffled. It seems to take place in some dystopian future, or perhaps an alternate present. Something about the world is different, although it's not clear what. The main character gets carjacked, some woman is murdered and her organs are stolen (maybe?), and then the main character is behind it all somehow. I don't know. The whole thing is told with barely any dialogue, and while Ochoa's stark black-and-white art with no gray tones is appealing, his storytelling clearly leaves something to be desired. The end promises another issue to come, and perhaps things will become clearer at that point, but I won't be bothering to find out.

Wendover (Scott Malchus & Jeff Marsick/Jonathan Burkhardt, Double Cross) I admit I picked this up almost solely because it's set in Wendover, Utah, a little town on the Utah/Nevada border that I drove through once on a cross-country trip. Wendover is immediately adjacent to West Wendover, which is in Nevada and has a bunch of casinos. The two towns, and the two states, are divided by a giant white line painted in the middle of the main road, with "Utah" written on one side and "Nevada" on the other. They're also in different time zones, but are otherwise entirely contiguous. My friend and I amused ourselves thinking of the theoretical divide between the Wendovers, one with legalized gambling and the Pacific time zone, the other with strict liquor laws, no gambling and the Mountain time zone. Anyway, this comic has nothing to do with any of that, but it's still pretty good. It's a mix of vampire horror and pulp detective story, with a Los Angeles gumshoe headed to the titular town to investigate the disappearance of his nephew. Seems that Wendover is suffering from a rash of vampire-related disappearances, and the local police are helpless to do anything about it. This first issue is mostly set-up (the detective hasn't even gotten to town yet), but it's an intriguing mix of styles, and Burkhardt's scratchy art creates a nice foreboding atmosphere. The author's note at the back explains that this first issue took two and a half years to create; I hope it doesn't take another two and a half years to produce a second one.

New York Comic-Con round-up, part one

Last weekend I went to the New York Comic-Con, which has been my go-to replacement for the insanity of San Diego for the past couple of years (although I might try to go to San Diego next year). This time around, instead of focusing on buying a bunch of trade paperbacks and graphic novels that I could easily get from Amazon for around the same price from the comfort of my own home, I made sure to spend a few hours wandering the small press and artist's alley areas, picking up comics that caught my interest thanks to eye-catching art or intriguing premises. Obviously a lot of these turn out to be crappy, but I think it's better to be a little adventurous at a convention and spend a few dollars on something completely new rather than (or at least in addition to) just buying back issues of the same old mainstream superhero stuff. So here's the first part of my look at the stuff I bought, plus some random free preview issues that were literally thrust into my hands. Part two coming when I have some more time.

American Corpse (Mike Desjarlais/David House, Big Bone Studios) This free preview book contains just the first eight pages of the forthcoming American Corpse series, about an American soldier in Vietnam who dies and is resurrected 40 years later as a member of the undead. Or at least that's what the description on the back says; the actual timeline of the story was extremely confusing. I found House's art too cartoony for the grim subject matter, although it would probably work on a more kid-friendly book, and while it's too early to tell in eight pages how the concept will play out, the dialogue was pretty stilted and awkward (and, as is often the case in indie comics, in need of a copy editor). Based on this sample, I wouldn't bother picking up a whole issue.

Beloved (Ben Philippe/David Habben, Draw More Inc.) This is probably the best book I've read so far, and certainly the most visually appealing. Habben's art is stunning, with simple, bold lines, a muted color palette that uses splashes of red to accent danger and the supernatural, and creative panel structure that mirrors the chaos of Philippe's story. That story, a sort of fable about a woman who inspires suicidal/homicidal devotion in nearly everyone she meets, is sometimes a little rushed and hard to follow, but the art easily makes up for the shortcomings. The combination of the surreal images and the pulpy dialogue gives the whole thing a very creepy edge. I'd be curious to see what else Philippe can do, but I'm much more eager to check out more of Habben's sequential work.

Funrama Presents: The Mutant Punks (Ryan Kelly, self-published) Kelly is a penciller and inker known mainly for his work on Vertigo books like Lucifer, American Virgin, DMZ and most recently The Unwritten, among others. The Mutant Punks is a sort of playful, goofy lark about a team of super-powered nihilists, who certainly aren't heroes but aren't exactly villains, either, since their goal seems to be to wreak havoc just to keep from being bored. Kelly designs a bunch of appealingly silly characters based on typical superhero types, and his writing is clever and snappy. There isn't much here beyond random mayhem, so I don't know if the Mutant Punks could really sustain a whole series. But for a one-off (although it ends saying "To be continued"), it's pretty fun reading.

The Haunting House (Sam Girdich/Mark Gonyea, Strongarm Labs) Strongarm had a bunch of different books at their booth, and I asked Girdich to recommend one for me. Based on what I said I was interested in, he suggested this brief one-shot about a pair of friends investigating a haunted house. It proceeds along the lines of pretty much every haunted-house story ever, and the dialogue is a little heavy with exposition and philosophical musings. Gonyea's art, done entirely in scratchboard, has a nice creepy feel, though, and reminded me a little of the simple illustrations you might find in a children's book of ghost stories. This is a bit too intense for children, making it sort of balanced in an awkward place, but it's an interesting little experiment.

Penny for Your Soul (Tom Hutchison/J.B. Neto, Big Dog Ink) Three issues of this series have been released, although I only bought the first one. It's a sort of supernatural/pseudo-religious thriller set in Las Vegas, which was what drew me to it. The idea is that the devil's daughter (who is of course super-sexy and well-endowed) has set up her own hotel-casino in Vegas, where she is literally buying people's souls. Mary Magdalene (also super-sexy and well-endowed) is her second-in-command, and Jesus is apparently doing a religious radio show. It's a little overly self-conscious about its religious taboo-busting, but generally approached with good humor. I also appreciated that Neto got a bunch of architectural references to Vegas right, although of course the story's understanding of Vegas is based on obvious cliches. Neto's art is full-on cheesecake, and as such his women all look pretty much the same (like lingerie models). The whole thing is trying a little too hard, but it shows glimmers of promise.

The Saga of Pandora Zwieback (Steven A. Roman/Eliseu Gouveia, Starwarp Concepts) This is another free preview issue, and when I opened it I discovered it wasn't even an actual comic book. Well, there are seven pages of sequential art, drawn by Gouveia, but they're literally just the title character talking to the audience about how awesome the upcoming series of prose novels starring her (written by Roman) will be. Then there's a preview of the opening pages of the novel, a painfully "hip" story about a disaffected teenager who discovers she can glimpse the world of the supernatural that others can't see. I actually liked Gouveia's clean, eye-catching art and the goth-punk look of Pandora, and a comic about this character could be fun. But the prose writing is ridiculously strained, with lame pop-culture references and a clueless approach to teen angst. I could barely make it through the seven sample pages.

The Vanilla Ice Project

Yeah, okay, I have a soft spot for Vanilla Ice. I was roped in by his white kid-friendly rapping when I was in middle school, and I still have To the Extreme and his 1998 rap-metal makeover album Hard to Swallow on CD. I even saw Ice live in concert a few years ago and had a pretty good time. It was part of a festival and thus full of people who hadn't specifically bought tickets to see Vanilla Ice, and I was worried everyone was just there to make fun of him. But the crowd was surprisingly enthusiastic, and Ice was so friendly and genuine that I think he won over any of the skeptics. By the end of the show, he had half the audience on stage with him, sharing shots of Jagermeister and the microphone.

So I like the guy, even if his music is lame and he's kind of dopey. His inherent likability is about the only reason to watch The Vanilla Ice Project, an extremely banal reality series on the DIY Network featuring Ice's home-flipping business. The show follows Ice and his associates as they work to fix up a damaged house and sell it for a profit, which I guess is what he does with most of his time since his music career has pretty much dried up. Ice is clearly knowledgeable about fixing up houses, but that doesn't mean it's interesting to watch him lecture on different kinds of palm trees or the best way to pressure-clean a roof. This is like standing outside talking to your landscaper, except your landscaper is a washed-up one-hit wonder who constantly finds new ways to extend his fame. My goodwill only stretches so far.

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on the DIY Network.

Triskaidekaphilia: Dementia 13

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Francis Ford Coppola's 1963 first mainstream feature (after a pair of what nowadays would be known as softcore films), produced by Roger Corman, probably wouldn't get much attention today were it not for Coppola's name attached to it. It's a rather incoherent but sometimes effectively atmospheric horror movie, with a plot that makes little sense and characters whose personalities sometimes seem to change from scene to scene. Corman wanted Coppola to give him something in the vein of Psycho, and Coppola does just that, right up to offing what appears to be the main character about halfway through the film. The problem is that he takes Psycho's focus on criminal psychology but not its expert crafting of suspense, so the dialogue is a combination of meaningless psychobabble and muddled exposition.

Still, Coppola manages to create a nice foreboding atmosphere in the cavernous old Irish castle where the movie takes place, and his characters are all so screwed up that they can't help but be a little interesting. It's difficult to see a future master filmmaker in here, although the visuals are confident and the opening sequence in particular (in which a woman disposes of her husband's body over the side of a boat) is eerily effective, with an inventive use of music to heighten the creepy mood. That woman is trying to wrangle an inheritance out of her husband's eccentric family, who congregate in the spooky castle, but despite the ax murderer lurking about, her efforts don't have much of a sense of urgency.

Corman was displeased with Coppola's original cut and had another director go in and add a subplot about a bumbling poacher who gets killed, and maybe the director's true vision is more intense and more coherent. For what it actually ended up as, though, Dementia 13 is valuable primarily as a footnote in a great director's biography.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: The Star (1952)

My monthlong series of posts about Bette Davis movies may have ended, but I'm still recording every Davis film that I haven't seen that airs on TCM and writing about it. And I'm still finding some duds, although I was kind of eager to see The Star since it was Davis' only Oscar-nominated performance that I hadn't already seen. The Star came right on the heels of Davis' magnificent, Oscar-nominated comeback in All About Eve, and maybe the Academy was just excited to see her playing another aging actress, this time a movie star rather than a stage legend. But The Star pales in comparison to All About Eve, not to mention plenty of other Davis movies. It's an awkward combination of romance, melodrama and showbiz satire, and it doesn't really succeed at any of them.

Davis' Margaret Elliott is broke and unable to find work, and the first part of the movie depicts her overwrought downward spiral, culminating in a DUI arrest. It's more than a bit overdone, and not amusing enough to be campy, but it's more entertaining than the next part, which finds Margaret seeking redemption with a simple shipbuilder played by Sterling Hayden. Hayden and Davis have no chemistry, and Hayden, who was known for playing thugs, looks uncomfortable and awkward the entire time. The movie can't seem to decide whether Margaret deserves redemption and a return to Hollywood or should be punished for her vanity and made to become a housewife to this boring square-jawed guy.

In the end, Margaret acts in rather illogical ways to twice sabotage her potential movie comeback (including in a scene in which a screenwriter essentially pitches her the movie she's currently appearing in), but instead of rock-bottom despair, the movie closes with an abrupt happy ending that finds Margaret reuniting with the boring shipbuilder, and bringing her annoying preteen daughter (played by Natalie Wood) along with her. In between, Davis gets a few chances to be gloriously bitchy, but for a character who's supposed to have such a monstrous ego, Margaret is more whiny and insecure than haughty. It's entertaining to see Davis play with her image, but The Star really fails to live up to the potential of its premise.

My Generation

I really wanted to like My Generation, and some early reviews suggested that it could be this season's version of My So-Called Life or Friday Night Lights or Felicity, a heartfelt, perhaps overly earnest look at people's lives and relationships. And there are moments in the pilot when it almost succeeds at doing that, but it's held back by a bizarrely limiting and inappropriate format, characters who are a special kind of one-dimensional and writing so reliant on coincidences and contrivances that it's almost comedic. This is the kind of thing that seems like a good idea in theory and then totally falls apart in execution. I really can't see how it can sustain itself as an ongoing TV series.

The idea is that a documentary crew followed around nine high-school seniors in 2000, and is now returning to document their lives 10 years later. So it's the suddenly popular mockumentary format, used for a relationship drama, and that presents problems right away. A show like this is predicated on the characters having many raw emotional moments together, and it stretches credibility even in the pilot that the camera crew (which is very much a part of the show, unlike on The Office or Parks and Recreation) would be there to capture it all. Plus, since the crew is only following these particular people, they have to all still hang out with each other (and only each other), and all still live in the same city. The pilot makes some concessions to a handful of characters having moved out of town, but by the end all but one (who is deployed in the military) ends up back in the same location.

Then there's the time-capsule element, which is supposed to show the scope of historical change in the last decade, but mostly just amounts to awkwardly throwing various characters into big historical events. One guy's dad worked for Enron! This guy joined the military after 9/11! Someone else was devastated by the financial crisis! It's silly and contrived, although not as much as the way that nearly every character has some sort of perfectly ironic about-face from their stereotypical high-school role. The overachieving go-getter? He's now a surf bum living on the beach. The punk rocker? She's now pregnant and married to a soldier. The shy wallflower? She got knocked up in high school and has a nine-year-old son. And so on.

Just one or two of these contrivances could be forgiven as necessary for the show's set-up or as byproducts of getting things in place for a pilot. But taken together they make it impossible to take the show seriously, and it doesn't help that the actual dialogue and storylines are mediocre. I'm all for a decent 20-something soap that wears its heart on its sleeve, but My Generation is way too much of a pretentious mess to fit that bill.

Premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on ABC.

Outlaw

After watching something like 23 fall TV pilots in the span of a week and a half, I have come to the conclusion that I would like never to see another lawyer or cop on TV again. Exhibit A as to why is Outlaw, the moronic new NBC legal drama in which a Supreme Court justice (played by Jimmy Smits) with a penchant for casino gambling (!) resigns from his position (!!) and forms some sort of super-team of lawyers, then takes on as a client the defendant in the last Supreme Court case he ruled on before resigning (!!!). Also, he's a charismatic hottie whose star associate is in love with him, and who hires a sexy, unscrupulous private investigator to do his snooping even while he's on the Supreme Court.

Obviously we don't expect realism even from the most high-minded courtroom dramas, but the premise of Outlaw, not to mention every single one of its characters, is so laughable that it's impossible even to focus on the boring, boilerplate case that makes up the first episode's ostensible plot (guy wrongly accused of murder, blah blah blah). There's a pathetic attempt at political intrigue because Smits' character is the only person ever to have resigned from the Court and he no longer plays by the rules, is a maverick (or outlaw, perhaps), etc., and the evil elected officials can't tolerate that. But the shady guys following him around are just as contrived as everything else on the show, and even the welcome presence of Carly Pope as the dirty, sexy P.I. who clearly belongs on a totally different show can't save this trainwreck. Lawyers, begone!

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on NBC.

Triskaidekaphilia: Friday the Thirteenth

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

No, this isn't a repeat of the entry I wrote a few months ago about the horror classic Friday the 13th; rather, this is about an obscure British comedy-drama from 1933 that happens to share the same title, albeit with the date spelled out. Thanks to fellow About guide Mark H. Harris, whose list of movies that share titles with famous horror movies alerted me to the existence of this little oddity, which appears to be unavailable on DVD but can be watched in its entirety at the Internet Archive. Honestly, it could have used a deranged killer in a hockey mask rampaging his way through the characters in order to make it a little more interesting.

Instead we get the dry, mostly dull stories of 13 strangers whose lives are intertwined when they all end up in a bus crash together. It's sort of a precursor of the tedious everything-is-connected ensemble dramas that have become so popular (and then cliched) in the last decade or so. The difference is that these people's lives don't intersect except when they all get on the bus, and even then they don't really interact with each other. The movie starts with the crash and then flashes back to the beginning of the day (which is, of course, Friday the 13th) to show how each character ended up on the bus. There's some amusement value in some of the stories, but most are based on silly little misunderstandings or contrivances, and are completely insubstantial.

I did appreciate the performance by Jessie Matthews as a chorus girl torn between her dull schoolteacher fiance and a sleazy producer who offers her the chance to dance in Paris. She brings a level of liveliness and naughtiness to the role that isn't matched by any of the other actors, who all either overdo the comedy or play things too sleepily. Matthews has wonderfully expressive eyes and a sly twinkle that indicates something more going on behind them, and her character gets to be assertive without looking like a harlot. She's worth checking out, but the rest of the movie is notable only for the curiosity of its title.

Hellcats

As I have mentioned probably more times than is healthy, I love the movie Bring It On, and one of the things I love about it is the way that it takes an institution and group of people that are traditionally derided and takes them seriously, shows their value and gives a rich portrait of them as human beings (I'm talking, in this case, about cheerleaders). It's part of why I love Friday Night Lights and Huge and why I wish I could love Glee. And it's definitely a big part of why I kind of loved the pilot for the new CW cheerleading drama Hellcats.

Now, don't get me wrong: Hellcats is no Friday Night Lights or Huge. It's no Bring It On, either, even though it often plays like Bring It On: The College Years, and heavily references the movie in one scene. It doesn't, at least at this point, have the same level of character complexity or subtlety, and its main stars (Disney-bred actresses Aly Michalka and Ashley Tisdale) are not particularly known for their acting range. But what it does do is treat cheerleading like a real, serious thing, an activity every bit as legitimate as any other collegiate pursuit that could theoretically be the subject of a TV drama. And like Bring It On, it has a sense of humor that doesn't come at the expense of its self-respect, even when it's gently mocking its own characters or storytelling conventions.

Michalka and Tisdale aren't amazing actresses, but they're extremely likable, as is the rest of the cast (Gail O'Grady, as Michalka's character's mom, is always a welcome TV presence). The cliched set-up of the bad girl forced to join the cheerleading squad is already shaken up in the first episode by her befriending the perky head cheerleader (again, shades of Bring It On), and there are plenty of ways for the show to go in more unexpected directions as it moves forward. I've only seen the original pilot presentation, which isn't quite a full episode, and certainly subsequent episodes could turn out to be nothing but collections of cheesy cliches. For now, though, in a season full of dismal, boring new shows (and I've watched them all), this is one of my favorite new shows of the fall, and one of the top two most entertaining.

Premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on The CW.

The end of Ex Machina

I've been meaning for several days now to write about the 50th and final issue of Ex Machina, which came out last week, and every time I sit down to do it I find myself drawing a blank. I have a feeling that Ex Machina is a series that will be more impressive when read all in one sitting, although I have no idea if or when I'll get around to doing that. I generally love the work of Brian K. Vaughan, and I was riveted all the way through the end of Y: The Last Man and his stint on Runaways. And a lot of times I was riveted with Ex Machina, too, but this last issue feels like sort of a letdown, and it's left me less enthused about commenting on it. The previous issue, 49, in which main character Mitchell Hundred essentially defeats the bad guys and saves the day, was a more satisfying ending, even if the whole idea of the 50th issue is pointing out how false endings like that are.

The problem is that Vaughan rushes through what could have been years of additional plot points without giving them their proper consideration, and then just kind of ends things without exploring the ideas he's just introduced. I'm all for ambiguous endings and leaving some things unexplained, but it seems like Vaughan is deliberately introducing tons of new developments here with the express purpose of then not exploring them. Like the last issue of Y, this issue jumps ahead in time to show what happened to the main character years after the primary events of the series, but unlike the lovely epilogue of Y's final issue, the end of Ex Machina doesn't provide extra emotional resonance or a sense of possibilities for the unseen future.

That's not to say it's terrible, of course. Vaughan is still great at writing dialogue, and he created distinctive enough characters over the previous 49 issues that they easily still hold your interest even as they head off in weird, unexpected directions. And the art by Tony Harris is typically excellent, especially on a two-page spread showing all the alternate versions of Mitchell Hundred over various timelines. One thing I liked about the series overall was that its mythology turned out to be relatively simple and was revealed in a fairly straightforward way, and Vaughan was as interested in political nuances as he was in grand sci-fi concepts. Here, the mythology becomes a sort of grandiose monster, and the politics do too, in a way, and neither one really fits. As a whole, Ex Machina was a solid, enjoyable series that started more slowly than some of Vaughan's other work but maintained a consistent tone and pace. That the ending turned out to be disappointing doesn't make me any less eager to read what Vaughan writes next (whenever that is).

Triskaidekaphilia: 13: Game of Death

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

The 2006 Thai film 13: Game of Death mixes together familiar elements from the Saw franchise and extreme reality-TV parodies like The Running Man and Series 7: The Contenders, and it does so in an occasionally intense and exciting way. There are too many abrupt tonal shifts for the movie to be as powerful as it could have been, though, and the plot pretty much falls apart at the end, which sappily ties all the seemingly random horrific trials back to the main character's childhood in a way that feels manipulative and unearned. Still, there are plenty of moments along the way that allow the movie to live up to its U.S. release under the "Dimension Extreme" banner.

Game of Death isn't quite a horror movie, although it puts protagonist Chit (Krissada Terrence) through some pretty gruesome stuff, including a scene in which he eats an actual plate of shit (John Waters would be so proud). A demoralized salesman who's just lost his job, Chit gets a mysterious phone call telling him he's been selected for a game show that starts right that moment. The seemingly omniscient voice on the phone knows everything about him and sees everything he does, and tells him that if he completes 13 challenges, he'll win 100 million baht, or about $3 million (thanks, Google). It starts with merely killing a fly, but soon escalates to shit-eating and other extremely unpleasant tasks, and naturally murder shows up eventually.

Director Chukiat Sakveerakul lurches from tense thriller to wacky comedy in the film's first half, with a jarringly jaunty score that sounds very out of place. The result is that moments that should be suspenseful are instead goofy, and that undercuts the later seriousness of the film. There are also some dodgy special effects (most notably a really fake-looking decomposed body) that jolt you out of the story, along with the aforementioned sappiness. But the visceral revulsion of watching Chit try to down that plate of shit, or the pain of seeing him agonize over how far he will go to get the money he needs for a better life -- those are conveyed effectively, and Sakveerakul definitely knows how to push the audience's buttons. He just has a tough time figuring out which are the right ones to push at the right times.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: June Bride (1948)

I spent the entire month of April writing about Bette Davis movies, but just because I've watched and reviewed 30 Bette Davis movies so far this year doesn't mean that I'm going to stop recording every Bette Davis movie on TCM that I haven't already seen. So I figured I might as well continue to write about them here.

June Bride is not exactly a great one to start on, though; it's a completely forgettable, often strained and really dated romantic comedy with Davis as the editor of a women's magazine and Robert Montgomery as her ex-boyfriend, who goes from being a glamorous war correspondent to getting stuck writing a fluff piece about a Midwestern family wedding and working for the woman he dumped. Davis and Montgomery have little chemistry (they didn't get along at all), and their banter is weak, although Davis does a good job as the assertive career woman who's moved on from being tossed aside, and she gets in a few zingers. There's a clever scene early on in which Linda (Davis) and Carey (Montgomery) go to her apartment after a night of drinking, and they duel over whether he's going to be able to seduce her by alternately turning on and turning off all the lights in the place (she turns them on, he turns them off). It's relatively subtle and well orchestrated.

Unfortunately, once they leave New York for Indiana to work on the magazine piece about the wedding, the banter takes a back seat to lame gags about city vs. country living and a whole bunch of subplots about the Indiana family members that carry no weight whatsoever. Tack on a rather icky resolution that involves celebrating the quickie marriage of a 17-year-old girl (plus Carey at one point giving said girl a spanking, portrayed as normal and completely justified) and of course Linda's abandonment of her career in favor of marriage, and you have many of the worst qualities of '40s romantic comedies, and not nearly enough of the redeeming ones.

Christmas in July: Joyeux Noel (2005)

Based on true events but heavily fictionalized for maximum sentimentality, Christian Carion's Joyeux Noel (which was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar despite approximately a third of its dialogue being in English) makes some powerful points about the futility of warfare but undermines its own effectiveness by hammering them over and over again to the point where they become tiresome. It goes from graceful to cloying in the space of a few minutes, and unfortunately stays there for the rest of its running time.

It's honorable that Carion wanted to commemorate what's known as the "Christmas truce" of 1914, in which German, French and British troops on the front lines of World War I voluntarily laid down their arms to honor Christmas together. Carion focuses on one particular group of soldiers, all fictional characters, and grounds the story in a few personalities, including a German opera singer, a Scottish priest, a Jewish German commander and a French lieutenant. The singer's wife, also an opera star, gets permission to join him at the front to entertain the troops, and the music brings the various factions together to share wine, chocolate and a soccer game, and to bury their dead without fear of being shot at. It's a nice string of events that highlights the similarities among the men, after Carion effectively demonstrates how bloody the warfare is.

But then he lingers on every moment of the aftermath, as soldiers struggle with returning to combat, and superior officers discover what happened and issue reprisals. It's a good 30-40 minutes of underlining every obvious point repeatedly, and the goodwill Carion built up earlier kind of deflates. The acting is still solid and mostly understated, and the message is an important one. It's admirable that Carion decided to tell a different kind of war story, even if he made up all the details for dramatic effect. He just doesn't know when to back off and trust that his message will come across without hand-holding.

The True Meaning of Christmas: It brings even mortal enemies together.