A Fistful of Double Features! (Matt’s Picks)

    Brad and I have been talking a lot lately about our favorite films, classics, and various elements of the movies and why we love them.  This may be in part because of the lackluster year 2013 has been, I’m not sure.  Not that it takes much to make us talk about this subject, anyway.  So, after expanding our favorite films list last week, this week we’re looking at movie pairings; movies that are especially good to watch together.  Not just sequels, like Crank & Crank 2 or Alien & Aliens.  But films that go together like peanut butter & chocolate, cheese & crackers, or Kool & the Gang.

5.  An American Werewolf in London & Cat People:  Two movies about doomed love and the beast within.  In both films, an innocent is cursed with an inner monster that must come out.  Both are about love & sex, and romance against the odds.  Both are interesting in their use eroticism; An American Werewolf is playful and cute, while Cat People is deeply intense and kinky.

4.  Apocalypto & The Fountain:  Both films are about going the extra mile for love, about risking everything to save that special someone.  And both feature Mayans as a central element, not a common thing in film.  When I watched Apocalypto with a friend a few years back, part way through the movie, I realized we had to follow it up with The Fountain, and they worked very well as a pair.

3.  The Omega Man & Soylent Green:  Two profoundly 70s Charlton Heston visions of unpleasant futures, these two movies have been linked in my mind for a long time.  I guess part of it is that I’ve frequently shown them together at HestFest celebrations.  Yet, each movie has its own strengths, and somehow they work well as a pair; one about a world where everyone is gone, and the other a world where there are too many people.

2.  Double Indemnity & Lost Highway:  Double Indemnity is one of the nastiest, ugliest movies lumped into the Film Noir genre, with two extremely unlikable characters doing some awful villainy.  And it’s obvious that David Lynch’s work has always been steeped in the Noir aesthetic, but nowhere is it more obvious than in Lost Highway.  Even the whole look of Renee/Alice harkens back to Barbara Stanwyck, a woman too fake to be attractive, but somehow sexually galvanizing, able to lure a sucker into the most vile of evils.

1.  The Rocketeer & Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow:  Two extremely fun homage films deeply rooted in the classic era of movie serials and early comic books.  Neither of the films can be watched while harboring an ounce of cynicism.  From battles atop zeppelins to mad science, these two movies cover a lot of pulp bases.  The Rocketeer might also be paired with The Shadow (1994), The Phantom (1996), or Dick Tracy (1990).  And Sky Captain would work well with Lost Horizon (1937) or King Kong (1933).

-Matt

Oh, the Internet.

Good Bye, Richard Matheson...

Like a lot of genre fanboys my age, I first encountered the work of Richard Matheson through the citations of Stephen King.  And once you read I Am Legend it's impossible to digest books like 'Salem's Lot without recognizing the foundation laid by the true master of suburban terror.  However, Richard Matheson is not some dusty "Father of Modern Horror" best left acknowledged rather than consumed.  Last night, after getting word via Twitter that he had passed at the age of 87, I immediately went to the local bookshop to snatch a copy of his short fiction.  As I munched over a fast food dinner I read the terse tension of "Duel."  It's a terrific bit of boogyman writing - a simple act from a careless mind leads to a torturous assault on the everyman.  Matheson took us out of the far off, exotic hoodoo and brought the beasts to our doorstep - Stephen King ran with it, but even he couldn't muster the power and fear of the all-time-great apocalypse novel.  The Stand struggles to match the weight and intensity of what Matheson did in just 160 pages.

Published in 1954, I Am Legend is the story of The Last Man on Earth, Robert Neville.  Each day he raids the shops & homes of Los Angeles researching what caused the end of man, and possibly what could save it.  At night he retreats to his fortified bunker as the rest of humanity has been transformed into vampiric scavengers.  These are not the vein sadsack Draculas of Bram Stoker or Anne Rice.  These are beasts.  Monsters.  Real horrors that taunt him from the streets, aching to snap their fangs into his neck and complete the consumption of the earth.  I Am Legend is a dystopian downer with bursts of terrorizing siege action, and it climaxes with a fantastic Twilight Zoney philosophical twist that's all in the title.  It's astonishing how effective it is with its scares, and walloping with its heartbreak - all under 200 pages, something doorstop bestsellers often fail to grasp.  And, yeah,  I Am Legend is the perfect book for the big screen...

The book has been adapted three times already, but they keep screwing it up!!!!  God Damn Hollywood, how can you possibly be this inept when the source material is so simplistically brilliant?!?!  In 1964, Vincent Price certainly grasped the doom & gloom of being The Last Man on Earth, but his Dr. Morgan stumbles around a shanty set, beating upon faceless vampires without ever scratching the mythic dread of the conclusion.  1971's The Omega Man barely resembles the source material, but Charlton Heston's turtle neck sex machine is sooo dang charming even when he's swimming the deep end of crazy town.  The Omega Man is a rather striking bit of disco cheese that elevates itself into earnest exploitation through performance and audacity.  And easily my favorite of the three adaptations.  Will Smith's 2007 extravaganza gets the title right, but squanders it all in the last act.  For most of the film I was flabbergasted by its faithfulness to the novel, and Smith's relationship with the dog is one of the sweetest & saddest representations of man's best friend I've encountered in cinema.  The fact that they ignore the genius of the novel's climax shows that the producers either didn't have the balls to follow through or were utterly dense to its impact.  We finally get to hear "I Am Legend" uttered on the big screen and it's laughable.  Do I dare ask for a fourth adaptation?  Give it ten years.  I sometimes have fantasies of a low budget (what's that $50,000,000 these days) version directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt.  Can't you just see a fifty year old Pitt laying the undead to waste?!?!  Forget Word War Z sir, this is where you should be exploring the human condition through the filter of genre.

Of course, the general consensus is that if you're looking for the great I Am Legend cinematic experience than you look towards George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.  For a low budget filmmaker with just enough jingle jangle in his pocket, it's easy to see the appeal of I Am Legend as the base for a screenplay.  He had access to a house and a group of wannabe actors.  A shelter from an outside force.  A siege film.  Plague.  Damn scary.  The modern zombie certainly owes more to Matheson's vampires than the haitian undead seen on screen before 1968.  We currently live in a walking dead world where every third horror film seems to involve a brain eater, and it's impossible to imagine the current state of the genre (for better or worse) without Romero's zombies, and in turn without Richard Matheson.

As you're growing up geek, even if you skip past Stephen King, George Romero, & I Am Legend, you're eventually going to stumble upon Rod Serling's Twilight Zone.  Richard Matheson wrote 16 episodes of the anthology series, most of which spawned from his own short stories.  His most famous episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is a staple in this household, and we watch it every year around Shat Attack.  William Shatner's recovering madman boards a plane and comes face-to-face with a furry gremlin.  It's dated, goofy, melodramatic, and George Miller's big screen version is certainly more successful.  But Shatner sells the hell outta his psychosis and it's rather painful to witness the rejection from his spouse - an element missing from Lithgow's nightmare.  Other Matheson highlights from the series are Lee Marvin's "Steel" (also the basis for Hugh Jackman's Real Steel), Agnes Moorehead's teeny tiny "Invaders," the time traveling "Last Flight," and that other Shatner tale "Nick of Time."

Matheson wrote one Star Trek episode, "The Enemy Within."  I don't see it get a lot love these days on the internet (where all geek matters are settled, right?), but as a Shatner obsessive it is essential viewing.  A transporter accident splits Captain James T Kirk into two personalities.  One good, honorable, and a little meek.  The other one bad, alcoholic, rapey, and filled with screams.  The good Captain Kirk tries to coax the bad Captain Kirk back into the transporter room, but in the end it comes down to some nasty Kirk on Kirk violence.  It might not be a significant moment in genre television - it's certainly no Twilight Zone - but I couldn't write this post without giving it a little love.

A couple of years ago, I read a great interview with Richard Matheson in the pages of Fangoria.  In it he bemoaned the various adaptations of his work (the I Am Legends, Richard Kelly's underrated The Box, A Stir of Echoes), but when the interviewer reminded Matheson of his own liberal adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe for Roger Corman, the novelist did some serious backpedaling.  I was a little bummed.  Not just because Matheson seemed to have disdain for what others had done to his work (I suppose that's only natural), but mostly he seemed to have little enthusiasm for those colorful Vincent Price adventures.  Sure, they're working on the flimsiest of skeletons, but The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, & The Raven are whole heaps of fun and some of the most joyful work to come from Vincent Price.  Well...in Usher, Price is at his most dour, but The Raven is an absolute lark with its Boris Karloff wizard battle and animal transformation hijinks.  They might not have been Matheson's proudest moments or the most influential, but they certainly helped Roger Corman take claim of his B Movie Empire.  It's possible that if The House of Usher had bombed then Corman would have faded into obscurity and the cinematic landscape would be a far blander arena.  No Matheson = No Corman = No Scorsese, Coppola, Demme, Dante, etc.  Ok, that's extreme and unreasonable...maybe...

Finally, I can't talk about Richard Matheson without mentioning the loony monstrosity of Jaws 3D.  It has to be one of the clumsiest and lamest sequels ever crafted, and at least some of it came for the pen of Matheson (at least two other writers worked on the script).  I've enjoyed the film since I was a wee lad; possibly only a 4 year old could find the merits of this dreck, and I'm sure most of my youthful glee came from the Sea World setting.  Having recently partaken in a Fish & Chips Alamo Drafthouse screening, I am still a firm believer in its horridness but I can't shake the giddiness of long ago.  And I can't help but take sick glee from the fact that Matheson contributed to the bastardization of Steven Spielberg's first blockbuster after having jumpstarted Spielberg's career with the television movie Duel.  It's a small world, and Hollywood is even smaller and delightfully incestuous.

This has all just been a long winded way of thanking Richard Matheson.  His work has been with me for nearly 20 years, and I will continue to revisit his worlds for the rest of my life.  And I look forward to experiencing the future stories of those standing on his shoulders.  The next Kings, Romeros, Spielbergs. 

--Brad

Matt’s Week in Dork! (9/30/12-10/6/12)

    Though starting slow, the week built up to HestFest 2012.

Starship Troopers: Invasion:  Look, I hated the original movie.  I hated it for a lot of reasons, and the fact that it was an atrocious adaptation of a good book wasn’t anywhere near close to my biggest problem.  But the CG TV series was shockingly good, even though the animation was pretty primitive.  This, however, is like the worst of the movie, mixed with cut scenes from a Japanese video game.  You know the script is ‘adult’ because they swear a lot and there’s nudity that looks like the animators have only ever seen a naked woman in the pages of Playboy.  It’s not well written, or especially interesting.  The voice acting is very meh.  I wish this was better.  I’d love to see more animated science fiction.  But like so many of these tie-in animated projects, in spite of the work that must have gone into this, it’s lazy.

Resident Evil: Dangnation:  A made-up Eastern European nation is the setting for this CG film based on the venerable, if not always especially good, Resident Evil franchise.  It’s sure a heck of a lot more like the video games than the Milla films.  Is that a good thing?  I don’t know.  I can say that this is a MUCH better movie than the last CG one done a couple years back.  And it has some genuinely cool bits.  When that zombie’s head bursts into a mass of whipping tentacles.  Frickin’ awesome.  The action scenes in the third act are pretty crazy.  It’s OK, and frankly, that’s surpassing expectations.

Looper:  Anyone who ever actually messes with time travel has clearly not watched many movies.  It’s just a bad idea.  It will not go well.  Also, don’t trust mutants.  They’re probably better than you.  Life lessons aside, this was a pretty cool, weird time travel story with some solid performances and lots of cool visuals.  The script is pretty clever, even if a few of the ‘twists’ are pretty obvious.  It kept putting me in mind of the really frickin’ brain breaking novel The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson, which if you value your sanity, you shouldn’t read (but if you’re not a wimp you’ll check out).  If you’re familiar with science fiction or can listen, this shouldn’t be too hard to follow.  People unwilling to pay attention to a movie may experience dizziness.  Everything is spelled out for you pretty clearly.  Definitely one of the better films this year (admittedly, it’s been a bad year) and one I’m sure I’ll enjoy watching again.

Torchlight:  Don’t freebase, man.  Don’t do it.  Especially if a sexy, sweaty Ian McShane (in a bathrobe?) is pushing the pipe in your face.  Steve Railsback LOVES the pipe, but Nancy Drew isn’t into it.  That spells marriage trouble.  This movie sucks.

    On Thursday night, I got an early start on HestFest.

Touch of Evil:  Orson Welles is so mumbly and disgusting as a beast American cop who comes into conflict with an idealist Mexican cop in a sleazy border town.  So many nasty characters do so many bad things.  And it’s all exposed in lurid detail by the mad genius director Welles.  And man, he is not afraid to make himself look so terrifying and so repulsive.  Every time I see this, the attack on Janet Leigh becomes more and more disquieting.  And the blaring music combined with jarring images will rock your socks off.  I’ve seen some folks give Heston guff for playing a Mexican cop, but that doesn’t hold any water with this guy.  First, there are a heck of a lot of Mexicans who are as European in descent as any Chicago born actor.  And secondly, unlike other actors from that era, he doesn’t ham it up, put on a crappy accent, or do any over the top mannerisms.  Died black hair is the extent of it.  Otherwise, it’s a perfectly respectful portrayal of a cop dealing with an international incident.

    On Friday night Brad, Lisa, and I got the festivities started with a double shot.

Gray Lady Down:  A great cast is squandered on a rather boring film.  Tension should be ramping up, but it feels like they keep hitting the snooze button.  Sacrifices are made, but I don’t care.  Triumphs are achieved, but I still don’t care.  The actors all do fine jobs, but blah.

Mother Load:  Heston is the Miner 49er, drawling out a wonky Scottish brogue while two young folk look for their lost friend in the lonely mountains.  Heston directs too, and the movie does look good.  But the two leads (Mancuso and Bassinger) are kinda awful.  To the inexperienced eye, it might appear that Brad and I fell asleep during this movie (Lisa having bailed during the opening) and that it auto-played three or four times while we slept.  This is of course not true, which is why in the morning, we didn’t bother to replay the ending to find out what happened.  We were just concentrating so hard it looked like sleep.

    The main event began Saturday morning.  It was just Brad and I for some time.  Then Lisa joined, and around 6, others began to arrive.  Ben, Sarah, Paul, and Robert helped make for another good night.  Food, drinks, and some more good conversation.  I’ve got to entertain more often.

El Cid:  One of the good ones, this doesn’t suffer from sloppy pacing like Ben Hur, or just straight-up dull scripting and acting like Ten Commandments.  This is one of the better Heston epics.  El Cid is a complicated man, and no one understands him…especially his woman (the fickle shrew Sophia Loren).  Everything he does, he does for the greater good of Spain, and idealized vision of a united and peaceful country (that probably did exist a couple hundred years earlier, but would never exist again).  It was more historically accurate than I expect from Hollywood of that time (or any other).  He isn’t simply portrayed as a Christian warrior bent on driving out the Moors, but as someone willing to work with whoever if it furthered the purpose.  Granted, he’s also shown as much more of a devout idealist than the mercenary he really was.  Still, pretty grand and a very cool ending.

Julius Caesar:  Shakespeare’s play gets a pretty good adaptation, with an excellent cast.  Though Jason Robards does NOT work.  Look, I think Robards is an excellent actor of his type, but his type doesn’t work for Shakespeare.  He’s too low talking, too grumbly, too mumbly, and too deadpan.  Still, Heston and the rest are all great.  Heston’s ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ speech is badass.  And Robert Vaughn’s cornucopia of facial expressions is worth every penny.

Antony and Cleopatra:  Heston is in the directing chair, as well as one of the titular roles in this follow-up adaptation.  Sadly, unless they simply botched it hard, it seems like this play is one of the Bard’s weaker.  The movie looks great and the cast is top notch.  But it’s dull, dull, dull.  And the last act/post climax seems to go on FOREVER!  I hardly think it would have fixed the film, but apparently Heston wanted Diana Rigg for the role of Cleopatra, and I think that would have made it more watchable at least.

The Omega Man:  HestFest favorite, this pretty terrible adaptation of Richard Mathison’s I Am Legend is also probably my favorite Heston film (though my favorite movie he’s in is probably Planet of the Apes and the best movie he’s in is probably Touch of Evil).  Crazy, crazy music, a bunch of quotable lines, and lots of Heston being awesome.

Planet of the Apes:  “It’s a mad house!  A MAD HOUSE!!!”  One of the best danged movies ever, it starts off as a science fictiony exploration film and becomes a colossal bitch-slap of social commentary about science, religion, the treatment of animals and men, heroism, the human condition, logic, faith and even a little sex.  One of Jerry Goldsmith’s more experimental and extreme scores drives the action as Charlton Heston tries to survive in a world so close to his own, but so alien.  Science fiction allowed writers to talk about things they couldn’t talk about in more typical dramas.  Still does.  And this is one of the best examples of that.

    I watched a few more episodes of The New Avengers.  The show is OK, but lacks something.  I think part of it is Joanna Lumley, who I don’t find attractive (like Steed’s previous partners), and who has a rather drab personality.

    And after much prompting from Brad, I finally started watching season 4 of Fringe.  Good show.  I love how much the cast is able to play with variations on their characters, and how nutty things tend to get without blinking an eye.  The first few episodes, though good, and with some bits of story building, do feel a bit like filler.  One episode could probably have covered all the story arc material.  The rest of it, this late in the game, felt distracting.  I don’t want monster of the week stories this deep in.

    Issue 2 of Archer & Armstrong has more weird cult stuff, a bunch of secret history, and the seeds of some kind of messianic devilry.  Mostly, I’m curious where they’re taking this story.  It feels like it should build to something big and specific.  What will that be?

    Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom’s second issue is more high-flying fun.  Betty is such a bitch, though.  You really have to wonder what Cliff sees in her, or is it just what he sees that’s the issue (‘cause she looks like Betty Page).  She just continually berates him and denigrates everything he loves, and constantly believes he’s cheating on her even though he’s shown no indication of doing so at all, then complains that she might be loosing him.  Ugh.  Otherwise, the insanity of the revealed enemy plans is totally turning things to 11.  Wow.  And the potential for some fun action is certainly there.

    The second issue of Godzilla: Half-Century War annoys me a bit with its stereotypical portrayal of the American general, and his assurance of 100% victory in spite of all evidence.  Still, the arrival of Anguirus, the favorite whipping boy of the Godzilla universe was nice.  Plus, it looks like next month, Smog Monster!!!

    Issues 4&5 of X-O Manowar are more of the same.  The story seems OK, but it’s moving at far too slow a pace for the monthly format.  The brief chapters barely push things forward before ‘next issue…’  And what’s up with Ninjak?  It’s a lame name, and he looks super 90s.  Still, it’s not bad.  And where’s Cary Nord on issue 5?  Has he already left the comic?

    I’m pretty shocked at how much I liked issue 1&2 of Bloodshot.  That was a comic that didn’t look even a little interesting to me in all the previews and write-ups, but it’s actually pretty good.  The titular character has potential to be interesting, and the events circling around him complicated and dangerous.  And it’s SUPER violent, with people getting faces and arms ripped, shot, blown, and punched off.

    Issue 10 of Winter Soldier is mostly about picking up the pieces after a nasty betrayal.  But what worries me is that they seem to be hitting another of those irritating comic ‘reset’ buttons on a character, so all the recent stories about said character (read it; I’m not giving anything away) won’t matter anymore.  My guess is they’re going to take that character in a new direction and don’t want baggage.  Lame.  Issue 11 moves on to the chase, as the Winter Soldier hooks up with…Hawkeye (ugh) to try their target.  Is this building to something?  Something that will reflect relationships in a certain popular movie?

    Throwing lots of swearing and sexual references isn’t enough to call your comic ‘adult.’  But that seems to be the case with The Victories issue one.  Nothing especially interesting.  Just a Batman type vigilante in a Gotham type city…with swearing and prison rape.  Not very impressive.

    At Brad’s fevered prompting, I read Wolverine and the X-Men #17.  Doop, huh.  That’s a thing.  I don’t know what the crap is going on in the X-Men universe, but this is one weirdass comic book.  Some special guest stars and a lot of head scratching.  Comics, man.

    Still reading a few issue zeros.  Teen Titans is a line I won’t be reading, but its issue Zero is more of the story of how Tim Drake became Red Robin (later a member of the Teen Titans).  So, it fits more with the whole Batman thing.  It’s OK.  His parents are a little too nice.  OK, a LOT too nice.

    Issue zero of The Flash is…well, it’s The Flash.  Like Green Arrow, this is a character that has never, even for a moment made me care.  I mean, I liked the TV show, but mostly because I had a crush on the lead actress (from her time on Max Headroom…and yes, in Leviathan).  OK, he’s fast.  But with a seemingly pathetic and lame rogues gallery, not much in the way of interesting background, and a pretty wooden personality, Barry Allan, the Fastest Man Alive is trapped in the amber of disinterest.

    Superman issue zero is more ‘back on Krypton’ with Jor-El trying to wake people up to the end of the world, and being thwarted by some kind of doomsday cult.  And then there’s some weird monster blowing a horn.  OK.  The art is more manga than I like, though not terrible.  The page layout is sometimes interesting and creative, but occasionally too clever for its own good, so it’s hard to follow.  But the coloring is really pretty.  Some of the better I’ve seen in a while.  Overall…well, I still just don’t care about Superman.

-Matt

Brad's Week in Dork! (9/30/12-10/6/12)

It's October.  You know what that means?  31 Days of Horror!  Uh...so...that didn't quite work out the way I wanted.  Started off with Re-Animator and Prince of Darkness, but then Hest Fest came and I got all kinds of distracted.  And it was a mighty Hest Fest.  That is, it was after we got over the hump of boring that was the Gray Lady Down/Mother Lode double feature.  Seriously, those movies were super dull.  But then came El Cid and a double dose of Shakespeare -- and of course, The Omega Man & Planet of the Apes will save any film festival.  It doesn't get any manlier than those two.

Besides all that Hest, read a bunch of comics, watched the Fringe premiere, and played a whole lot of Arkham City.  I'm not much for video games, but when I'm feeling a little stressed it's real easy to escape into the demented mind of Hugo Strange.

TV OF THE WEEK!

Fringe Season 5 - Episode One "Transilience Thought Unifier Model 11":  The final season of Fringe is off and running and its pretty gosh darn weird.  We've jumped nearly thirty years into the future.  The Observers have enslaved humanity, and the Fringe team has awoken from an amber sleep to be greeted with egg sticks and the now adult daughter of Olivia & Peter.  Only Walter holds the key to taking down the bald baddies but his brain has been jumbled by September.  Any of this make sense to you?  If you haven't been watching this show from the beginning than I'm guessing not.  But that's what's so great about this show.  You're in or you're out.  And who know what horrors Fringe Devision is going to face before presumably saving the day....gulp.

MOVIES OF THE WEEK!

Re-Animator:  "I've never done whole parts." Delirious soap opera horror squeezed fresh from the words of HP Lovecraft and lovingly wrung through the demented humor of Dennis Paoli & Stuart Gordon. Jeffery Combs is the perfection of smug as mad scientist Herbert West, and he delivers each line of dialog with know-it-all vitriol and it's star-makingly charming. Re-Animator is gross, gross, gross and damn funny. Simply, a classic.

Looper:  Not the time travel film I was expecting, but I thoroughly enjoyed this Terminator venture thanks to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's mimicry and Bruce Willis' somewhat adorable old dog charm. It's impressive how likable they are considering that both versions of the Looper assassin are psychotic scumbags no matter how many women they fall for. The climactic payoff is satisfying, but for me, the journey to the credits was more enthralling than the obvious destination. Emily Blunt is solid as Sara and Jeff Daniels is tyrannically beardy, but Looper works best when its two stars are sharing the screen.

Prince of Darkness:  "This is caca." Not my favorite John Carpenter film. But not my least favorite either (thanks to The Ward). Every time I press play on this flick I think I'm going to enjoy it more than I ultimately do. Jameson Parker (of Simon & Simon!!!!!) is not Tom Atkins, and this film could have used some serious Tom Atkins. Donald Pleasence is typically gravitas and doom & gloomy. Victor Wong is somehow freaky heroic and dashing. And Dennis Dun is a solid scaredy cat. But Jameson Parker is one boring mustache man and he makes for a terrible leading man. Which is a bummer cuz SIMON & SIMON ROCKS!

Gray Lady Down:  Despite an incredible cast of Navy Men (Charlton Heston, Ronny Cox, Stephen McHattie, Stacey Keach, Christopher Reeve, David Carradine, Ned Beatty) this underwater disaster film is a bit of a snooze. A radarless Norwegian cargo ship blindly rams into the USS Neptune sending it into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. The Navy scrambles to rescue the tin can sailors as they bicker amongst each other. Lots of rising and diving and rising and diving and rising and diving...the drama becomes tiresome after a while punctuated with David Carradine's endless know-it-all eye rolls.  Just watch Earthquake instead.

Mother Lode:  Boring! So Very Boring! Nick Mancuso and Kim Basinger travel into British Columbia in search of their bush pilot buddy and a whole heap of gold. What they find is crazy ass Scottish miner Charlton Heston and his even crazier pick wielding twin brother. And dammit, despite have twin Hestons, The Mother Lode is a painfully dull film saddled with two lifeless leads in Mancuso & Bassinger.  Give it a miss.

El Cid:  "Can a man live without honor?" Gorgeous sweeping historical epic directed by Anthony Mann and starring the unpenetrably altruistic Charlton Heston as El Cid, the Spanish warrior who brought Christians & Muslims together to war with meaner, more evil Muslim conquerors. The first half of the film is incredibly gripping as he slays his soon-to-be-father-in-law, earns the contempt of his fiance Sophia Loren, and jousts brutally for his honor. The second half is more typical hero stuff, but its the devious mindgames with his true love & her assassin suitor that appeals to my demented noggin over the monstrous battlefield clashes of extras that conclude the picture.

Julius Caesar:  A somewhat shaky but enjoyable adaptation, Charlton Heston is theatrically grandios as Marc Antony looking to score some payback against Brutus and his goon squad. Jason Robards doesn't quite fit as Robards, he feels far too modern for the language but Richard Johnson is a solid foil as the diabolical Cassius. John Gielgud simply shows up to read his lines as Caesar, but his Ides of March mutilation is appropriately, violently grim. This is probably not going to be your go-to Shakespearean adaptation but it gets the job done.

Antony and Cleopatra:  Two years after Julius Caesar, Charlton Heston returns to the role of Marc Antony is this rather pedestrian production. Don't get me wrong, it looks and sounds like a million bucks, but I've just never gravitated towards this supposedly tragic love affair involving the loins of Rome & Egypt. Heston does what Heston does best, venomously spitting epic proclamations and supporting the weight of the ancient world. Hildegard Neil draws the short straw as Cleopatra, she comes off simply bitchy and not the proper warrior Queen she most certainly was.

The Omega Man:  "You're the angel of death brother. Not us." This jab from hooded mutant Anthony Zerbe is the closest this adaptation gets to the climactic them of Richard Matheson's utterly brilliant horror novel I Am Legend. But despite lacking the brutality and genuine horror of the novel, The Omega Man is still a classic of high brow B Movie entertainment. Desperately trying to maintain his sanity, Heston battles the pasty pancaked creatures of the night with an array of high powered rifles and the very best assortment of 1970s fashion. Seriously, these mutants couldn't possibly take down a man brave enough to wear ruffles. And, you know what? Unlike the more recent I Am Legend film, Neville's sudden second reel relationship with tough chick Rosalind Cash is welcomed; if only the narrative would allow them the opportunity to rule as King & Queen of the Apocalypse.

Planet of the Apes:  "What are you afraid of Doctor?" Before Hest Fest, I liked Planet of the Apes. Having now watched this film every year for the last five years, I am happy to proclaim this film as one of my all time favorites. I absolutely love what a bastard Heston is for the first 30 minutes of the film. His ship has crashed in the barren wastes of the Forbidden Zone. The past is dead. The future don't look much prettier. He laughs in the face of his fellow astronauts - adapt or die, my friends. Then the apes come and all reality is shaken. Planet of the Apes is an incredibly progressive film centering on the never ending battle between Faith vs Science...plus Monkeys!!!! With Guns!!!! Can't get enough of this flick.

COMICS OF THE WEEK!

Wonder Woman - Blood:  Ok.  So I don't think I disliked this book as much as Matt did, but I was profoundly disappointed.  People have been going ga-ga for Brian Azzarello & Cliff Chiang's God War book but I couldn't help but see it as a wannabe Sandman story with an unwanted dash of very 90s gothy fetishizing.  And I don't dig Chiang's art.  I appreciate how his Wonder Woman towers over other characters but she looks mannish, not Amazonian.  I'm curious to see where this Apollo stuff goes, so I'm going to keep reading, but I just can't join the lovefest for this book.

Fatale #8:  The 70s set section of this book is starting to come together.  The first half of this issue explores the childhood memories (nightmares) of Nicholas Lash while he's fleeing those undead cultists.  We get to see old man Hank (the hero of Volume 1) pleading with the seemingly immortal Josephine and we we also get a glimpse at what the demonic Hansel has been up to since his blinding.  And let's not forget about poor Miles, lapping at the bedsheets of Josephine, who most certainly will come to a grisly and horrifying end in the next couple of issues.  Again, if you're not reading Fatale than you're not reading the best monthly book on the market.  My only complaint is that I have to wait a month (or more) between issues.

Batman - Detective Comics #13:  With the arrival of John Layman (Chew, Mars Attacks!) as writer, I started reading yet another Batman book.  It's a Penguin story and not that amazing.  But it's a good, solid, typical Batman story.  Hopefully it's hinting at larger things, but with Scott Snyder knocking it out of the park with The Court of Owls (and hopefully the upcoming Death of the Family) it's hard to get jazzed on a "good, solid, typical" story.

Fatima - The Blood Spinners #4:  The madness comes to a close.  And I don't know what I really thought of this book.  I definitely enjoyed the insanity (or was it absurdity) of this Gilbert Hernandez mini but was it actually good?  Not sure, yet.  It was definitely gross.  Super gross.  But the pacing was all kinds of crazy-jumping from panel to panel, from seemingly random plot point to random plot point.  Still, no one can quite make me queasy with gore the way Hernandez can, and I find that to be somewhat amusing.  Demented indie darling.

Legends of the Dark Knight #1:  Only picked this one up for the Damon Lindelof/Jeff Lemire short story, and I'll only continue with it depending on who they get for the rest of the shorts.  Their story is a cute, if painful point put upon Bruce by his loyal teacher Alfred.  When The Bat starts to get smug than it's up to the Butler to teach him a lesson.  The second story by Jonathan Larsen & JG Jones proves why Batman's on the Justice League and why Amazo is a super lame villain.  And the third story shows that Bats is just as good at pre-crime as any player in Minority Report or Persons of Interest.  I don't imagine I'll be remembering this issue after a couple of weeks but it killed some time for this Bat fan.  Plus, Shark Repellent still comes in handy.

Daredevil - End of Days #1:  I'm really curious about this mini series.  Brian Michael Bendis' original run on Daredevil was one of the books that brought me back to comics, and even if these "The End" stories tend to disappoint I'm really excited to see what Bendis has in store for Daredevil's last battle.  The first issue opens in the middle of a VS. fight between ol' horn head and his arch nemesis Bullseye.  A few panels in and Matt Murdock's brains have been dashed upon the sidewalk.  His final word is not "Rosebud" but it might as well have been, and it's up to die hard reporter Ben Urich to find the truth behind the death of the Hell's Kitchen vigilante.  A good start, and I look forward to the next issue.

Bloodshot #3:  With this issue we're finally getting a look at the bigger picture.  Bloodshot and his hostage invade the home of Mrs. Spellman, the woman used by government mad scientists as a model for his fantasy wife.  But they're not the only invaders.  A squadron of universal soldiers are charging down the highway and they're packing a human atom bomb capable of disabling Bloodshot's nanobots.  Or something.  For a character I never once gave a crap about, this series is turning into a pleasant surprise.

Wolverine and the X-Men #17:  Speaking of pleasant surprises...Wolverine & the X-Men #17 was withoutadoubt the most fun I had while reading a comic book this week.  Yep.  I'm not really an X-Men fan, at least not so much anymore.  And the only reason I bought this issue was because Mike Allred was pulling the art duties.  I don't know who or what Doop is.  I vaguely remember the X-Statix & X-Force books in which he originally appeared but I never read them.  That's gotta change.  In this issue we learn that Doop is the only thing keeping the X-Men free from The League of Nazi Bowlers, the devil music of...Satan, the mutant hating PTA, and the robo army of dimension ZZZ.  Well, Howard The Duck and a gun that shoots bees leant a helping hand as well.  This issue is totally mental, silly as hell, and an absolute hoot.  I Forced Matt to read it, however I don't think he appreciated it as much as I did, but dammit!  Doop vs The Flame War Nun!  That's some serious genius.

--Brad