The late Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard has always been mine. While I watched and dug the kitschy old original series reruns on afternoon TV back in the ‘80s, that Star Trek was ancient history to me.
When Star Trek: Next Generation came along in 1987, it was something new. It had a rocky start – the first few seasons the show wasn’t sure what it wanted to be – but it single-handedly revived the ageing franchise’s future and gave us spinoffs like Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks and all the rest.
Holding centre stage was Patrick Stewart, who seemed an unlikely figure to replace William Shatner’s iconic James T. Kirk as captain. British, balding and stern, Stewart’s Picard was no Kirk.
He was steady and firm but compassionate, a no-nonsense captain who showed what a good leader could be. (Something sorely missing in today’s world.) Stewart brought his Shakespearean background to give Picard a depth and gravitas that instantly made you want to follow him across the stars.
It’s been a terrible week for Star Trek fans, with the loss of original series star Walter ‘Chekov’ Koenig at age 90 and the unexpected death of Stewart today at age 86.
Backed up by what remains the best supporting cast any Star Trek series has had, Stewart’s Picard made Star Trek soar to new heights over seven seasons, four movies and even a late-in-life revival series, Picard, which ran from 2020 and 2023 and gave the captain and crew a welcome final sendoff.
Star Trek may seem silly to some, but it’s been a lifeline for many. “Trekkies” often get made fun of over the years, but like any fandom it’s a found family that provides a sense of belonging.
Its world is a glimpse of a future that – mostly, Borg aside – is optimistic, that promises more cooperation than chaos among humanity, the possibility of a galaxy-wide United Federation of Planets that values exploration over conquest. In the world of Star Trek, anything is still possible for mankind.
Although there’s been plenty of dystopian Trek stories, by far the best ones are those that embrace a sense of optimism. Things will be better in the future, even if there’s Tribbles and Klingons to deal with.
Patrick Stewart wasn’t just Picard – he was the only obvious choice to be Marvel’s Professor X, of course, in a series of movies that has lasted from 2000’s X-Men all the way to his appearance in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. He had a wide range – he could be great as a villainous racist in Green Room or a gay activist in the 1990s comedy Jeffrey.
But of course, Picard is what he will be remembered the most for. That’s not the worst fate – he was an actor who entertained millions, inspired explorers of all kinds, and whose character showed a way for humanity to boldly go, where no one had gone before.
“You think when you die, you go to heaven. You come to us!” – The Tall Man
Horror movies are littered with franchises that churn out endless sequels, but there’s nothing quite like the experimental weirdness of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm series, a perfect treat for this Halloween week.
The original Phantasm from 1979 remains a masterclass in creepy, slow-burn terror. Writer and director Don Coscarelli was only 25 when he created Phantasm, and the story can be seen as a young guy trying to grapple with the concept of death for the first time. Teenager Jody and his wide-eyed little brother Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) are mourning the mysterious death of one of their friends, but the funeral becomes steeped in strangeness as the mortician – a towering figure known only as “The Tall Man” (Angus Scrimm) – seems to be something less than human. Weird robed Jawa-like creatures are skittering about in the shadows. Dead people are being stolen and reanimated.
And then there’s the moment that made Phantasm iconic – in one of the most bizarrely terrifying scenes in horror history, glittering silver spheres come hurtling down the deserted mortuary hallways, spiked with knives that burrow deep into your skull, suck out your blood and kill you. Jody, Mike and their friend, balding ponytailed ice-cream truck driver Reggie, soon become embroiled in a battle with the Tall Man for their very souls.
Nothing quite “fits” in Phantasm – the story has a kind of dream logic. In the final act we learn the Tall Man may be from some other world entirely as Jody and Mike briefly fall into a vast void with scarlet skies. Phantasm feels like a clear influence on the Nightmare On Elm Street series, which turned out a much more audience-friendly, wisecrack-filled spin on the notion of a killer who can manipulate reality. I even get an echo of its liminal space horrors in the recent hit Backrooms.
You could drive a truck through the escalating plot holes in the Phantasm series, and to be honest I’m still not entirely sure what’s “real” and what’s a dream. Jody dies, but does he really? “Nothing is ever really what it seems,” a character says at one point, which sums it all up. The lapses in logic and continuity in the Phantasm franchise are less of a bug and more of a feature. A little mood goes a long way:
The first movie remains the most distinctive, but there’s enough distinctive vision in even the worst of the sequels to make them worth following for Phantasm Phans.
Even mildly successful horror flicks got heaps of sequels in the 1980s, but it took until 1988 for Phantasm II to be released. It shows the push of a major Hollywood studio to try and make it a horror hit machine like Freddy and Jason, adding in a superfluous love interest, and recasting Mike with a Teen Beat-friendly new actor. The new Mike is a sullen bore, lacking the amateurish relatability that Baldwin brought to the original, and the romantic angles shoved in here feel forced. (Suddenly Mike is psychic, and has a bond with a sexy stranger?) Phantasm II loses a lot of the ambiguous feeling, instead throwing in more gore and more guns, and the plot is even more choppy – Reggie has a never-seen family who get killed offscreen, for instance. But there’s cool expansion of the series’ opaque “lore”, gruesome uses of the spheres, and a great chainsaw battle. It also shows the franchise mutating into a kind of never-ending road trip, as Reggie and Mike begin what seems to be an infinite loop of searches for the Tall Man. Gradually, all external life for these two is stripped away – they have no jobs, no friends, no real purpose but fighting and losing to the Tall Man, forever.
Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead from 1994 swerves in yet another new direction, bringing a bit more comic tone. Phantasm II’s love interest is swiftly, nastily dispatched in the opening scene and never mentioned again, and A. Michael Baldwin returns as the original Mike but is almost immediately sidelined for most of the movie as a prisoner of the Tall Man. Instead, it becomes Reggie’s show as he sets out to find Mike. Fortunately Bannister has enough everyman charisma to carry the franchise, and he’s quickly saddled with a homicidal child sidekick and a smack-talking Black woman partner. To top things off, Mike’s brother Jody, apparently dead since Phantasm, returns somehow reincarnated as one of the floating spheres, which now can talk. Yeah, it gets weird. That’s Phantasm for you.
“My name is Reggie. I was an ice cream vendor by trade. Now, I am a soldier. A soldier in a war against his army of the living dead.” – Reggie
After the middling Phantasm III, I was surprised by how decent Phantasm IV: Oblivion is, combining the chilly menace of the first film with some amusing set pieces and giving us far more of the Tall Man than we’ve ever had before, digging into his mysterious origins with some time travel and dimension hopping. There’s some inventive gore, particularly a scene involving a female traveller Reggie hooks up with and a novel use for those deadly spheres. Mike attempts to learn more about his strange bond with the Tall Man while Reggie hunts for him (again!). Much of Phantasm IV takes place in the desert, which gives a welcome new look to the series, instead of being set in mortuaries and shadowy darkness. Angus Scrimm gets to do a bit more than just growl menacingly, as we discover he was once a scientist in the 1860s trying to discover more about reality who became transformed into the Tall Man. Several deleted scenes from the original Phantasm are merged seamlessly into the narrative here, making it feel like everything’s come full circle. As always, plot threads are dangling and things left unexplained (Phantasm specialises in fake-out twist endings that never quite get resolved) but at this point, you like it or you don’t.
It took 18 years for the final Phantasm movie, 2016’s Phantasm: Ravager, to be released – and it wasn’t really worth the wait. It’s the only one not directed by Coscarelli, who co-wrote the script. It’s a messy hybrid of SyFy Channel-level production with a few decent ideas, but ultimately it just feels like a sketchy coda to the main story. We pick up years after Phantasm IV with a battered Reggie emerging out of the desert (what’s he been doing? who knows!), still searching for Mike and chasing the Tall Man (a clearly ailing Scrimm), but then it abruptly switches to another timeline, where an elderly Reggie is battling dementia in a nursing home, and a third timeline in a post-apocalyptic future where the Tall Man has mostly destroyed the world as an armed resistance fights back – Terminator meets Phantasm, if you will. Director David Hartman’s cheap approach strips away gravitas in favour of splattery shocks (if you’ve ever wanted to see a sphere kill a horse, this is your movie). Special effects that would’ve looked cheap on a PlayStation 2 don’t help the overall feeling that this is a fan film that’s broken containment.
It shows how much Coscarelli’s unique style and voice matters to Phantasm, and once you strip it away you’ve got just another generic horror franchise. It does give us a chance to say farewell to Angus Scrimm, who died shortly before its release, and Reggie (Bannister himself died just this year). But at this point after five films, the endless twists in reality and lack of narrative closure feel kind of exhausting. Is the entire series just a dream of a dying man in the end, or does the battle go on forever? Phantasm: Ravager tries to have it both ways. I’d prefer to think of Phantasm IV as the end of the series, and this as a kind of misguided tribute. It’s also cool that Scrimm, Bannister and (mostly) Baldwin remained the stars of the series for its entire 37-year run.
The Phantasm series is schlock, but to me, it’s evocative schlock. For all its silliness and flaws, Phantasm seems to strive to be about something – the unstoppable nature of death, the void we all face wide awake at 3am – rather than just an escalating gory body count. The Tall Man is Death itself, implacable, unbeatable, and always there, waiting to reach out for all of us. Now that’s scary.
I’m once again in one of my Rocky phases, sparked by reading Sylvester Stallone’s excellent new memoir of his grim childhood and early career struggles, The Steps.
As I’ve written before, I’m always going to be a Stallone Stan, and the Rocky movies are comforting old friends to me that I pop on every few years.
I’ll go to the mat in particular for 1982’s Rocky III, where the downbeat realism of Rocky I and II and the gung-ho excess of Rocky IV combine for a vastly entertaining punch-up that hits the heart and the solar plexus equally. I like all the Rocky and Creed movies – yeah, even Rocky V, kind of – but in my heart of hearts Rocky III will always be my favourite. And a good bit of that is due to Mr. T’s menacing villain, Clubber Lang.
Clubber Lang is a mystery – the contender who emerges, glowering and angry, in several crowd shots before loudly challenging Rocky to a title fight in public. He’s pure rage, even outside the ring (he indirectly causes the death of poor old Rocky’s coach and father figure Mickey), and no motive is given for his temper other than a burning desire to win, to be the champion. He obeys none of the polite rules of boxing or indeed, civilisation.
Lang bursts on the scene with a snarl and never lets up for the movie’s entire runtime. He beats Rocky in one of the series’ grimmest battles, giving the egotistical champ a much-needed reality check, and then is beaten himself after Rocky trains up with former foe Apollo Creed to the impossibly catchy refrains of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” It’s a simple rise-and-fall-and-rise story that almost all the Rocky movies follow, but it’s perfected to a glossy shine here.
Every word out of Clubber’s mouth is an attack or a brag – “I’m gonna torture him. I’m gonna crucify him.” Mr T’s most famous quote – “I pity the fool” – is heard here first, not in his later turn as a slightly gentler hero in TV’s The A-Team. Rocky III is by far Mr T’s most iconic performance, before his image got softened up in cartoons and anti-drug ads.
Clubber Lang appears to have no family, no friends, no outside life at all – we get quick shots of him training ferociously alone in grubby rooms, and the ringside crew we briefly see act like hired guns who probably can’t stand the man. He has no calm dialogue with any of his peers, no references to anything but his own grinding ambition. He’s the boxing equivalent of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, riding into town to stir shit up.
(Of course, because fandom is a thing, the later book Rocky: The Ultimate Guide sketches out a childhood of orphanhood and jail, and apparently an early script for Rocky Balboa, aka Rocky 6, would’ve had Lang make a cameo as a ringside announcer who’s become a born-again Christian. None of that is necessary, to be honest. Leave Clubber’s canon alone!)
When you watch a movie heaps of times over the years, you start to dissect it more. I wondered if Clubber Lang is too much of a racial boogeyman, all the vile stereotypes of the “black menace” brought to life (particularly a scene where he makes a crude pass at Rocky’s wife).
Yet generally, the Rocky series has always been fairly racially even-handed, with Carl Weathers’ outstandingly cool, confident Apollo Creed (I’d endlessly argue he deserved a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work), Michael B. Jordan in the Creed movies, Tony Burton’s trainer Duke and a variety of other well-drawn Black cast members giving some balance.
Clubber Lang is a wounded beast, lashing out – I’m sure he was the victim of racist treatment many a time – and he simply has become who he is, all predator, never prey.
Few other Rocky villains achieve the primal power of Clubber Lang – Apollo Creed is just too darned charismatic, while Ivan Drago is awesomely swole but a little cartoony, and honestly few of the other Rocky or Creed boxing villains are all that memorable.
The Rocky movies would try to give Rocky’s opponents a little more depth, notably Apollo Creed whose legacy became the hook for a whole new trilogy. Even Russian super-boxer Drago got a little redemption in the surprisingly great Creed II, thanks to a terrific weathered performance by Dolph Lundgren returning to the role as a man beaten down and haunted by his loss to Rocky.
Other Rocky antagonists, like the sleazy, misguided Tommy Gunn in the misfire Rocky V or the young champ Mason Dixon in Rocky Balboa, tend to be a little more human.
Not Clubber Lang, who has no apologies, no quarter given. When he loses, he might as well dissolve into the mist, as Rocky III doesn’t even give him a momentary twinge of acceptance, no shaking hands with the new champ. He’s last seen groaning on the canvas, face still twisted with rage. Fans have fantasised about more Clubber Lang for years – Rocky rematches and such, but honestly, his story was one and done.
There was an echo of Clubber Lang in 2023’s Creed III, the last (for now) Rocky universe film. Jonathan Majors’ Damian Anderson is an intense ex-con frenemy who beats Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed to a pulp (and this being the Rocky-verse, is himself of course beat down in the end). There’s hints of Clubber here, the angry outsider who takes on the king. But Majors – whose personal and career troubles are well-documented – gets the backstory Clubber Lang was denied (troubled youth, jail, desire for revenge, etc), and the slightly undercooked Creed III doesn’t quite sell his rise and fall and redemption arc. Unlike Clubber Lang, we’re asked to care a bit about Anderson, and it’s hard to do that with Majors and his baggage in the role.
Clubber Lang has no backstory. He doesn’t need one.
He simply appears, sneering, from the shadows, and in the end goes back to them exactly as he always was, unredeemed, unrepentant, ultimately, in a strange kind of way, undefeated.
“That’s the one thing that I’ve taken from this programme is that my story is special because it’s been seen. Not because it is special, just because it’s been seen. How many people can say that, their story from 7 to 70, has been on television?” – Symon
In the end, there’s nothing better or more complicated to try to explain than an ordinary life, I think.
The recent release of 70 Up brings to a close the greatest documentary series of all time, capturing the lives of more than a dozen people from the age of 7 to 70, stretching from 1964 to 2026. It’s a masterpiece, and it breaks my heart a little bit, but also leaves me feeling a lot better about our troubled human species, too.
Over the years, the ITV British TV series has followed 14 British children turning into teenagers, adults and now old men and women. You watch the entire 10 films and gradually Neil, Tony, Jackie, Nick, Sue, Paul, Bruce, Symon and all the rest start to feel a little bit like friends. They’re not influencers or celebrities – they’re profoundly ordinary despite the differences in careers and income.
70 is probably a good place to stop, creating a nice synchronicity with the first film 7 Up, and leaving our cast before they all get too old and infirm. Two of them have already died – children’s librarian Lynn in 2013, and physicist Nick in 2023. Director Michael Apted shepherded the series from 14 until his own death in 2019, and director Asif Kapadia has done a marvellous job bringing the series full circle and keeping Apted’s distinctive tone with 70 Up, which feels like a natural ending and an elegy for the whole ambitious project.
The Up series started out trying to make its cast fit set roles – the stuffy Tory, the loud Eastender, the young Black boy living in a care home, the chilly rich girl. Yet over time, you realise none of these people were entirely the stereotypes the director may have thought they were.
“I think it’s now, it’s a film about living a human life.” – Peter
Up explodes the idea that people are just one thing – barrister John with his tailored suits and sniffy youthful pronouncements was arguably set up as the “villain” in the earliest instalments, yet we learn as the years pass he’s actually a warm, caring fellow who’s spent much of his life advocating for Bulgarian orphans, and is hardly the selfish toff he first appeared to be.
Each member of the cast has a story to tell, some perhaps more interesting than others. Wealthy, comfortable lawyer Andrew and his relatively uneventful life takes the prize for most boring member, while Neil, a bright-eyed chipper chap at age 7, went through a roller coaster of undiagnosed mental health crises, homelessness and wandering before coming out of it all to become a capable local body politician. Neil’s story shows us that life doesn’t always fit imagined paths.
It is hard, of course, to watch them all grow old, bald and grey, but we all do in the end, and while there’s certainly a bit of bittersweet sadness in 70 Up, there’s also a lot of joy and acceptance, something we could all do our best to hang on to as the years pile up.
Many of the series’ participants proved very ambivalent about taking part – some vanished for an instalment or two, a couple for decades. (One of 70 Up’s genius movies is even bringing back long-lost Charles, who utterly disappeared after a falling out with Apted around 21 Up, for a brief cameo.)
Apted was on the record saying he wished he’d chosen a more diverse cast – the series had only one non-white child, and just four women. But it’s still an invaluable snapshot of lives lived during the last 70 years, and how society has changed.
As the series went on, too, it interrogated Apted’s motives and questioned a lot of the haughty assumptions the film was making about poor people and rich people. The interviewees pushed back, none more than spunky Jackie, and the ongoing dialogue between intention and reality was fascinating. A documentary can never really capture all of a person’s facets. The Up series acknowledging that just makes it all stronger.
“A part of my little life story, and I’m a nobody, I’m just a normal person, and my little life story’s on film forever.” – Sue
There are so many little moments of grace in 70 Up that make you feel grateful to be human – take Symon, the Black participant who never knew his father, struggled through a failed marriage and menial jobs, but in the end with his second wife has formed a beautiful family and most astonishingly, they’ve been foster parents for over one HUNDRED children from Africa, the Caribbean and all over the world. The lonely kid we saw in the care home at age 7 has become a father figure to dozens. Now that’s a good life well lived.
The Up series is not flashy, like a lot of reality shows with their incessant jump-cuts and bombastic music and manufactured conflicts. And binge-watching the entire series in one go isn’t really recommended, as there’s a lot of repetitive clips shared over and over again (drink every time you hear teenage Tony’s discourse on how to treat women, or see Neil walking along lonely landscapes in Scotland).
While we did rewatch a lot of the series this week before the grand finale 70 Up, the best way to watch the Up saga ideally was to catch it every seven years, and savour the feel of the calendar pages flipping over in real time.
But most of all, the Up series gets you thinking an awful lot about your own life as it unspools. What would a 14 Up, a 28 Up, a 49 Up have said about me? I look in the mirror and would like to think I’m the same person I was at 21, but what would the camera truly show, in seven-year increments – and the choices we make and the things that happen to us?
The late Nick Hitchon might have been my favourite of the cast – the clever, philosophical farm boy from the Dales who became a highly regarded international physicist and teacher, defying Apted’s ideas that class background is everything. He battled throat cancer for years, and it’s unbearably sad to see him so shrunken and in pain in his final interview, recorded just three days before he died in 2023. And yet it’s profound, too, because Nick was always good at seeing the bigger picture of what Up was trying to accomplish, with his scientific eye. He is scared, but he is grateful.
“You know how you see this time-lapse photography of a flower, and, you know, it blossoms and then fades away and so on? And it’s amazing to see a flower grow and then decay in a couple of minutes.
“Well, seeing that with a person is also amazing because we don’t see that. We’re so busy seeing the day-to-day life of a person that we don’t see the big picture of how they change over time.” – Nick Hitchon
The Up series has given us a dozen or more human flowers to follow most of their lives, and for that, I’m glad. I can’t imagine we’ll ever see anything else quite like it again.
Godzilla has been smashing buildings and blasting fools for more than 70 years now, but in my heart, I still consider him to be kind of a giant green goofball.
Godzilla certainly can be used seriously – in the unbeatable stark Cold War paranoia of the 1954 original, or the Oscar-winning kaiju-as-art masterpiece of Godzilla Minus One, for instance. But the Godzilla mythos is at its heart a world of monsters and men and aliens, the weirder the better.
The original Showa Era films through the ’60s and ’70s settled into a kid-friendly monster mash of Godzilla tossing buildings at King Kong, battling smog monsters and giant robot versions of himself. They were colourful pulp kaiju delights. Later Godzilla movies on into the 1990s and early 2000s would get slightly less silly, but for every too-serious take like the 2014 Godzilla reboot, there’s been a Godzilla Vs Kongwith monsters punching each other out on aircraft carriers.
Over in comic books, Godzilla has been taken to many strange new worlds and lately it’s gotten more bizarre than ever, with things like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic antihero Jay Gatsby bulking up and leading an anti-Godzilla task force. I’m here for it.
Godzilla’s first extended stay in the comics was the very fun 1977 Godzilla, King of The Monsters which ran 24 issues with classic Hulk artist Herb Trimpe drawing the big dude bashing his way around the Marvel universe. As the series went on, Godzilla took on the Avengers and Fantastic Four, got sent back in time to meet Devil Dinosaur and, in quite possibly his finest hour, was shrunk down to mouse size by Pym Particles.
That storyline was capped by the unforgettable spectacle of a slowly growing man-sized Godzilla in a trenchcoat, hissing his way through New York City alleyways. It’s a darned fun series that might be my highlight from the mighty Marvel age of licensed comics.
Another epic slice of kitsch was the 1990s one-shot Godzilla Vs Barkley, which yes, had Godzilla playing basketball against an embiggened Charles Barkley. Weird Godzilla comics went kind of dormant after that, but the success of the Monsterverse and Japanese Godzilla movies means new Godzilla comics have been flying out faster than Godzilla’s nuclear breath.
I’ve usually been a bit bored by more traditional Godzilla comics. Watching two monsters bash each other on the printed page can’t be as explosive as seeing them on the screen, really. The best Godzilla comics for me have always been the ones that have taken our lizardy hero and thrown him into all kinds of silly hijinks.
The newest Godzilla comics being published by Marvel aren’t quite masterpieces, but I’ve admired their all-in excess as Godzilla progressively smashes everyone in the Marvel Universe, then breaks out across the cosmos in a multiverse-spanning insane war for the fate of existence itself. I’m pretty sick of multiversal shenanigans like everyone else these days, but I forgave it all when I gazed upon the campy delight that was a Wolverine-Godzilla mash-up … who rather stupidly is called “Weapon’Zilla” when “Godzill-verine” is RIGHT THERE.
The Justice League has also fought Godzilla, of course, and the Avengers, X-Men and Hulk have all taken on Godzilla and other monsters in the past few years. The quality of these stories is all over the place, but I generally admire their sense of play. In a comics ecosystem where I’ve gotten pretty tired of endless “dark” reinventions of Spider-Man and Batman and the like, I’m quite game for seeing King Kong battle Batman.
I can’t even keep up with the flood of Godzilla comics these days, but I like sampling the particularly offbeat ones, like James Stokoe’s magnificently drawn eerie Godzilla In Hell. Godzilla Heist adds the monster to an Ocean’s 11-style romp, while Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons does a cool little riff on the monster’s appearance in the 1500s during the age of exploration. Not all of these are played for laughs, but they play with the concept of Godzilla in fun new ways – after all, the big guy might well have been around for centuries, eh?
The highlight for me is the delightfully insane Godzilla’sMonsterpiece Theatre series spearheaded by quirky indie comics creator Tom Scioli, which has pushed Weirdzilla Lit as far as it can go – did you ever wonder how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby might change if you tossed in a kaiju to add to Nick Carraway’s poetic jazz age musings, and while you were at it, perhaps added in Sherlock Holmes and a cyborg version of Jules Verne to the mix?
Other recent Monsterpiece crossovers have included Dracula, the Odyssey, the War of the Worlds and perhaps my favourite, Romeo and Juliet and Godzilla. Forsooth! What kaiiju through yonder window breaks?
It’s immensely silly to drop Godzilla into William Shakespeare, of course, but that’s kind of the point – the monster is the x-factor, sent to Dracula’s Transylvania or meeting Robin Hood and seeing what happens.
The joke is dangerously close to being pushed further than it can bear, I guess – “Godzill-verine” might be a kaiju too far – but in a time when comics are constantly cannibalising themselves and their history anyway, having a little random giant lizard action in that churning content machine gives me back that sense of fun a lot of current comics lack.
The next Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre book is called “the Kaiju Of Oz.” You’d better believe I’ll be there, just to see what kind of havoc Godzilla wreaks on that old Yellow Brick Road.
Tim Curry had a wonderful career full of offbeat acting, but for many of us, he’ll always be Dr. Frank N. Furter.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show just marked its 50th birthday last year, and what many fans may not realise is it’s got small-town New Zealand embedded deep in its DNA, thanks to its creator and co-star Richard ‘Riff Raff’ O’Brien. O’Brien emigrated to New Zealand from the UK as a kid and grew up around Tauranga and Hamilton, and the kind of greyish conformity of life down under in the 1950s is exactly what Rocky Horror is rebelling against.
Tim Curry had been in poor health for years, but his leaving recently at age 80 still hit hard. I went to a memorial screening of Rocky Horror on the weekend at Hollywood Avondale – the midnight showings there in the ‘70s and ‘80s are apparently still New Zealand’s longest running movie of all time. It’s the spiritual home of Rocky Horror in Auckland – my last time seeing it on the big screen there about six years back featured Richard O’Brien himself telling stories and introducing the movie, which was a rare treat.
I’m somewhat impressed by those who can watch it every week in their own personal mad carnival, but I find catching a live Rocky Horror every 5 years or so is enough for me. I have to overcome my natural aversion to people yelling out shit in movie theatres, and there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Some jokes will land with an escalating wave of laughter, others will belly-flop to little notice. There is self-policing – at one screening, a guy who just started shouting gross obscenities every time Janet appeared on screen quickly got shushed up.
But I get a kick every time out of watching the joyful carnage of a good Rocky audience, dancing to the “Time Warp,” of the celebration of life itself. Whatever you want to be is OK here.
I have a different favourite Rocky Horror song all the time – I love Barry Bostwick’s stiffness in “Dammit Janet,” Susan Sarandon’s brazen awakening in “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me”, Meat Loaf’s swagger in “Hot Patootie,” O’Brien’s sinister slinky menace in “Time Warp” – but the last time I saw it, the dreamy haze of “Don’t Dream It, Be It” stuck with me the most.
Be what you want to be. Make it happen.
The first time I saw Rocky was in high school, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It wasn’t a chaotic screening, but there was a lot of yelling and throwing toilet paper and rice around. Yet something about it grabbed me – Curry’s beautifully odd Frank N. Furter, the cast of hunchbacks and nerds, and the ultimate beautiful message of letting your inner freak flag fly.
I copied a friend’s cassette of the movie soundtrack and listened to it endlessly, “Sweet Transvestite” and “Science Fiction/Double Feature” playing on a loop. I was boringly hetero and conventional in a lot of ways, but I also was an awkward weirdo, performing too often as the class clown and getting called a “fag” a lot by the jocks and assholes, and my heart was always with the theatre kids and the punks even though I never really dressed as cool as they did.
Curry’s defiant outcast who refused to be cast out was the patron saint for anyone who felt trampled on by dull conformity.
It wasn’t for everyone – I remember an attempt by me to impress a girl in college by popping a VHS tape of it on only to have it greeted with an increasingly chilly silence. (To be honest, watching it on home video for the first time is a rookie mistake.)
Curry, of course, is the beating heart of Rocky Horror – while O’Brien’s songs are terrific, the movie itself kind of sputters along in low gear until Frank N. Furter’s dazzling entrance, still one of the most captivating character introductions of all time. His big mascara’d eyes pulse out of the screen like laser beams, his swaggering self-confidence, booming singing voice and purring line delivery redefined the straight world’s notion of beauty.
Sure, Rocky Horror has become big business over the decades – it was featured on Glee, for crying out loud – but still, the essential strangeness of the original movie remains intact. It’s, objectively, not a perfect movie, perhaps – the narrative is wonky, the filming sometimes painfully low-fi, and it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.
What always gets me about Rocky Horror isn’t so much the manic audience interaction, the costumes and the campiness – it’s actually the rising melancholy that slowly comes into focus, the loneliness of Frank N. Furter we start to see. For all the partying it’s a movie that ends with its star dead, its young romantic couple seemingly dead or dying and the “bad” guys getting away. It lulls you with catchy songs and then breaks your heart a little bit.
It says something about RockyHorror’s essential power that it still feels all like a triumph somehow, and that Curry’s beautiful, doomed decadent genius remains a shining light for so many people, and probably will for as long as we still watch movies.
Looney Tunes are, of course, the greatest cartoon characters in history. While bits of a dozen of the classic Bugs & Daffy shorts are taking up my headspace at any given time, can anyone even really remember a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck cartoon outside of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? (Comics, now that’s where Donald Duck truly soared.)
The Looney Tunes gang are messily human, flawed and mischievous, perhaps none of them more than good ol’ Wile E. Coyote.
The new Coyote Vs. Acme movie gives the long-suffering coyote his moment to shine, and it’s a hilarious, surprisingly moving celebration of the dogged predator who somehow never, ever gets his prey.
This movie nearly never came out at all, a saga which has been well described elsewhere but which is a perfect illustration of the film’s sneering takedown of corporate culture and soulless profiteering. It’s all about maintaining valuable IP, sure, but Coyote Vs. Acme bites the hand that feeds it a little bit too.
In tone, it’s an awful lot like a long-delayed sequel to the classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It could even be conceivably set in the same wacky cinematic universe, one where ‘toons and humans co-exist uneasily and where the cartoons are often being exploited unfairly.
Coyote Vs. Acme is a lot less frantic than other sloppy live/cartoon hybrid Looney tributes like the Space Jam movies. At times, it’s almost bracingly mature in some of its thinking – it’s hard to imagine a Minions or Super Mario Brothers cartoon including several references to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, or a central plot point being questioning a character’s essential purpose in life.
When I was a wee kid, I foolishly found the Wile E. Coyote / Road Runner cartoons a bit boring – those stark desert landscapes, the lack of dialogue, their repetitive nature – and it was only as I got a bit older I started to appreciate their inventiveness and wit. I realised you could tell the same story 1000 different ways and get a laugh every time.
“Nobody cares about the coyote!” – Buddy Crane
There’s plenty of madcap hijinks – human costars Will Forte and John Cena practically are living cartoons themselves, and many things get blown up, bizarre car chases happen and more. But the key to Coyote Vs. Acme’s success is that you actually do care about the coyote, and his twisted relationship with Road Runner. Wile E. is perhaps the most sympathetic of Looney Tunes, while still being an evil genius whose primary goal in life is to catch and eat his nemesis.
Coyote ain’t a good guy, but the real bad guy in Coyote Vs. Acme (and the movie’s real-life release saga) is the power of monolithic corporations, taking over every bit of our lives and obsessed with profit at any cost. …I feel like there might just be a bit of subtext in there about the world we live in circa 2026.
Another classic reimagining of Wile E’s story came in 1998’s Animal Man #5 by Grant Morrison, where the indefatigable coyote ‘Crafty’ becomes a kind of horror-movie monster, unable to die, unable to break the cycle of his cursed destiny. He’s ultimately a kind of ungainly messiah figure whose tragedy is that nobody ever understands him. That story definitely ain’t for kids, though.
Fortunately Coyote’s arc is less dark in the new movie, and one of its quietly optimistic joys is that Coyote is understood in the end, and he and that pesky Road Runner’s places in the universe make a demented kind of sense.
One of the central joys of the Looney Tunes is that they do basically do the same thing over and over in those classic shorts – Yosemite Sam rages, Elmer Fudd screws up, Daffy Duck blows a gasket and wily Bugs Bunny always escapes in the end, wisecracks ready to go.
Blowing himself up over and over again, getting crushed by giant anvils and rockslides and his body mangled in infinite ways, Wile E. Coyote might feel like a tragic figure – but one of the triumphs of Coyote Vs. Acme is how it shows us this gangly misfit, this evil genius, is actually kind of a plucky little hero despite it all.
Mel Brooks from the film “Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man!” (HBO Max via AP)
The lives of comedians are a funny subject for documentaries, but I find I can’t get enough of them.
Right now is a golden age for those of us who like long (sometimes very long) documentaries about classic ‘70s and ‘80s comedians. Just in the last year or two, films about Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, John Candy, Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase, Martin Short, Pee Wee Herman and probably a heap of others I’m missing have all stumbled onto centre stage.
Other great documentaries in the past several years have taken apart the careers of Robin Williams, Garry Shandling, George Carlin, Gilda Radner, Gene Wilder and so many more. Honestly, it’s easier to make a list of ‘70s/80s comedians who haven’t gotten a sprawling documentary look at their lives yet.
There’s a theory out there that explaining comedy ruins it, but I have always been weirdly interested in dissecting what exactly makes something funny.
Sometimes, these documentaries are about reinforcing what we already know – everybody loves plucky Martin Short, everyone has a story about what a jerk Chevy Chase can be, Steve Martin is so much more than a wild and crazy guy and Garry Shandling may have been the most neurotic man alive.
Yeah, there is sometimes too much reverence and not enough bite in these films. Comedy should sting a little bit, and so should documentaries about its makers.
And yet, I’m kind of here for them all.
I’ve grown to appreciate Martin Short’s guileless energetic charm more and more over time, andMarty: Life Is Short is the textbook example of showing us how comedians often come from the saddest possible circumstances but can turn that pain into a sword and shield. Short lost his parents and a brother before he was 20 years old – and later, his wife to cancer – and yet he’s forged a career being one of the most likeable men in show biz. “There were laughs,” he says at one point, reflecting on the darkest times in his life. “That’s the point.”
The recent John Candy documentaryI Like Me is haunted by Candy’s ridiculously sad early death at age 43, and often falls into the trap of telling, not showing, with maudlin footage of Candy’s funeral and sappy strings dominating until it loosens up and starts to show us exactly why Candy was so funny and loved. It’s a tricky thing – you want to show the ups and downs but if you tip too far into the sadness, your comedian documentary starts to feel more like a wake.
Still, a little bit of self-congratulatory backslapping also goes a long way, like the recent Being Eddie that fails to ask the hard questions about Murphy’s career. I don’t want a documentary that just feels like a tribute special. I want to know how these folks work. By far the best comedian documentaries are the ones which really rip away the public image to give you an idea how these people tick and how they think.
I’m Chevy Chase And You’re Notis actually one of the more effective documentaries I’ve seen lately, because it doesn’t hold back in examining Chase’s longstanding reputation as, well, a massive asshole. It features several brutal clips and stories that show Chase insulting peers, crossing the line between comedy and cruelty without actually being funny – but it also digs into the abusive childhood he lived through, and makes us realise nobody is truly 100 percent villain or hero, success or failure. It’s a canny look at an often off-putting, self-sabotaging man who still has made me laugh a lot over the years.
Documentaries have all their cliches – the random talking heads, the jittery home movie flashbacks and the standup performance videos. Sometimes they get too formulaic. Why do we need to have Ryan Reynolds’ opinion on Chevy Chase, for instance?
Several of them go very long, giving the creator of Spaceballs the same treatment you might give the American Civil War. Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, George Carlin and Pee Wee Herman all got two-part, nearly four-hour long deep dives. It may be excessive, but done right, I could watch this stuff all day.
Mel Brooks is a living treasure, turning 100 in a few weeks time, and The 99-Year-Old Man! is a loving tribute to a man who shaped comedy for me ever since I saw Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein flickering away on TV reruns. Nobody expected Brooks to last this long, but the 216-minute documentary shows us why he matters and is still vital, even if at times it feels sad to watch a man who one day won’t be with us, knowing when we lose Mel we’ll lose a lot. But we’ll always have the laughs.
Paul Reubens, aka Pee Wee Herman, didn’t make it past 70 years old, but as I’ve written before, Pee Wee As Himselfis one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in recent years. It reveals a lot about Paul Reubens’ art background and experimental work before Pee Wee became a blockbuster and patron saint for oddballs, and fills in the gaps on the private comedian’s personal life and loves.
There’s a fine balance to comedian documentaries. I mean, everyone’s story has the same sad end – people leave your life, then eventually you do, too – but comedians can show how you cope with that and even find the sprinkles of wit in the worst days. Comedian documentaries often tend to be tearjerkers in their final act despite all the funny clips – John Candy’s potential sadly cut short, Robin Williams’ tragic mental health struggles, or the images of aged, shrunken Mel Brooks at nearly a century, smiling away and cracking wise even as he becomes the last man standing from his friends and loves.
A good comedian documentary should make me laugh… but I don’t mind if it makes me choke back a tear or two as well, as long as it’s got a little of both, sugar and salt. Life is a funny thing, and it’s sometimes a sad thing. And a lot of the time, it’s everything all at once.
When I was an ’80s kid, I guzzled down all the sci-fi that was coming our way. Star Wars was king, of course, but I was also all about Flash Gordon, Battlestar Galactica, V, that scary adult Terminator and hell, even Manimal.
And then there was Star Trek – the original series reruns I saw struck my oh-so-worldly pre-teen self as a bit hokey and dated, so I didn’t really grow to appreciate them for years, but the Star Trek movies coming out were totally my bag. That golden run from 1982’s Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan to 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country remains some of my favourite Trek as mass entertainment.
It did strike me at the time that these guys were, well, a little old. Ancient by the standards of a 12-year-old. It’s only now that I’m about the same age as Captain Kirk was through his years of box office stardom that I realise that well, that was kind of the point.
Viewed again in a recent marathon, I was struck by how well most of the ‘80s Trek movie run holds up – and the sudden resonance they have for all us aging fanboys. The movies have their ups and downs but are overall a remarkably consistent series, even with the much-maligned Star Trek V in the mix.
I see now how much Star Trek II through VI are a story of aging and coming to terms with your own mortality, which sets them quite apart from classic young hero’s journey tales like Star Wars, Back To The Future or The Last Starfighter. There are no plucky teenagers here. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Chekhov, Sulu and Uhura brought a weight to the films, a sense of a long and shared universe, which was a bit of a novelty in a world without all the decades-on revivals and reboots we live in now.
The original Trek cast were all at least in their 50s by then, and DeForest Kelley’s craggy face, Leonard Nimoy’s gravitas and even Jimmy Doohan’s Scotty with his greying, gradually rounding figure were all a counterpoint to the smoother visages of a Tom Cruise or Michael J. Fox. A minor plot thread throughout involves James Kirk needing glasses – not exactly Bill and Ted.
Leaving the odd and rather too reverential slog of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture behind, the Trek journey of the 1980s was all about the old Enterprise crew, who started sailing in the stars in 1966, gradually saying goodbye. Familiar icons kept being broken down – they killed Spock! (he got better) they blew up the Enterprise! (they built a few new ones), Klingons aren’t the bad guys! (more or less)
Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan is often held up as the peak of Trek movies, and it’s still a dynamic, tense ride, mainly because of all the rules it breaks. Having a movie feature as its villain a one-shot nemesis from almost 20 years earlier shouldn’t work. Having the two leads, Kirk and Khan, never actually meet in person, shouldn’t work. Yet it’s all surprisingly adult and the often-maligned William Shatner gives one of his best performances here. Killing Spock, even if the pre-internet fans of 1982 figured they’d probably find a way to reverse it, felt as hardcore as Luke and Vader’s brutal confrontation at the end of Empire Strikes Back. (You can tell how well-crafted Khan is in how JJ Abrams basically spent an entire movie directing a flaccid attempt to equal its dramatic heft in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness.)
Star Trek III: The Search For Spock is seen as a comedown from Khan – what wouldn’t be? – but it’s still a personal favourite of mine. I vividly remember looking forward to this one in theatres after being hooked by Khan, and even picking up the nifty Burger King glasses (they all broke, very quickly). Search is a rockier ride as it has to get through a lot of plot mechanics, but any movie featuring Christopher Lloyd hamming it up as a Klingon, the startling destruction of the original Enterprise and the sudden blunt cruelty of the death of a son Kirk hardly knew makes up for a lot of the rather dippy Genesis stuff.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is the breath of fresh air after all the grimdark of Khan and Search, and while it’s precision entertainment, on what probably was my 20th viewing the plot feels wobblier than ever (time travel is treated as casually as a ride to spacedock). Yet none of that matters when Kirk and crew start bopping around ‘80s San Francisco. While getting older is still a theme (it’s amusing how awkward and uncool they all seem in ‘modern’ SF) the bonds of long-lasting friendship also play a bit part in how amiable the movie is. If this were Star Trek I, it wouldn’t have the easy confidence it does, but we know these guys by now, and they’re a fun hang.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, unfortunately, fails to really get past impulse speed. It was a William Shatner vanity project – Shatner wanted to direct, after Nimoy directed the previous two big hits, but the movie feels like a cobbled together original series episode, and not one of the good ones. It’s not without merit – the easy camaraderie of the crew sings and the opening Yosemite shore leave sequence is delightful, even if being asked to believe 50-something Kirk could REALLY scale El Capitan pushes all belief. The story is yet another “what if we met God?” ham-handed religious allegory, and while it has potential, massive budget cuts derailed any chance for spectacle. You can feel the energy draining out of the movie as it goes. Trek movies would be worse – as mentioned, the cold calculating manipulativeness of Into Darkness offends me deeply – but this is still a big stumble.
While I love Khan, Voyage and my underrated Search, these days I feel like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country might actually be the gem of the whole lot. I love the Cold War paranoia of it all, the cosmic politics and the way Kirk’s simmering resentment towards the Klingons isn’t sugar-coated. It’s a romping ride that opens up the story to a wider universe than the rather closed-off feeling of the other movies, where Starfleet is rarely central to Kirk’s own dramas. There’s so many little joys in this one – Christopher Plummer’s hammy Shakespeare-quoting Klingon, Spock turning starship detective, Kirk looking all of his 60 years pushing through the pain of exile on a frozen prison planet and in the end, a charming farewell to this crew as the Enterprise crew finally steps aside for other bold voyagers.
Watching the films all again from an age closer to where the Trek crew was then, that theme of time, regret and acceptance hits a lot harder than any laser beam, really. When even a James T. Kirk, who’s seen and done it all, has regrets and missed hopes about how it’s all turned out, who needs his glasses and misses his kid, it makes him realer to me, a more authentic kind of hero than the operatic scope of something like Anakin Skywalker’s overwrought rise and fall.
Sure, we got glimpses of the original crew after these movies – Nimoy’s powerful return as Spock a few times, Jimmy Doohan getting a terrific episode of Next Generation to send off Scotty, and Kirk hamming his way into a mixed farewell in the cluttered Star Trek: Generations. There’s only three of the original crew left now, Shatner, Koening as Chekhov and Takei as Sulu, and while 95-year-old Shatner probably would be happy to take the captain’s chair one last time, their era is truly over now.
Star Trek belonged on the big screen in the 1980s, really. Star Trek: The Next Generation did kick off in 1987, and while it took a little while for that show to find its way, by the third season in late 1989, it started becoming ultimately the best of the Star Trek TV series, although their movies never quite lived up to that standard. None of that would’ve happened without the veteran middle-aged heroes of Kirk and crew paving the way for Star Trek’s real-life Genesis rebirth moment. Not bad for a bunch of old guys.
Frankenstein’s Monster is dead, but he’ll also really never die.
I love it when a character hits the cultural level of a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, and can be endlessly reinvented for new eras.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride is the latest reimagining of the bones of Mary Shelley’s tale, a wild, anarchic creation myth and love story. It’s as loose and freaky as major Hollywood productions ever get these days, and while it’s sure to be divisive, I kind of loved it.
Very loosely retelling the events of Bride of Frankenstein in the 1930s, Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley gives a delightfully unhinged performance as a new “Bride” to Christian Bale’s wounded and lonesome Frankenstein’s monster. The Bride at times feels as rough and patched together as the monster himself, but that’s what charmed me – it tells something new by stitching together ghostly possession, a screwball musical, a blood-spattered romance and a Bonnie and Clyde-style violent lovers on the run arc.
The monster and his bride tear through polite society, and while the plot is sprawling and doesn’t always add up, terrific turns by Bale, Buckley and Annette Bening as this movie’s “mad doctor” work well. A truly insane homage dance number to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is the most audaciously strange scene I’ve seen so far this year. This one’s for the sickos, and I’m proud to be among them.
I’m here for all the Frankensteins, to be honest, right on down to campy ‘60s kaiju romp Frankenstein Conquers The World and the ultra-sleazy Frankenhooker.
There remains endless potential in the story of man creating life, and how it (usually) all goes horribly wrong.
We’re only a few months from the last great Frankenstein movie, Guillermo Del Toro’s Gothic Oscar-nominated epic of an adaptation of Shelley’s novel with a committed and curiously sexy performance by Jacob Elordi as the monster. That one is as overwrought and passionate as The Bride, but in a completely different way. Those great lonesome Arctic chase sequences – always my favourite part of the original novel – sparkle on the big screen.
A rough Google estimate tells me there’s been close to 500 spins on the Frankenstein story. Boris Karloff set the standard, of course, and his performance, closing in on a century ago now, remains the template for investing the monster with both humanity and menace. Christopher Lee played the creature as a hurt, abused animal, with melting-egg makeup that seemed startlingly grotesque in 1957’s Hammer production The Curse of Frankenstein – then followed by a half-dozen more Hammer movies that totally reimagined the creature’s story each time, even as a woman and once as a New Zealand wrestler with the world’s worst makeup job.
Every era has its Frankenstein – splattery gore from Andy Warhol in the ‘70s, kid-friendly spoofs like The Monster Squad in the 1980s, bombastic excess like Kenneth Branagh’s 1990s take. I like the weirder angles, like Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Bound from 1990 that throws time travel and metafiction into the mix.
I’m even fascinated by the schlocky look of 1910’s Frankenstein by Edison Studios, the first adaptation of the creature’s story done in a mere 16-minute silent film, with Charles Stanton Ogle as a shaggy, deformed monster that’s memorably bizarre. A mere 116 years old now, it’s more of a curio than a successful film, but it sets the template for many a Frankenstein story in the century-plus since.
And that doesn’t even get into the non-film realms, like DC Comics turning Frankenstein’s monster into a kind of immortal holy warrior, queer fiction imaginings like Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein and the novel and movie of Gods And Monsters, or modern-day parables like Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad.
The Bride builds on all these flocks of Frankensteins, and Gyllenhaal’s weird delight of a film embraces the shimmering fluid identities of the monsters – her romantic duo are alternately enraged and peaceful, needy and fiercely independent. I expect The Bride is the kind of movie a lot of people will hate, and it’s certainly not flawless, but it’s brave in its own weird way.
For a book that came out 208 years ago, Shelley’s Frankenstein is still remarkably futile ground for birthing all kinds of stories about mankind’s hopes and dreams, and nightmares.
