movies – Page 2 – Nik Dirga

Getting lost in Jim Henson’s ‘Labyrinth’, 36 years on

I’m old enough to remember that Labyrinth was actually kind of a flop when it opened in theatres in 1986, but I recall that I still somehow managed to watch it three times there before it faded away.

I don’t want to be that guy, but I was into Labyrinth before it was cool, man.

Jim Henson’s film is a swirling strange dream of a movie, with a grandly absurd David Bowie as the Goblin King and young Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, a girl who accidentally loses her baby brother to the goblins’ realm and has to get him back. I loved it as a kid, and still adore it as an adult, but with a very different perspective on it all now.

Watching Labyrinth over the weekend on the big screen at the glorious Hollywood Avondale for the first time in decades, it still seems to me a beautifully askew little fairy tale. All fairy tales are written by adults, and all fairy tales on some level are about the end of childhood.

Several years ago, I watched Labyrinth for the first time in ages and it didn’t land as well – it felt a bit clumsy and halting on a small screen. I realise now that the big screen is a far better venue for Henson’s imagination, where you can appreciate the dazzling CGI-free puppet work and intricate set designs, where Bowie’s haughty sneer and Connelly’s unforced sincerity seem stronger, realer. The puppet characters are a quirky joy, especially the hulking Ludo and my favourite, the frantic Sir Didymus.

It’s also all proudly weird, which I think is what appealed to me as a teenager – from distorted goblin designs to the cavern full of sentient hands to the creepy Fireys dancing with their separated body parts, it doesn’t feel very Disney-fied like so many young adult fantasies. Bowie takes a character that could be ridiculous (that wig!) and makes him charismatic – it’s hard to imagine possible alternative casting like Sting or Mick Jagger being quite so effective.

Bowie’s mournful songs and Trevor Jones’ score are all more adult and yearning than most kid-movie soundtracks, with Bowie’s “Within You” one of his most underrated, intense love songs. The sexual subtext of Sarah’s coming of age is right up in your face as an adult, because honestly, you don’t cast David Bowie and put him in rather tight leotards without expecting some kind of reaction, do you?

At the time, Labyrinth was not a success. It barely opened in the box office top 10 in June 1986, beaten by the likes of Top Gun and Karate Kid (franchises that were of course, never heard from again). In Bowie’s career, it was considered part of the long post-Let’s Dance slump that included pre-grunge band Tin Machine and Never Let Me Down. (I disagree, of course, and Bowie’s firm willingness to reinvent himself makes this era stronger in hindsight.)

Yet somehow, Labyrinth endured. Part adult reverie, part teenage girl fantasy, part childhood toy-filled romp, Labyrinth still sits uncertainly next to the likes of Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. Sarah’s final rejection of the Goblin King still has power – “Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave,” he tells her. She knows better, and chooses her own path. The King’s somewhat twisted affections are rejected.

There’s been talk over the years of sequels, prequels or sidequels to Labyrinth. Frankly, I really do hope it never happens. We’ve a tendency to wring out that ‘80s intellectual property until it’s exhausted, and the intimate pre-digital charm of Labyrinth can only be diluted by shoving it through the unquenchable content machine.

There is more sadness in watching Labyrinth now than there was when I was a teenager, at the other end of the telescope – sadness that the campy, imperious Bowie is gone, that Jim Henson’s dream of puppets ended too young, that we all, in the end, grow up. But there’s also joy, in knowing you were there, once, and nothing can erase the memories of the labyrinth of getting from there to here.

After 204 years, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still haunts us

The thing about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is it’s not the story you think it is.

Mary Shelley was only a teenager when she wrote the book that has led some to call her “the inventor of science fiction.” At the very least, she certainly helped create some foundations for it. However, if you’ve binged on old Boris Karloff movies and are expecting Frankenstein the novel to be the same animal, you’re likely to be a bit befuddled.

The book has a rather average 3.8-star rating on GoodReads, with critics saying it’s “like watching paint dry” and “tedious.” Published in 1818, it does get off to a somewhat slow start, with a series of nesting first-person narratives from an Arctic ship captain, then Victor Frankenstein, and then finally the monster itself. There’s not a lot of what we jaded 2022 folk would call “action” and a lot of flowery romantic language.

But once you abandon expectations of a silent Karloff-ian zombie lurking in the shadows and Colin Clive shrieking “It’s alive!”, Frankenstein is still a pretty remarkable book which I return to every few years. It turned 200 years old just a few years back, so keep in mind its voice is almost closer to the era of Shakespeare than it is 2022. It is a novel of ideas and debate, rather than straight horror, although god knows plenty of horrible things happen to Victor Frankenstein and his creation.

The first time I “read” Frankenstein was in one of those adapted great works of literature children’s books, which stripped the story down to the essentials and ran some evocative illustrations to go with it. These days, my go-to version of Frankenstein is one with utterly gorgeous macabre drawings by the late, great Bernie Wrightson to go with Shelley’s text. More than some classic novels, I’ve always felt like Frankenstein cries out for a little art to complement the wordy text.

Like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it’s another classic horror book that is quite different in tone than its many adaptations. So much of our image of what “Frankenstein” is comes from James Whale’s 1931 film – which I utterly adore, don’t get me wrong. Even the idea that the monster itself is somehow actually called “Frankenstein” emerged from those old Universal films. (In the books, he refers to himself as Adam at least once.)

The bones of Shelley’s story still stick with me years later. When I first read it, I was obsessed by the image of Frankenstein chasing his monster across the Arctic wastes that frames Shelley’s story, the idea of monster and creator pursuing each other into the frozen wastelands throughout eternity. I love Shelley’s questing monologues for the Creature, who is the polar opposite of Karloff’s silent, mournful monster. The Creature is violently angry at the world that scorned him but also gorgeously descriptive about his cursed place in it: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”

One of the most notable things about reading Frankenstein the novel is how all the scientific explanations for the monster’s creation we are so used to don’t appear at all. There’s no Igor, no labs filled with lightning, only a hint of grave-robbing. Shelley is almost coy about how the monster came to be, dismissing the technical details within a sentence or two. She is more interested in the question of duality – are monsters made, or are they created by the world’s reaction to them? The spark her book lit has fuelled a thousand other interpretations and expansions of her dark tragedy.

Hollywood has taken many, many swings at the Frankenstein story in the past century but never quite captures the book. Kenneth Branagh’s overwrought 1994 film has its moments of fidelity, but still piles on laboratories sparking and its campy excess misses the book’s haunted, spartan tone.

But I’m happy with that. There’s many great Frankenstein movies out there, but the novel that birthed all these monsters is very much its own animal, two centuries old now and still filled with wonder and horror and mystery about the world around us.

Movies I Have Never Seen #19: Megaforce (1982)

What is it: Forty years ago, children around the world lined up to celebrate the greatest cinematic experience of their time. They played with the toys, they read the storybooks, they dove into the rich fictional world. Unfortunately for the creators of the 1982 flop Megaforce, it wasn’t their world, but that of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The strange, toy-etic action flick Megaforce was part of a weird wave of would-be early ‘80s sci-fi franchises that were blatantly ripping off elements of Star Wars and Mad Max. Somewhere, a world exists where movies like this and its kinfolk Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn and Krull received multiple sequels. It isn’t this one.

The plot of Megaforce, such as it is, is about a futuristic UN-esque peacekeeping agency who ride around on motorbikes and dune buggies and fight a vaguely stereotypical foreign gang. Our star is none other than a wild-eyed Barry Bostwick of Rocky Horror and Spin City fame, perhaps the last actor on earth you’d cast as your leading man in a post-apocalyptic action flick. With a headband harnessing grand flowing locks of ‘80s hair and beard and a skintight shiny uniform that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination, Bostwick’s awesomely named Ace Hunter is indeed a sight to behold. And that doesn’t even get into the flying motorbike scene featured at Megaforce’s climax, perhaps the film’s finest moment of sheer kitsch.

Why I never saw it: Wait, was it ever even in theatres? Or home video? Megaforce kind of sank from the world, the only evidence it existed comic-book ads, an Atari videogame and a line of tie-in vehicle toys that were mostly forgotten the moment they were released. It made less than $6 million worldwide and vanished. I might not have even clocked Megaforce’s existence if it weren’t for an onslaught of comic book ads for it in 1982. I’ve already written about how 1982 was my year of comics awakening, and you couldn’t pick up an issue of Star Wars or Marvel Team-Up without seeing Megaforce’s cheery manly ad on the back cover with a pumped-up Bostwick and the slogan “Deeds, Not Words” staring at you. Why, you could even get a Megaforce Membership Kit for a mere $1.00! Years later, I finally set out to find out what the fuss was all about.

Does it measure up to its rep? It had talent, in theory – director Hal Needham was behind Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run, so he knew how to make movies about loud cars and broad characters. But Megaforce is on the more dismal end of non-starter sci-fi cheapies of the early ‘80s (I’ve got a soft spot for Krull, I admit). Most of the movie is about explaining what Megaforce is, leading up to and training for the underwhelming battles, and enjoying Barry Bostwick’s luxurious hair. Bostwick brings a jovial energy to the movie that the story never rises to meet. Co-star Persis Khambatta (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) makes Bostwick look like Laurence Olivier and the rest of the cast are generic action stereotypes. The motorcycle battles – endless – get boring very quickly and nothing much really happens in Megaforce. There’s no stakes, no emotion, no sense of the wider world, just a few glimmers of the cheesy masterpiece it could’ve been if Ace Hunter had been allowed to really cut loose.

Worth seeing? To be honest… no, unless you’re in a very particular sort of mood and crave a particular sort of guilty pleasure. Maybe it’s just finally catching up 40 years later to seeing what that omnipresent comic book ad was all about. Even for a bomb, Megaforce doesn’t maintain the kitsch heights of The Room or Battlefield Earth. But … despite the slapdash storytelling, the long stretches where nothing much happens, the unforgettable sight of Barry’s Bostwick in too-tight tan spandex … there’s something I find kind of adorable about Megaforce and its willingness to fail big. Deeds, not words, indeed.

Back on the big screen: New Zealand International Film Festival

Life isn’t entirely normal yet, and may not be for a while, but at least I can go to film festivals again.

During the strictest of New Zealand’s lockdowns, cinemas were all shut down, and one big casualty the last few Covid-addled years has been the New Zealand International Film Festival, which suffered from cancellations, postponements and management problems in 2020 and 2021.

Ever since I moved here in 2006, NZIFF has been a highlight of the calendar year, a time when Auckland gets to pretend it’s the centre of the cinematic universe for a week or so and enjoy the buzziest hits from Cannes, amazing revival classics and hidden gems that change your brain. I’ve watched dozens and dozens of NZIFF movies over the last 16 years, and I missed it dearly in these Covid days.

This year’s festival isn’t quite up to full speed compared with the before times – it is shorter and smaller – but I still managed to catch several great films this week mostly at Auckland’s legendarily awesome Civic Theatre, the best place in New Zealand to watch a movie.

I love my Marvel cinematic universe and all that jazz, but a well-curated film fest is a whole different vibe, one that engages new parts of the brain. It celebrates the communal joys of art, too – at a time when doing anything as a community feels a bit fraught, it’s good to be reminded there are benefits to it.

I would’ve liked to fit more in my schedule, but only four movies made the cut for me this year. I watched an intimate and witty documentary on the late great author, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time; South Korean icon Park Chan-Wook’s exquisitely crafted twisty romantic detective thriller Decision To Leave; the harrowing and weirdly life-affirming documentary about two married volcanologists Fire Of Love, and this year’s Cannes Palme D’Or winner, the scabrously funny, filthy Swedish satire Triangle of Sadness.

Triangle of Sadness is a divisive movie among the critics but in a packed gorgeous old cinema, this barbed attack on influencer culture and the privilege of the wealthy felt like a perfect film festival experience. A story of two young and vapid gorgeous people who end up on a cruise ship that turns into a Lord of the Flies-esque fiasco complete with plentiful vomiting and even worse, it’s not subtle. It’s not a deep satire, and it might be a little long. Yet its outraged, shouty and impotent tone somehow seems to mirror the weirdness that is life in 2022. It’s the movie for the moment, as we’re all a little bit stuck in our own personal cruise ship voyages from hell. In the end, you have to laugh about how absurd everything is, don’t you?

Without a film festival to gather up all the visions of the world, from South Korean noir to Swedish ennui, it’d be a bit harder to see these things, these perspectives. To be in a crowded cinema (mostly mask-wearing, thankfully) and laughing and gasping over the world together seems a bit naughty, a bit daring these days.

I missed that vibe, and even if the crises roiling the world are hardly over, it feels good to laugh together, for a moment, at a film festival.

What’s up, doc? Why Looney Tunes never get old

Like any child in the pre-internet era, I spent an awful lot of time watching cartoons. I watched the good, the bad and the ugly.

I’d watch Flintstones and Jetsons, Woody Woodpecker and G.I. Joe, Super Friends and Yogi Bear. A lot of the worst featured sub-par animation where only characters’ mouths moved jerkily, or backgrounds that appeared to be made on a rusty photocopier.

Always in the top tier, of course, were Disney and Warner Brothers. Disney made some ground-breaking, amazing animation, and set the standard. But when it comes to the best – the toons that make you feel glad to be on this planet, the ones you’d watch again and again – I’m a Looney Tunes man through and through.

Even as a kid, I knew that the half-hour or so of vintage Looney Tunes cartoons that played weekday afternoons were something special.

As I limp my way into mid-middle age, I still find comfort in binging a handful of Warner Bros’ seven-minute gems, still as hilarious and free-wheeling as they were decades ago. Time has rubbed some of that rebellious edge off the Looney Tunes – I know there have been cartoons starring them since the original run ended in 1969, but watching Bugs play basketball with NBA stars just ain’t the same to me as having him run rings around Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck in the “rabbit season” trilogy. The originals remain the peak of the animation form and a showcase for sheer mad creativity.

Bugs is always funny, Daffy is reliably explosive, Porky amiably daft, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner Shakespearean in their eternal struggle, and even Foghorn Leghorn’s blowhard act raises a chuckle from me. (Let’s not talk too much about Speedy Gonzales or Pepe Le Pew, though.) There’s a lot of formula and a few bucketloads of caffeinated frenzy over the 900 or so Looney Tunes, of course, and I heartily recommend only watching a half-dozen or so in one sitting lest all the ACME equipment and carrot-chewing permanently liquify your brain.

But watching some of these cartoons for the 10th or 20th time in my life, I’m struck the most these days by the sheer hand-hewn artistry of them all. Pixar and its computer-generated toon spawn have entertained and delighted us all too, but there is something tangible and awe-inspiring about watching the OG toons, where every single line was drawn by a probably chain-smoking, squinting human being.

Animation is a form where innovation led to an explosion of energy, Reid Mitenbuler writes in his highly entertaining recent history of the early years of the form, Wild Minds.

Walt Disney became the biggest household name, but the likes of Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Mel Blanc, Frank Tashlin and many more shaped the anarchic spirit of animation and shook up Disney’s tendency for stuffiness. The Looney Tunes may have been repetitive – coyote chases road runner, hunter chases duck, cat chases bird – but it was the ceaseless creative invention around the margins of these blueprints that still amuses today.

To get a real feeling for the artistry of these gents, watch some of a Looney Tunes cartoon some time frame by frame. (You can pull one up on YouTube and pause it, then press the “.” key to do just that.)

It’s astonishing to watch the carefully hand-drawn antic life in these drawings, more than 50 years on. No short-cuts, none of that partial animation that made my childhood “Super Friends” toons seem so static. In motion, these moments sometimes pass so quickly they’re as zippy as the Tasmanian Devil.

That didn’t stop the geniuses from labouring over every single line and contorted facial expression. Frozen in time, you see the craft that went into it all. That’s what makes them art.

Movies I Have Never Seen #18: Foxy Brown (1974)

What is it: Foxy Brown is one of a series of blaxsploitation films starring Pam Grier in the early 1970s, which directly inspired her being cast as the star in Quentin Tarantino’s excellent noir, 1997’s Jackie Brown. Grier is Foxy, who’s got a cop boyfriend and a drug dealer brother. When the brother snitches out her boyfriend to the gangs, Foxy sets out for revenge in top blaxsploitation style. Foxy goes undercover with a prostitution ring (!) to avenge her losses, but things go south and she’s captured and brutalised. But when Foxy makes her move to escape, things get very bloody very quickly as the bodies pile up.

Why I never saw it: Blaxsploitation is a tricky genre to watch in 2022. You either roll with it, enjoy some of the camp/kitsch value and accept it as a portrait of the times, or you’re kind of horrified by the casual racism, sexism and violence. I do love a gritty, sleazy ‘70s crime movie, though, and where blaxsploitation stood out from more mainstream fare like The French Connection is in casting Black actors in the leading roles, making stars out of previously marginalised figures like Shaft’s Richard Roundtree, Fred Williamson or Jim Brown. Grier was the star of several of several major movies of the era, and Tarantino himself called her cinema’s first female action star. On the other hand, I’m a middle-aged American-born white guy, so it’s not quite my place to wade too deeply into the ambiguities of what blaxsploitation meant. It provided some strong Black heroic figures on screen, but also saddled them in crime- and drug-drenched movies that wallowed in a lot of stereotypes.

Does it measure up to its rep? Grier’s Foxy is a typical Death Wish-styled exploitation movie archetype – the gentle person who turns into a murderous killer. Unfortunately, that means in Foxy Brown the lead suffers some horrendous abuse, including being injected with heroin and raped by thugs. The queasy hardcore intensity of those scenes viewed in modern times linger and make it a bit harder to enjoy when Foxy tears loose and has her revenge. And trust me – she gets her revenge, notably in a remarkably gory bit of retribution upon the leading white male villain at the climax. You don’t see this kind of revenge in Tom Cruise movies!

There’s a groovy aesthetic to Foxy Brown I can’t help but dig, from the James Bond-style opening credits to the way Grier shifts from demure girlfriend to striking leather-clad figure of vengeance, dazzling along the way with some very hip ‘70s fashion. Remember, in 1974, a Black woman fighting back on screen and taking vengeance against white men (at one point, mocking the genital size of a slimy white authority figure she entraps!) was a novelty. Grier dominates, but she’s helped by a cast including Antonio Fargas as her jittery backstabbing brother and a weirdly so-bad-its-good over-the-top turn by Kathryn Loder as the preening, sadistic leader of the drug syndicate. Foxy Brown is the better-remembered of Grier’s movies today, but it’s actually a quasi-sequel to a slightly less exploitive and rapey film, 1973’s Coffy.

Worth seeing? Remembering this almost-50-year-old movie is utterly an artefact of its time, sure. It’ll offend some viewers coming to it cold but it’s hard to imagine anyone not finishing this being a little bit impressed by Grier’s kick-ass warrior, even if you’re put off by the sleazier side of the storytelling. Coffy is the better movie, but perhaps Foxy Brown better sums up the messy, yet empowering allure of blaxsploitation even now – with Grier’s powerhouse performance, despite all the violence, rape and sexism, it’s still at its heart a movie about standing up for yourself in a crappy world and sticking it to the man – whoever and whatever that may be.

Hercules, the demigod who got Thor to loosen up

Look, I’m a New Zealander and a comics geek, so you better believe I’m excited to see homegrown talent Taika Waititi’s new Thor: Love And Thunder come out this week. And it looks set to expand the Marvel pantheon to the Greek gods, with Russell Crowe’s Zeus prominent in the trailers.

Where Zeus goes, will Hercules follow? Marvel Comics’ version of Hercules has always been simmering somewhere around the B-list, and while the demigod Hercules has been around for eons as mythology and heroic TV and movie character, the Marvel-fied version of him has yet to debut in the MCU.

I always kind of dug Marvel’s Hercules, who was a lot more relatable than Thor in the comics. He was a hard-drinking brawler who loved to share “the gift” (of combat!) with everyone he met.

It’s easy to forget now with Chris Hemsworth’s winningly loose performance as the God of Thunder, but Thor was a lot less bro-tastic in the comics at first. When he debuted, Thor spoke a lofty, faux-Shakespearean prose, and even had a secret identity of sorts, a human named Don Blake he was cursed to transform into regularly. Thor began to loosen up in the comics after decades, but for years he was kind of a dull stiff. I’ve grown to appreciate the epic scope of those early Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Thor adventures more, but when I first came to comics, Thor often seemed a boring straight man. It took the energy of creators like Walt Simonson, Dan Jurgens and Jason Aaron to give him some much-needed life.

To be honest, the MCU’s Thor owes a lot more of his character to Marvel’s Hercules. Thor’s stiffness was once a counterpoint to Hercules’ looseness, but if you squint now the characters are pretty similar.

Now, Hercules – he was a slightly dopey bro-god from the start, impulsive and always with a flagon of ale nearby, right from his first appearance wrestling with Thor. But there’s only so many roles for god/superhero characters even somewhere as big as the Marvel universe, so Hercules was mostly related to supporting turns in Thor as a frenemy pal, some memorable runs in The Avengers and even the awesomely odd mix of characters in the short-lived 1970s Champions superteam. He’s had a few brief solo series of his own, including an excellent relatively recent run by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lante.

But the first exposure I ever had to Marvel’s Hercules was Bob Layton’s superb 1982 miniseries, an offbeat comic odyssey that wasn’t quite like anything else Marvel was putting out at the time. Hercules: Prince of Power took place in the distant future, where a still-carousing Hercules is once again banished from Olympus by his angry father Zeus, and ends up heading to the stars and having galactic adventures. Liberated from the bonds of regular continuity, Hercules could have universe-changing escapades and there was a goofy freedom to it all. Palling around with robots and Skrulls, Herc showed that being a god was kind of fun.

Hercules: The Prince of Power was side-splittingly funny (name another comic that features Galactus getting drunk), but it also treated the demigod seriously. Perpetually immature, Hercules is still burdened by the weight of the years and his feats. In several sequel miniseries and graphic novels, Bob Layton proved one of Hercules’ finest chroniclers. At its heart the Hercules miniseries by Layton addressed the central question of godhood – what would it really be like to live forever? Would you learn anything or keep making the same mistakes over and over?

Marvel’s Hercules may or may not get a shot at wide cinematic universe fame at some point – hell, when She-Hulk, Rocket Raccoon and Ant-Man have all become household names, who knows? But I’d like to think he’s already had his impact, behind the scenes, by inspiring Thor to loosen the hell up.

Baz Luhrmann’s frantic Elvis shows why the King got his crown

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a delirious, caffeinated roller-coaster of a music biopic, taking the essence of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and shaking it up like a jug of Mountain Dew. It isn’t entirely true, nor does it try to be, but for much of its epic 159-minute running time, it’s vastly entertaining.

Like the director’s Moulin Rouge and Great Gatsby, Elvis is all about style and razzle-dazzle. It’s bold, loud and occasionally bad but it captures the kinetic shock of Elvis’ impact on pop culture better than any other biopic of the man has done. It’s about Elvis as legend, really, a fable imagining the life of the boy from Tupelo.

Luhrmann does cast an eye over the scope of Elvis’ brief 42 years on Earth, but in a fragmented, kaleidoscopic fashion. Like his Gatsby, Baz mixes in modern hip-hop and rock sounds to attempt to show a through-line from Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” to Doja Cat and Diplo. We flash back to Elvis’ impoverished boyhood, his love for Black music and his devil’s bargain with Colonel Tom Parker, the man who would guide – and some say crush the creativity out of – his career. We’ve seen Elvis slowly get reclaimed from the land of fat jokes the past decade or two, and Baz takes him seriously.

Elvis, a god-fearing mama’s boy, was also a precursor of punk rock – shaking up the system and terrifying the powers that be with his hip-shaking, lip-curling presence. Austin Butler at first seems a bit too pretty and polished to be Elvis, but he really grows on you, especially when he hits the stage for some utterly dynamic numbers. From his first appearances on the Louisiana Hayride to his comeback special to his final sad, dazed shows in Vegas, Luhrmann delivers astonishingly visceral recreations. There are moments when Butler’s on stage miming the King that I honestly couldn’t tell him and Presley apart.

Tom Hanks’s scenery-chewing Colonel is a love-it or hate-it creation, speaking in a strange whispery, sing-songy carny barker’s tone and draped in a distracting fat suit. And yet, I liked Hanks, because he understands that to play this character you’ve got to go campy and broad, to embrace the Mephistophelean hold that Parker had on Elvis. Whispering promises and lies like an Iago to Elvis’ Othello, in real life Parker was actually a Dutch native who fled to America under a cloud of scandal and reinvented himself as a huckster. (The excellent biography The Colonel by Alanna Nash goes far more into depth about who Parker really was, which the movie only really alludes to.)

If Elvis peaks during the astounding recreations of his musical numbers, it falters a bit during sappy family drama, and despite its length it tends to zip through the life story, dispatching his time in the Army and movie career in about five minutes. Nobody other than Elvis and the Colonel is given much depth in the movie (Priscilla Presley suffers particularly) and for all the gloss the rise-and-fall-and-rise drama of Elvis apes a million other cinematic biographies.

And this is a fable, make no mistake – Elvis painted as a victim and the less savoury parts of his character brushed aside. The movie leans into his appreciation and inspirations from Black music (which he did have, although the movie exaggerates that a little too much) and ignores questioning the questions that raises about authenticity. It acts as if he wasn’t also a huge fan of white country and gospel artists. I don’t think Elvis was a fierce racist as some do, but he was also very much a product of his time, dirt-poor Mississippi.

There’s a lot of fun-house distortion of history here, but I don’t think this film is trying to ape, say, the thoroughness of the definitive Elvis biography by Peter Guralnick. It’s all about the spectacle in the end, and that’s where Elvis truly delivers. I wouldn’t point this movie at anyone who wants a high-fidelity biography of the man, but if you want to imagine the impact he had, the seismic force of those wiggles and moans on stage almost 70 years ago now and why it still matters today, it’s not a bad place to start.

Movies I Have Never Seen #17: Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

What is it: Today, of all days, you know who this guy is. He’s the hockey mask-wearing serial killer who starred in about a jillion gory movies between 1980 and 2003 or so (to be precise, 10 Friday the 13th movies, one reboot, and one “team-up” with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger). The sixth instalment, Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, is the charmingly low-key story of a boy with a dream … a dream which involves killing lots of teenagers.

Why I never saw it: To be blunt, Jason scared me. I was an ‘80s horror movie buff – I loved Nightmare On Elm Street, even the awful ones, and it’s not unfair to say that David Cronenberg’s The Fly changed my life. I grooved on The Lost Boys and The Thing. Yet, for years, I was repelled and a little freaked out by the Jason movies, which were culturally everywhere in the ‘80s – parodied in Mad magazine, homaged by other movies, et cetera. Jason was of course a bit of a rip-off of John Carpenter’s Halloween and its own stalking silent killer Michael Myers, but there was something even more bleak and disturbing about his hockey-masked visage – a blank white canvas with staring eye-holes where a soul might be. He lacked the elegance of a Dracula or the pathos of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. All he did was kill. I even remember seeing the paperback adaptation of Jason Lives sitting on the racks in our local Kmart as a kid, where I’d flip through the pages each time I saw it – figuring it was less horrifying than seeing the movies themselves. These movies seemed more terror than horror to me – I like my horror movies with a dollop of wit in there, and sight unseen, the reputation of the Jason movies is that they were brutal, nihilistic gore-fests without the cheesy parody that made Freddy Krueger or Evil Dead II a bit more, well, loveable.

Does it measure up to its rep? Do the Friday the 13th movies have a rep, outside of horror aficionados? It turns out, years later, some of them aren’t really all that bad, although I’ve still only seen a handful of them – and I’m fond of the weirder later entries like the insanely over-the-top Freddy Vs Jason monster mash, or the absurdist “let’s just send the serial killer into space in the future, then” comedy of Jason X. But to see Jason in his pure, summer camp ghoul element, you’ve got to go back a bit. The Friday The 13th series has a weird chronology – Jason himself barely appears in the first one and doesn’t don that iconic hockey mask until Part III. For the next several sequels, the pattern was set – Jason returns, kills a lot, is defeated by some spunky teenager. By the time Part VI rolled around in ’86, the series was evolving from a creepy, somewhat human knife killer and the rather unstoppable demonic figure that Jason became by Jason X. If you’re imagining what a Friday the 13th movie might be like, then starting with Part VI isn’t actually a bad place to go.

Worth seeing? “Some folks sure got a strange idea of entertainment,” the town drunk mutters at one point, just before he gets murdered. Jason Lives is the platonic ideal of the ‘80s slasher horror movie in its mainstream moment – lifting from everything from Frankenstein to James Bond to Rambo, with beloved period cliches like the perpetually angry cops, ripped-jean and pastel fashions, synth-driven pop music, the teenagers who run around rutting every chance they get. The movie starts with a thoroughly dead Jason being accidentally resurrected by one of his teenager enemies and given new superhuman endurance, and escalates from there. You can’t expect part six of a series to bring much new to the table, but with Jason Lives the execution is glossily polished to a Tupperware shine. It’s schlock, but in the right mood it’s massively entertaining schlock, really, and less sadistic than one might expect (sure, teens die, but nobody is really tortured here – Jason is quite efficient). There’s a fair bit of humour and in-jokes here, but not enough to push it into Scream meta territory. It’s simply an effective scare-fest which isn’t trying to be clever. Sometimes, on a Friday the 13th, that’s all you really want. “It’s over. It’s finally over,” we’re told at the end. Spoiler warning: It wasn’t over.

How the Return Of The Jedi Storybook ruined my childhood

Spoiler warnings are serious business, even if it’s harder and harder to avoid finding out things in this 24-7 endlessly scrolling world we live in without seriously muting your social media diet. But decades ago, one of the biggest movies of my lifetime got seriously spoiled by… a storybook.

Nearly 40 years on, I’m still a little annoyed about how Return Of The Jedi worked out for me.

The year 1983 was a long time before the idea of “spoiler culture” developed. Culture was typically more rooted in time. You saw a TV show when it aired, or you didn’t. You saw a movie like everyone else did during the few weeks it ran, or you didn’t and waited years for it to air on TV. If someone told you who shot JR, you just nodded. We didn’t really worry about spoilers so much then, or ponder the damage they could do.

But I’ll never forgive the Return of the Jedi Storybook which, mystifyingly, spoiled George Lucas’ sequel and quite possibly the biggest cliffhanger ending in recorded history for me weeks before the movie came out.

Let me tell you, there were few bigger dramas in the life of 12-year-old Nik and his friends than imagining for years what might have happened next after the incredibly downbeat, traumatising final scenes of Empire Strikes Back in 1980. Luke’s hand cut off! Vader his father? Han Solo locked in a block of whatever the heck carbonite was, hauled off to Jabba the Hutt?

Kids today can literally not imagine how stressful this all was. It made Avengers: Endgame seem like a cool sea breeze by comparison.

I remember watching the first trailer for Return of the Jedi with a fanboy’s anticipation. But when it came time to actually see the movie itself, I already knew what was going to happen.

I got the storybook as part of one of those nifty “school book clubs” that were all the rage back in the day, and I was kind of astonished to see that this Return of the Jedi Storybook wasn’t some fanboy collection of images and interviews, but the ENTIRE STORY of the movie, weeks before it opened. Why did I get it so early? Why did they reveal the whole story? These days, there would be media blackouts and embargoes galore, but in 1983, I guess a kid’s tie-in book wasn’t seen as a state secret.

(According to the “Wookiepedia,” which has to be authoritative with a name like that, the Jedi storybook was published May 12, 1983, about two weeks before Jedi hit theatres around May 25. In my hazy pre-teen memories, it felt like it came out months before Jedi.)

In my memory I flipped through the pages, astonished to see pictures of Luke Skywalker in stark black clothing, Jabba the Hutt, the Emperor, Leia in a fetishy slave outfit that awakened all young Nik’s carnal rumblings, and more, and the plot of the entire movie laid out in simplified easy-reader prose. The storybook was meant as a flimsy souvenir for young padawan like myself, to re-read and savour… after seeing the damned movie! I do remember feeling vaguely let down… was this the story I had hoped for the past three years? Or was I just not really enjoying seeing it in pantomime storybook form? The merits of Jedi have been argued for the past 39 years, but wherever you stand I’d argue it’s best to have actually seen the movie instead of just reading about it first.

I can’t recall clearly now if I shared the Jedi plot revelations with my friends at the time, but I probably did. I was the kind of kid who ate too much at Halloween, who sometimes snuck looks at Christmas presents. If older me had been there to Marley’s ghost himself, I’d have warned about the perils of giving in to temptation. I should have put the book in a locked safe once I realised what it was. It would’ve been a lot cooler to be surprised by the twists and turns of Return of the Jedi. It would’ve been nice.

Hell, I wouldn’t have minded being surprised by an Ewok, even.