Reviews

Created by a British veteran of Warner Brothers' "Teen Titans", this show is among the first to be produced from a collaboration between Japanese animators and a major American studio, in this case, Disney's Jetix Animation Group (another example is Warner Brothers/Turner Cartoon Network Toonami and Production I.G. for "IGPX").

The animation is mindful of early Rankin/Bass shows like their versions of "The Hobbitt" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King". he characters are voiced by an impressive cast of talent like Clancy Brown of "Starship Troopers", Kari Wahlgren, long time V/O artist for anime, most recently Otomo's "Steamboy", Mark Hamil ("Star Wars 4, 5 & 6"), Mako (Aku of Genndy Tartakovsky's "Samurai Jack") and James Hong ("Big Trouble In Little China").

With great sight gags and one liners meant for the adults in the audience, a sound effects library lifted from Horta/Manhana's loops from the original Star Trek TV series, appearances by characters from classic anime series (such as the captain of the "Yamato", aka the "Argo" of "Starblazers" fame, as an intergalactic tour bus driver in the episode "Big Lug") and plot lines that borrow from so many movie genres, including a showdown between Chiro and the Skeleton King that sounds vaguely like the exchange between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in "The Return of the Jedi" S.R.M.T.H.G. makes for great fun for young and old. With a title more convoluted than a certain group of radioactive, adolescent reptilian martial artists, how can you go wrong?

The story of an elf named Elvin with a love of hip-hop music and a need to modernize Santa's toy line is a clever re-telling in rap and rhyme of the famous poem, featuring stand-up artist and MadTV alumni Aries Spears in the lead, with a collection of rap stars like Tone Loc and Earthquake backing him up in what surprisingly turns out to be a great morality tale of redemption and discovery.

It is a perfect vehicle for the new urban youth whose tastes have evolved from the traditional Yule tide fare. Produced and developed by American hip-hop artists, but visually churned out by one of the many Korean animation groups which seems to be taking over animation duties on much of the cartoon market on television these days, Disney it ain't, but considering what Disney has been churning out and ripping off as of late, that may not be a bad thing after all. Usually shows up on Turner's Cartoon Network for one or two showing each year, it's worth the watch.

The grave robbers of Hollywood, completely devoid of new ideas, have taken to the graveyard once again to dig up classic movies of various directors to help their sagging box office.

This year's director of choice is John Carpenter. We've seen a bad remake of "Assault On Precient 13" already and now comes "The Fog". Originally, it was a well crafted tale of suspense, horror and shock with a minimal amount of blood and gore, relying on the talent of Carpenter and his usual team of actors such as then wife Adreinne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Jamie Lee Curtis and mom Janet Leigh, et al and spun a great ghost story.

Along comes the remake squad with the latest in teen idols like "Smallville"'s Tom Welling, a load of digital effects and generous amounts of blood, gore and bad acting to deliver a hot steaming plate of manure shoved down our throats between handfuls of stale, overpriced popcorn.

Message to Hollywood. There's a reason that your profits are tanking. Leave the classics alone unless you've got something better to do with it. So far, you're failing miserably!!!

Another attempt to look behind the screen of videos games comes up short against "Reboot".

Granted, it matches Mainframe's animated classic series in the technology, but for all it's attempts, it comes up short with lackluster gags, lame jokes and also ran dialogue. The pilot offers no real difference in this show and a dozen other live TV sitcoms that have failed for being nothing more than copies of other sitcoms. Adding the aspect of digital animation doesn't change the fact that it's nothing new.

Sorry guys, spend your quarters on better writers. In fact, you may want to considering spending less on the technology and more on the writers.

Although it's not the spectacle of the greatness of Japanese Anime, the Western release of Saiyu-ki was a testament to the early days of the art.

Alas, like so many classics of animation, such as Toei's "Gulliver's Travels Beyond The Moon (Gariba no uchu ryoko)" or Nelvana's "Rock & Rule", this film will never be seen again except on rare, pirated copies, for it has been cast into the pit of Moritorium Hell, where major video chains unceremoniously trash the remaining copies into a dumpster without the opportunity to purchase them to try to salvage history. This disgusting form of book burning for profits by the major studios that now run the major video rental chains, leading to the demise of the Mom & Pop stores of the past will be remembered as corporate greed at it's worst.

I hope there is a special Hell for these arrogant suits.

This wild, wooley and wacky look back at the evolution of the 1960's camp classic is a lighthearted romp through a lot of memories for fans of the series, as well as an interesting expose for those who were unaware of the true lives of the stars.

Hosted by the originals, Adam West and Burt Ward, their hunt for a missing Batmobile (George Barris' 1955 Ford Futura), is filled with rememberances of the lives of the dynamic duo in and out of their tights. The plot is peppered with actual Batlore, including Mickey Rooney's turning down the part of The Penguin, Lyle Waggoner's original screen test as the Dark Knight, et al.

Appearences by Frank Gorshin, Julie Newmar, Lee Meriweather help round out the cast that are superbly lead by West and Ward, taking a step backwards from ego and attitudes and goofing it up with the rest of the gang, with great impersonations of younger versions of West, Ward, Gorshin, Burgess Merideth, Meriweather, Vincent Price, Yvonne Craig and a Ceaser Romero Joker that will knock your socks off.

Another amazing bit of trivia is that Dawn Wells, "Mary Ann" of Gilligan's Island fame was an executive producer for the show.

A Euro production that calls upon the talents of people like Patrick O'Neal, Donald Pleasence and the consummate movie and TV bad guy, Henry Silva, can't be all bad, which it isn't.

A spaghetti spy flick spoof, which starts with the inheritance of a mystical ring containing a drug which can enable the wearer invisible (but not their clothes, leading to usually interesting rematerialization scenes), and can only be used every ten hours, leads to a manhunt for our titular hero as he is pursued for the ring throughout Europe by every single government espionage agency on the Earth, as well as his backstabbing, sleazy partner (Silva) who provides a great deal of comic relief during the chase.

Nothing tremendous in storytelling, it serves as a light hearted romp for the stars.

Weekly, as I grew up in the 60's, I would dutifully allow my TV set to be hijacked by a disembodied spirit that became known simply as "The Control Voice". At it's eerie insistence, all that I would see and hear for the next hour (albeit riddled with even more insidious messages, specifically commercials) would be controlled by this power from beyond as I sat back and journeyed to strange lands of the future and the far away, or just around the next corner in a dimension besides us.

The voice introduced us to men and women (portrayed by an A-list of Hollywood character actors and future superstars i.e. Robert Culp, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, William Shatner, Sally Kellerman, Michael Ansara, Steve Inhat, Leonard Nimoy, James Shigeta) in conflict, sometimes with alien menaces or at war with themselves and the monsters within our own beings. Plots included a chess match featuring two humans versus two alien hunters as the pawns ("Fun And Games"), a being made of radio waves forcibly drawn into our world ("The Galaxy Being"), an alien exchange program which turns out to be an invasion for the purposes of capital punishment ("The Zanti Misfits"), the collection of the human offspring of an alien race of fathers who have lost the ability to dream ("Children Of Spider County"), the invasion from within of the first man to travel to Venus ("Cold Hands, Warm Heart"), the interrogation of human POW's during an intergalactic war ("Nightmare")and so much more.

The works of executive producer Joseph Stefano and composer Dominic Frontiere (later, Harry Lubin, who would reuse his classic theramin synthesizer theme from the paranormal series "One Step Beyond"), were brought into stark realism with the creation of "the bears", monsters and alien creatures that would leave me with nightmares, even if it was just a puppet in a water tank ("Cold Hands, Warm Heart"), or an alien microbe mutated into a huge blob of protoplasm ("The Probe", featuring stuntman Janos Prohaska as "Mikie", in an early version of his Horta costume from Star Trek's "Devil In The Dark").

The assortment of writers working on the series were from a who-who of modern masters of sci-fi and horror, most notably Harlan Ellison, whose time travel stories of "Demon With The Glass Hand" and "Soldier" would not just become instant classics, but form the basis of his lawsuit against James Cameron over the move "The Terminator".

Time travel just didn't get a serious treatment, though, for one episode written in a pique of wry whimsey, "Controlled Experiment", featured Carroll O'Connor ("All In The Family") and Barry Morse ("The Fugitive") as Phobos and Deimos, two chain smoking, caffeine addicted Martians who use a time manipulator to move back and forth through a few minutes before and after a murder, repeating the act from multiple angles and speeds, to study it's cause and effects, much to the delight of the alien observers. The episode also featured future Star Trek cast regular Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Janice Rand) as the gun wielding scorned woman.

Not all episodes were ground breaking, as with most shows, occasional ruts were all too obvious, and at times the Control Voice's words became all to preachy. But there is no other show like it, even one that claims to be it's namesake, that can match the stark surrealistic nightmares it brought to the screen until the Control Voice released you from it's grip, warning you until the next time when it would take you to the "Outer Limits of your imagination".

And what a long, strange trip it's been!

The rumours of the test screenings were bad enough. This film only thinly resembles the original in the actual game. From there, it takes a hard left turn and continues to spiral downward.

The remake was bad enough with a lifeless Chris Klein, who's stunningly lame work in "Say It Isn't So" must have been some inspiration for this turn in his lackluster career. Also, there has got to be some law passed preventing ex-rappers from becoming actors. It's worse than Elvis being shoved in front of a camera.

However, knowing that this was once an R rated movie, and in order to recover what must have been stunning prospects of losses at the box office, neutered down to a PG-13 rating with bad digital shadows to cover up Rebecca Romin-Stamos' nudity, doesn't make it an easier pill to swallow.

Add to that some of the worse editing during the actual matches that leave you with your eyes hurting from cuts away from the action, this turns into one turkey of a movie. Not so bad as to be un-intentionally funny, but bad enough to be an insult.

This clumsy, ham fisted attempt at re-filming "There's Something About Mary" suffers greatly from a lack of wit, writing, comedy, and likable characters, which makes the viewer suffer for it's insolence.

Produced by "...Mary"'s creators, the Brother Farelly, this is almost, gag for gag, shot for shot, a lame attempt to capture the success of the previous, but without the levity that made the toilet humor work, any chemistry between actors, or talent of said same actors to pull off what the previous did.

Not even mildly amusing performances by normally talented people like Orlando Jones, Sally Fields, Richard Jenkins, Henry Cho (completely wasted here) or Sarah Silverman can stop the run-away turkey from impacting on your senses like a fist up a cow's butt.

In the 1960's, British TV producer Gerry Anderson and his wife, Sylvia, went about making a series of shows based around a highly functional set of marionettes which where built around a process called Supermarionation, a speech syncronization system designed to have the puppet's mouth move in sync with the voice actor reading it's lines.

Combining it with some of the most fanciful designs of futuristic societies, they spawned a slew of shows including "Joe 90", about a boy with the ability to be programmed like a computer to do anything, from pilot a stolen jet fighter to perform brain surgery: "Fireball XL-5", a galactic adventure onboard a massive space cruiser, "Stingray", the tales of a super sub working for the World Aquatic Security Patrol ("W.A.S.P."), "Captain Scarlet", tales of an indestructible agent in a war against unseen Martian invaders called The Mysterons, et al.

Perhaps the Anderson's most famous and popular show in the hearts and minds of it's fans is "Thunderbirds". The background is simple. John Tracy, former astronaut and billionaire industrialist, decides to use his wealth to help the world by creating "International Rescue", a secret force of super vehicles designed by an in-house genius known simply as "Brain" and manned by his sons, each a superb athlete and trained expert in their fields (It is no doubt to some that his sons would have been Xtreme sports enthusiasts given the times). Brain's creations are the Thunderbirds, a set of highly specialized rescue and response vehicles each designed for specific purposes.

Thunderbird One is a hypersonic VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) vehicle used as a mobile command center. Thunderbird Two is a heavy lifter, capable of transporting pods containing rescue equipment to any location, from a subterranean "Mole" to the aquatic Thunderbird Four. Thunderbird Three is a space ship, launched from under the Tracy Island estate's pool (the vehicles launch sequences are themselves something to behold, since International Rescue is a secret organization, the deployment of the vehicles must also be the same, leading to some of the most unique ways of converting the Tracy Island compound into a launch & retrieval complex). As for Thunderbird Five, it is a monitoring station orbiting in space, listening in on the world's airwaves for the call.

A pink, armoured futuristic Rolls Royce bearing the license plate FAB-1 also come into play, as the property of one Lady Penelope, British aristocrat and undercover agent for International Rescue. Driven by a former resident of Wormwood Scrubs Prison known simply as Parker, it is bullet-proof,has an exceptionally heavy bit or ordinance under it's hood and is capable of Hydrofoil work on the water.

The way that they pull this off without it turning into a low rent kiddie show was from the contributions of such people as Derek Meddings, designer or the ships as well as the space craft and miniatures for movies like "Krull", "Moonraker", "Goldeneye" and many James Bond films. Barry Gray's scoring duties bring real tension and drama to the adventure.

Anderson was no slouch himself, creating many inventive effects shots using the highly detailed miniatures. This movie, surrounding the attempted sabotage and eventual rescue of a Mars exploration mission, displays the tools of Anderson's craft quite well. Look for another movie, Thunderbird 6, as well as newly digitally remastered releases of the original episodes on the shelves (and no, they did not digitally erase the wires). It is truly one of the best guilty pleasures from the past.

It also marked the end of Supermarionation, for with the exception of one puppet show ("Terrahawks"), Anderson's productions went into live actors, but still carried on the traditions of awesome miniatures with shows like "U.F.O", "Space:1999" and "Space Precinct".

Unfortunately,the big budget adaptation of the series, released in 2005, directed by Johnathan Frakes (Commander Will Riker of "Star Trek:The Next Generation"), was a muddled, childish piece of dreck which totally ruined the hopes of many aging fans of the original show for a decent and reverent homage to Anderson's vision, which probably explains his refusal to have anything to do with the movie.

Xtro, the original movie, was a British production involving an abducted father who comes back for his son, transforming him into an alien like himself and raising Hell for his ex-wife and friends.

This movie has nothing even resembling anything like that, with the exception of the director.

It is a bad sign when a movie sequel manages to forget some of what happened in the previous movie. It is a terrible sign when it completely ignores every thing like the plot, characters, situations, et al.

Even worse is when you hire Jan Michael Vincent at the height of his addiction phase, when he was on the verge of getting bounced from Airwolf for his drunken antics. His underwhelming presence in this film is a great display of the depths he had sunken to already.

The adaptation of one of Stephan King's better novels comes across as positive if only for the screen presence of Drew Barrymore. She holds the film's improbabilities together with a mixture of innocence and grit that no other child actor could possibly have given.

Tangerine Dream's electronic score, starting with the haunting title theme, "Crystal Voice", carry the story very well, moving from times of cool mystery to frantic panic to the driving beat of the demise of the Shop at the hands of Charley's awesome, unleashed pyrokinetic power.

The ending is not as good as the book's, opting for Charley to be escorted to the newspaper building rather than seeking it out on her own.

As for the casting, David Keith came across as perhaps a little too tortured, Martin Sheen as slimy as they come, along with good bits by Art Carney, Louise Fletcher, Heather Locklear, Freddie Jones and Moses Gunn.

A major bit of miscasting was in the choice of George C. Scott hamming it up as the shop's Native American (?) assassin. The part, originally offered to Edward James Olmos, was refused because of political protest from the Hispanic actor over casting him rather than a true Native American. So they went to George C. Scott? Absolutely bloody awful choice, as is the choice of Malcolm McDowell in the same role for the upcoming sequel, "Firestarter:Rekindled". What are producers and casting agents thinking? That we won't notice the British accent?

A fan of the movie since I first saw it at 12, it has never lost it's charm, delight and powerful imagery. Although, my father's only memory was a headache from all the colors.

Years later, I made the DVD version a part of my library, delighting in the inclusion of scenes cut from the original American release, such as the song "Hey Bulldog", or the boys meeting with their cosmic cousins, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

But imagine my absolute delight when my grandchildren, aging from nine to 3 1/2, to 2 1/2 to 18 months sat down and watched, eraptured by the images and story unfolding before them. Many of the adult jokes went over their heads, but they laughed, giggled, squealed and even danced to the Beatles music. Later on, they drew pictures of the Beatles, the sub and the various other characters.

Just think, a film about peace, love, music, no death, extreme or graphic violence, not incredibly scary monsters and great Beatles music. I'd say you can't go wrong with that for a Saturday afternoon movie.

George Pal, Hungarian born Puppetoon creator and fantasy legend made several great science fiction space movies. Adaptations of popular books in the 50's included former German rocket scientist Willy Ley's "Conquest Of Space" using designs and ideas illustrated by space artist Chestley Bonestell, who's work is seen in almost all of Pal's space films in one way or another, considered cutting edge for the time. His others included H.G.Wells classic "War Of The Worlds", Robert Heinlein's "Destination Moon" and the Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylie 1932 novel "When World's Collide".

The results still stand as seminal classics of science fiction filmwork, often copied, referenced and paid homage in one way or another. Although perhaps dated by the computer generated, digitally enhanced SFX of today's so-called masterpieces, these films still stand out as the major influences which helped shape our dream, visions and often spoke to our deepest fears, such as the end of the world.

From the inverted ski jump launch system (used today on aircraft carriers), to expendable booster rockets (a Space Shuttle standard), the Ark spaceship spawned the imagination of many filmakers, including some who reused the model for other films such as "Flight To Mars" and "The Queen Of Outer Space". The movie still stands as a milestone as the first science fiction disaster movie.

Once again, Leith Stevens' musical score enriches the experience, as it did for Pal's previous space adventure, "Destination Moon". The film's special effects won it the Oscar in 1951. All this, and in the rich tones of Technicolor that shall never been seen in a first run movie theater again. Thank you Lord for revival houses that still manage to seek out old time prints for festivals (the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas comes to mind).

There still remains a bit of controversy, though, about the film's ending. A wide, panoramic Bonestell matte painting is seen from the hatch of the newly arrived Ark. In the image can be seen two clearly pyramidal mountains in perfect proportions, as if artificial, as well as the base of what appears to be a building constructed by an alien intelligence. Although the actors don't react to this (the matte effect added in post production), the artwork hints at the planet Zyra as being inhabited (In the novel, the planet is known as Bronson Beta, and is indeed found to be once inhabited, and is explored further in the sequel "After Worlds Collide").

In the 1970s, producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown attempted to do a remake, which eventually mutated into the 1998 film, "Deep Impact". As in "When Worlds Collide", the human interaction was as important as the science fiction elements.

Tenchi 2, better known as Daughter Of Darkness, skips back and forth from present day Earth to the homeworld of Jurai in the distant past to a young Prince Yosho (Tenchi's Grandfather) during a festival of the planet's living, sentient trees and a young girl Yuszhuka, who was a playmate with the boy prince, and a terrible incident that seperated the two friends.

We switch forward to a typical day in the Masaki household. Sasami cooking, Washu blowing things up, Ayeka sneaking around looking for Ryoko while the space pirate looks to get into Tenchi's bed when a mysterious stranger arrives. A young girl claiming to be Tenchi's daughter!

Her presence sends the more jealous women into a spin cycle of recriminations and energy bolt battles, Sasami taking the child under her wing, super genius Washuu looking to perform tests on the girl's veracity and Tenchi wandering dazed, confused and downright mystified at the miraculous birth considering he is a virgin.

The story's flashbacks begin to tie in the past with the present as the true nature of the girl becomes clear and her connection to Yosho's young ladyfriend from eons past come to light.

It takes a different tack than most Tenchi adventures, and is rather short in comparision, but it offers up another look at one of the most dysfunctional extended "families" in Anime history, with clever and amusing results.