Heavy Metal 2000 (2000)

 

In ages past, the evil Arakacians discovered a fluid granted immortality to anyone who consumed it. The Arakacians built an empire and enslaved the known universe for centuries. They were finally vanquished after the source of the fluid was sealed off by freedom fighters. The key to the source, a glowing crystal that can lead the bearer back to the fountain and drives anyone who possessed it insane, was cast into space and lost among the stars.

In a present-day asteroid excavation, space crewman Tyler and his colleague find the key by accident. Tyler touches the key and instantly goes becomes malevolently insane.  He murders several colleagues, drums up an army of thugs, and begins a search for the source.

His first port of call is the city of Eden, a planet where the inhabitants carry traces of the immortality fluid in their systems.  This certainly doesn't save them, though: Tyler's has his forces slaughter almost everyone then leaves the planet to continue his quest.

Almost is the important word there.  A survivor named Julie pursues Tyler across space, determined to execute him for his crimes.  Of course, she'd better do that before Tyler finds the Source, or he'll become immortal ...

This film is a follow-up, but not a true sequel, to the 1981 animated feature Heavy Metal, from the publishers of the magazine of the same name.

For a few years in the late 80s or early 90s, I was a regular reader of Heavy Metal magazine.  I saw the original film back then as well, and quite enjoyed it.  When I first saw this film in early 2000s, I thought it was a very disappointing offering in comparison to the earlier film. Which just goes to show that me 20 years ago had some really thick rose-tinted glasses about the older movie!

I'm not saying this film is good, mind you: it's not.  It's frankly a bit crass and juvenile.  But as I discovered in my recent re-watch, so was the original.  And this movie does have a couple of improvements.

First, it features significantly improved art and animation. Perspective is executed much more consistently and convincingly.  CGI makes an appearance and is used effectively for backgrounds and spaceships, and has been blended well with more traditional character animation.  There's also greater depth of colour and shadow. 

Now of course, this film was made 20 years later than its predecessor, so it should be better.  And it's not of a quality that's going to have Disney's animators quaking in their boots: but still, it's noticeably better than the original!

The film's plot also gets moving faster, maintains a more consistent tempo, and relies a lot less on exposition (at least once we're past the big info dump at the beginning). It's doubtless helped by the fact that rather than an anthology of short sequences connected by a loose framing story, it follows a single through-line narrative based (very loosely) on Kevin Eastman's "The Melting Pot" graphic novel.

Setting aside one particular black mark, said narrative is an adequate if fairly unexceptional sex-and-violence space opera.  The sex and violence is very much front and centre, for the record: there's plenty of blood spurting around the place and lots of gratuitous animated nudity, much as in the first film.  It all feels a bit self-consciously "look how edgy we are!", frankly - an adolescent attempt to be "adult".  

The particular black mark is that the plot features quite a bit of sexualised violence.  That's one thing that I could definitely do without, and comes across as every bit as crass as you might expect.

In the final analysis, Heavy Metal 2000 is not really much better than my initial impression of it; but at least that meant it wasn't a significant disappointment like  my re-watch of the 1981 film!

London Fields (2018)

 

The beautiful and enigmatic Nicola Six has (or at the very least, believes she has) psychic premonitions.  When she has a vision of her own murder on her 30th birthday, she identifies two very different men as the most likely possible culprits.  These are taxi driver Keith Talent, a crude slob who despite not being very bright, excels at darts; and Guy Clinch, a wealthy businessman who is trapped in a loveless marriage with his wife Hope.

Far from using this foresight to save herself, the vain and narcissistic Nicola embraces it as opportunity to never grow old.  She sets out to seduce and emotionally destroy both men, thereby ensuring that the foreseen murder comes to pass.  She even goes so far as to inform terminally ill American writer Samson Young of her vision, employing him to write the story and immortalise her in the process.

I freely confess to watching this movie entirely from a sense of morbid curiosity; it boasts a fantastic cast, but got terrible reviews and is based on a book I loathed, because it's a pompous, misogynistic, misanthropic pile of dung with a preposterous premise and filled with hateful characters doing implausible things.  

So when I sat down to watch London Fields, I had one simple question on my mind: was it possible to actually make a decent film out of this pile?  

It turns out that the answer is "no", but the movie is at least 30% less awful than the book, so yay for that.  Having charismatic actors definitely helps. For instance, in the book, Keith Talent is a completely preposterous and implausible character. In the film, he's still a nasty bit of work but actor Jim Sturgess manages to provide him with a kind of desperate, thuggish charm that the novel's prose definitely did not convey.

On the subject of the cast, Amber Heard got a Golden Raspberry nomination for worst actress, which seems to be to be thoroughly unjustified.  Yes, the film is bad and her character is an awful, implausible sociopath whose motives and actions are nonsense, but her performance within those constraints is actually really rather good.  It's ridiculous that  her performance was the film's only nomination, when it far more deserved to be on the Worst Film and Worst Screenplay lists. To be honest, this smacks a little of the same kind of misogyny that was replete within the book.

Speaking of Heard, the camera spends a lot of time ogling her in skimpy outfits.  This would normally annoy me intensely as egregious voyeurism for the sake of voyeurism, but I think in this role it's actually purposeful: it's a visual cue for the character's nature, particularly given that there is ultimately almost no actual bare flesh. Nicola Six is all about titillation, tease and unfulfilled promises of intimacy, never about fulfilling them.

It's also still voyeurism, mind you. I'm not going to pretend it isn't.

So in the final analysis the film is bad, and you should skip it, but I think it's about as good as it could be given the source material.  Why you'd want to adapt the source material in the first place is the bigger question, to be honest.

Screamers: The Hunting (2009)

 

Following the dangerous escalation and purported destruction of the automated killing machines known as Screamers, planet Sirius 6B has been left deserted for some twenty years.

Or so all the records claim.  But when his ship picks up an SOS signal from the supposedly empty planet, Commander Andy Sexton leads a team to investigate.  Once the squad arrives, they find a group of human survivors eking out an existence in an old military outpost, but more important, they discover that the threat of the Screamers is far from over.  The killer machines have continued to evolve their camouflage and infiltration techniques, and Sexton's team soon finds its numbers dwindling.

Can the surviving team members survive the Screamers and find a way off-world, or are they doom to die gory deaths amid the ruined wastelands of Sirius 6B?  For that matter, could they suffer an even worse fate than that?

Made nearly 15 years after the original Screamers (linked above), Screamers: The Hunting is a made-for-TV sequel that features Arrow's Stephen Amell (not looking quite as buff here as he would for his most famous role) and Gina Holden, who for while there seemed to be making something of a career of being in not-very-good science fiction shows that I nonetheless enjoyed (Blood Ties and SyFy's Flash Gordon, specifically).  It also boasts a small role for Lance Henriksen, who was turning up for a lot of science fiction movie cameos at the time.  Presumably the thought process there was to cheaply cash in on the Aliens connection.

So it has a decent enough cast, but how does it compare to the original movie, overall?

Well, I think the short answer is that it's technically better than the original in most respects, but it's frankly not as much fun to watch.

The technical improvements include the visual effects.  Screamers: The Hunting definitely profits from the advancements in cinema techniques since the release of the 1995 movie: while it was almost certainly considerably cheaper to make than the original film, the improved make-up and effects technology allow it to look better in almost every request.  It's still a long way short of the quality of a big budget film, of course, and you'll almost certainly spot a few flaws, but honestly the visual effects were technically more competent than I expected them to be.

The script also has some strengths over that of the original: in particular, the strategy of the Screamers makes a fair bit more sense this time.  It's easier to see how the actions the killer machines take contribute to their primary goals, rather than just contributing to "and now we can have a twist for the audience, let's hope they never stop to think about whether this makes any sense".  It also offers some ideas about Screamer development that are potentially interesting.

Unfortunately, despite those strengths, the script is definitely not short of weaknesses.  The human characters are uniformly as dumb as rocks, probably even more than in the 1995 film, and the potentially interesting ideas about Screamer development seem to mainly exist purely to set up the ending.  And said ending is utterly goofy and laughable.  Even more than that of the original film.  Which is saying something, given how goofy the end of Screamers was.

Only for hard-core SF enthusiasts, this one.

Maggie (2015)

 

In an alternative version of the present-day Midwestern United States, society struggles to function in the aftermath of a zombie pandemic that is still barely under control.  Victims contract the disease through the normal zombie vector - being bitten - and once infected, slowly descend into a cannibalistic state.

When Wade Vogel gets a voicemail from his daughter Maggie, saying only that she loves him and that he should not look for her, he knows that can only mean one thing: she has been bitten.

Wade ignores his daughter's message, tracking her down and bringing her home, where government rules allow to stay until her condition reaches the stage where quarantine - and eventually euthanisation - will be her inevitable fate.

Wade refuses to accept these regulations, insisting that he will care for Maggie until the end.  Thanks to his respected position in the local community, he has some latitude, but even old friends like the local Sheriff and Doctor can only do so much for so long: sooner or later, Maggie must either be killed, or become a danger to everyone else around her.

A lot of zombie media tends to present 'not killing your infected loved ones' as a foolish, doomed and self-destructive decision.  They take it as read that anything other than immediately killing any victim of the plague is the only sane and rational decision.  Little if any credence is given to the emotional trauma of being expected to kill your own spouse or child. Maggie feels like  the film-makers set out to deliberately explore why 'of course you should immediately kill them' is not the easy answer it is often presented to be.

This makes for a very different kind of zombie film, of course, with only occasional moments of zombie menace, and a lot more focus on the interpersonal relationships of the characters.  The result is a movie with a measured pace.  I never found Maggie to be slow or boring, but it's certainly no high octane thrill right, either: this is a movie of slowly creeping tension and uncertainty, not one for jump scares and shocks.

When the film came out, much attention was given to the casting and performance of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Wade Vogel.  This is not a movie that relies on the action heroics for which Schwarzenegger is best known.  Instead, it asks him to portray a grieving, loving father who is holding onto that love in the face of imminent horror.  It's not a role Schwarzenegger could have handled in his 80s and 90s heyday, but he does a good job of it here.  It helps a lot that the film smartly lets him do most of his emoting non-verbally.  He's always had good body language as a performer, and he proves here to also be adept at conveying emotion with his eyes.  The result is an understated but convincing portrayal of a man who has to make an impossible choice.

The film's camera work is also interesting; I noticed that the camera often focuses on the characters' hands as they perform tasks.  I think this is a clever non-verbal way of reminding us that at the end of this story, either Maggie or her father will likely use those hands to commit violence on the person they love best in the world.  It's a clever bit of visual story telling.

Maggie is a much more sombre, thoughtful offering than the typical zombie horror fare, but it is a well done.  If it at all sounds like your sort of thing, I recommend checking it out.

Heavy Metal (1981)

 

Heavy Metal is a comics magazine that commenced publishing in 1977.  It began primarily as a licensed translation of the French science-fantasy magazine Metal Hurlant, but soon expanded its remit to a wide variety of creators both European and American.  Within a few years, it had become known for its exceptional art, and also for its graphic sexual and violent content.  This combination proved commercially successful in the mostly highly-sanitised US comics market of the time, and by 1981, the magazine's publisher had managed to persuade Ivan Reitman to co-produce this $9 million animated film.

Heavy Metal the movie is comprised of an anthology of stories adapted from the magazine, all linked by an original framing story about an intelligent, evil artefact known as the Loc-Nar, which is brought to Earth by an astronaut and after killing the man, begins terrorising his young daughter.

Meanwhile the adapted stories are a combination of one-shots and individual episodes from recurring features from the magazine, specifically the Den and Captain Sternn (with 2 n's).  The former was a highly sexualised planetary fantasy in the John Carter mould, while the latter was a rather mean-spirited serial about a dishonest, amoral space adventurer.

I think including this mixture of one-off and recurring features from the magazine may have been chosen with the perspective of potentially developing future sequels.  After all, new episodes of those same long-running serials could be included to provide a sense of continuity with future projects, while there would still be plenty of scope to experiment with new stories.

Overall, given the movie is based on a magazine that was specifically known for its often exceptional art, I was surprised and disappointed by the art and animation of this production.  It is often quite poor.  For instance, the framing story segments have crude art with an inconsistent portrayal of perspective is unconvincing.

I get the feeling they spent more on the film's music than its visuals: the soundtrack features a lot of notable 70s performers, often from the progressive rock and heavy metal genres.  Songs on the film include offerings from Sammy Hagar, Devo, Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick, Nazareth, Black Sabbath and Stevie Nicks.

The resulting soundtrack is pretty good, but the cool tunes don't make up for the disappointing visuals and they certainly don't disguise the mediocre quality of the script: most of the stories come across as a bit juvenile, to be frank, often to a large extent because of their efforts to be 'grown up' and 'edgy' by including lots of sex and violence.

This story-telling shortfall is perhaps best exemplified by the segment involving a bomber crew in World War 2.  This sequence starts quite promisingly, with a real sense of menace, but then it just seems to give up on that and segues into another, rather comic skit that also doesn't go anywhere and exists just to offer up a few smutty jokes and stoner gags.

Despite typically mediocre art and lots of gratuitous nudity the Den segment is probably the most enjoyable part of the film. At least Den is a proactive and relatively decent person, making him something of an exception to the leading characters in most segments of the movie.

Welcome to Wrexham, Season 1 (2022)

 

Founded in 1864, Wrexham A.F.C. is the third oldest professional association football (soccer) club in the world.  Though based in Wrexham, Wales the club plays in the much more competitive - and financially demanding - English leagues.  

During the 1960s and 1970s Wrexham enjoyed considerable success.  But following a series of poor seasons on the field, and financial difficulties in the back office, the club tumbled from the second tier of English football to the fifth; putting it outside the fully professional bounds of the "Football League".  In English soccer, you see, as in many association football leagues around the world, there are not just many levels of competition, but clubs that succeed or fail move up or down in those levels.  Moving up means more prestige, more money and more pressure.  Going down means less prestige, less money ... and perhaps even more pressure!

In 2011, in the face of liquidation, the club's supporters formed a Trust that purchased the ailing club to keep it functioning.  However the club's coffers were never very full and the financial impact of the 2020 COVID lockdowns left Wrexham A.F.C.'s existence in once more in real danger.

And then, in September 2020, Hollywood actors Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds announced their intention to buy the club.

Welcome to Wrexham is the tale of that unlikely purchase, and of the even more unlikely love story between two Hollywood outsiders and the passionate local community that has supported the club for over 150 years.  It charts the duo's initial acquisition of the club, the completion of the 2020/21 season, and their investments toward seeing Wrexham A.F.C. promoted out of the fifth tier of English football and into the fourth; a promotion challenge commonly considered the most difficult in the English system.

In the process, the show explores Welsh identity, the community of Wrexham itself, the lives of the club's fans and personnel, and the vicissitudes of fate both on and off the pitch.  While in the process I felt it sometimes lays on the efforts at humour a little too thick, it's mostly a very engaging and seemingly authentic depiction of events, and does a good job of giving you an insight into the thoughts and lives of the people involved.

I also appreciated that that show frankly addressed the problem of football hooliganism and the security issues when holding matches.  This is not at all a positive aspect of the game, and the show does not shy away from that fact.

If you actively dislike sports (particularly soccer) Welcome to Wrexham is probably not going to change your mind, but for anyone with even a neutral attitude to the game, it's an entertaining and engaging watch. You may well find yourself becoming strongly invested in the fortunes of the club.  Particularly since this is all real: however 'fairy tale' the idea of two famous actors buying a struggling club might be, this is the real world, and football is a cruel game.  A triumphant finish cannot be guaranteed.

Gabriel (2007)

 

Since the beginning of time, Heaven and Hell have fought over Purgatory and the souls trapped inside it. Each side has sent seven warriors: archangels from Heaven, fallen angels from Hell.

Over time, Hell has become ascendant in Purgatory, transforming it into a dark and seedy place.  Now the seventh and last archangel, Gabriel, enters the city, hoping to discover whether any of his predecessors still live, and if they do, to unite with them and overcome the forces of Hell.

He will find this a massive task.  Coming to Purgatory forces the Archangels to assume human form and cuts them off from replenishing their divine power.  Over time, the Archangels were eventually worn down and fell prey to their fallen enemies, who thrived and became stronger the longer they stayed in purgatory.  This will happen to Gabriel, too, unless he can find a new way to fight.

Can he?  Well, the movie's named after him, so I think he has a decent shot!

Gabriel is an Australian action-horror film starring Andy Whitfield in the title role.  Whitfield would go on to play the lead in Spartacus: Blood and Sand a couple of years later, before regrettably having his life and promising career cut short by lymphoma.  He's by far the best thing in this film.  The rest of the acting is frankly very uneven, likely a product of the movie's limited financial resources.  It was independently produced, without government funding, for around the equivalent of $100,000 US.

The acting is not the only place where the film's lack of funding is apparent.  The sets and effects are very limited, for instance, with the various cityscapes being obvious CGI.  The choreography of the action scenes is also generally very limited.  Smartly, they save their best work for the very first fight, as a high tempo (if short) kickstart, and for the rather longer and more elaborate final confrontation between Gabriel and the leader of Hell's forces.

It's clear throughout that the film wants to be much more epic than its resources really allow. I appreciate the ambition, but not the judgement: This is a film whose reach frequently exceeds its grasp, and it would probably have been stronger overall if it had restrained its more overblown ambitions and focused on strengthening the narrative core of the film.

Because the script and plotting are definitely the film's main weak points.  The storytelling is very didactic and heavy-handed, something that is clear right from the outset of the film, when it delivers page after page of text to explain the background.  I like to read books, but books aren't movies and I don't want to read a film.  This huge text dump is particularly galling because boy oh boy the film is not short on exposition about the war between Heaven and Hell, and the film could easily have covered all this stuff as part of that.

Which leads into the second issue: Much of the film is just Gabriel learning what's already happened. Which means it most of the runtime consists of lots of pretty men (and occasionally women) having Very Intense Conversations that every now and again break out into violence.  Imagine a beat-em-up computer game that is 80% cut scenes and 20% actually beat-em-up, and you have the basic idea.

The script is also rather rapey, which is definitely a big black mark against it in my books.

Do I have anything positive to say?  Well, the ending is pretty solid.  The fight that sets it up is a cut above the others and I can see how the way it plays out could have been the Big Idea that inspired them to work so hard to make the movie, despite their lack of funding.  I don't think it is enough to save the film overall though.

The Public Enemy (1931)

 

As youngsters in 1900s Chicago, Irish-Americans Tom Powers and his lifelong friend Matt Doyle engage in petty theft, selling stolen items to a fence named "Putty Nose". 

Putty Nose persuades them to join his gang on a fur warehouse robbery, assuring them he will take care of them if anything goes wrong. However, when something does go wrong, he disappears on them.

Tom's straitlaced older brother Mike Powers tries to talk Tom into giving up crime.  He is not successful, and when he enlists for service in World War I, even he limited influence he could exert in lost.

Local gangster Paddy Ryan recruits Tom and Matt as beer "salesmen" (enforcers) in his bootlegging business. The bootlegging business proves highly lucrative, allowing Tom and Matt to enjoy the high-styling, luxurious lifestyle they've always dreamed of.  Tom is also able to financially support his mother, who remains innocent of his real occupation, despite his brother's disapproval.

But of course, as has already been foreshadowed with Putty Nose, a career based on crime and violence is a precarious one with great dangers attached.  It remains to be seen whether Tom and Matt will have much time to enjoy their ill-gotten wealth ...

Once its release in 1931, The Public Enemy received modest praise, with critics impressed by the acting, but not especially by the plot.  Over time, perhaps in part because of the subsequent careers of stars James Cagney and Jean Harlow, the film's reputation has grown.  In 1998 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"

Overall, I'm on board with the film's reappraisal.  It's a well made film on multiple levels, and I think the script is a stronger one than was originally acknowledged.  In terms of the writing, I particularly like that Tom's successes and failures in life can both be directly traced to the same aspects of his character: in particular, his fierce loyalty and his aggression.

One thing to note is that the script is not afraid to leave some questions and situations not entirely resolved.  The writers likely felt they had told the core story, and that wrapping up every loose end would be detrimental to the film's structure, pacing and impact.  They may well be right, but depending on your investment in some of the ancillary elements, you may find yourself a bit disappointed.

I feel like I should take a moment to praise the film's staging and scene design.  Several sequences of the movie have been justly celebrated in the near century since the film came out, including my own personal favourite, which is how they set up and structured the scene where Tom launches his impetuous on rival mobster Schemer Burns.  It's become justly iconic.

One thing that I think contributes to the film's success is its 1931 production date; this pre-dated the restrictive Hays Code.  Had the movie been made just a few years later, it would not have been able to include some of the things it did.  When the film was re-released in 1941, for instance, three scenes were cut as containing inappropriate content.  All were later restored for the home media releases.

If you have an interest in the history of cinema, then The Public Enemy is  worth seeing just for its significance that topic.  I'm pleased to say however that you will likely not find it a chore to watch!