Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed

Year 13, Day 285 - 10/12/21 - Movie #3,953

BEFORE: Probably the best thing about watching these old Scooby-Doo films is clearing them off the list, knowing that I'll never have to watch them again, unless I want to, but then, why would I want that?  At least this way they serve some kind of function, they get me to the next thing, which is slasher movies - not that slasher movies are any less junky for my brain, but those films at minimum follow a set of basic rules, they exist in a lawful universe where things happen for a reason, as opposed to being loud, flashy, colorful films where people battle ghosts and tend to fall down a lot, or get covered in goo or protoplasm or something just to get a laugh out of small children. And there are all sorts of topical references from the early 2000's included just to make kids somehow think these films are "cool", which they're not. God help me. 

Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr. and several others carry over from "Scooby-Doo".

THE PLOT: The Mystery Inc. gang must save Coolsville from an attack of their past monsters brought to life by an evil masked figure trying to take down the gang.

AFTER: Oh, this was just dreadful and pitiful, let us never again speak of this movie, not until it's time for the year-end round-up analysis.  Clearly this film is "cool" because it's set in the town of Coolsville. Good lord, who came up with that?  Such pandering should be beneath everyone - and then to drive the point home, the haunted (?) museum is called the Coolsonian, in case you missed the fact that these are very "cool" people who live in a "cool" town and do very "cool" things. Jeezus, what year is this, it's like those terrible beach movies with Frankie and Annette and the filmmakers were a bunch of old geezers who threw in references to bikers and doing the frug and this crazy new music called rock and roll in feeble attempts to connect with the youth culture.  Remember "Beach Blanket Bingo"?  Yeah, I'm sure teens on the beach brought their bingo cards.  Remember the "Batusi"? Yeah, sure, Batman's got his own dance, whatever, you old farts. 

In this one (like it matters...) some old enemy of Mystery Inc. has invented a machine that takes the costumes of their old foes, like the Black Knight Ghost and the 10,000 Volt Ghost and the Pterodactyl Ghost, and somehow turns them into REAL monsters.  Right, because we have that technology to take a set of clothing and make it into a living creature, WTF?  So now the group that spent years debunking and unmasking ghosts and zombies and tar monsters has to contend with the fact that those things are REAL now.  Yeah, because some villain figured out how to science, that really sucks.  

I think the problem is that people don't demand more from films aimed at kids - there was an opportunity here to get some real science on the table, nowadays it's all about STEM education, whatever that is, but I know some parents dig it.  We've already got a girl in bulky sweaters and sensible shoes who loves science, why not take things a step further and incorporate some real science here?  You could probably win a Peabody Award or something. Nope, they just fall back on, "Wait, if we reverse the polarity and run a negative current through the device, that will solve everything." Nobody realizes that if you fall back on this too many times, you create a generation of kids who get to their high-school science class and want to reverse the polarity and run a negative current through their frogs on dissection day. Those little monsters....

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The film starts with the opening of that costume exhibit at the Cool-sonian, and all the Scooby Gang's fans have come out to celebrate.  Fred's fans are a bunch of love-struck girls, but Daphne's fans are just two fat guys with tattoos of her.  Well, I guess people are just as faithful as their options, right?  Shaggy's fans are a bunch of total stoners, and Scooby's fans are...dogs. Velma's fans are the plus-sized girls in glasses and sensible shoes who just "LOVE" her, so she's getting some leg tonight for sure.  There you go, Velmster, get some. 

Velma's conflicted, though, when she meets the geeky (but also maybe creepy?) museum director, who's a big fan of hers, but she's very nervous about dating a man - gee, I can't imagine why - and doesn't want to go on a date with him, claiming that "mystery is her mistress". Right, it's not the screaming girls out in the crowd throwing themselves at her, it's "mystery". Whatever, girl, if that's your cover story then let's run with that. 

There's no shortage of suspects for the main villain here, in fact there's a whole bar full of them at the Faux Ghost, unmasked villains who get together and drink and talk about how much they hate Mystery Inc. There's Old Man Wickles, and Old Man Smithson and Old Man Magnus and I'm really noticing a pattern here about old frustrated caretakers who dress up as phantoms to scare people off of property after they don't connect romantically with the female property owners...maybe it's just me. 

But hey, ghosts are real now, so that's something, and Mystery Inc. needs a plan to sneak into the old mining town (which is somehow part of a modern city) and reverse the polarity and then unmask somebody.  Once again, there are very important flashbacks that tell us everything we need to know - one flashback to a frisbee game the Scooby Gang once played, and the other tells the backstory of one of their early villains.  Gee, I wonder if this information will be important later on.  Now I think I've cracked the code on James Gunn screenplays, because even in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" everything you needed to know was in the flashback. I'm thinking about "The Suicide Squad" now, but the only flashback I recall was the brief one with Ratcatcher and her father, and it had nothing to do with the identity of the big bad villain - although the flashback with the astronauts was a key piece of the puzzle.  I see you, Mr. Gunn, and I love your work, but you've got a "tell". 

There's a bit where Scooby-Doo drinks a potion from a scientist's refrigerator, and turns into a monster, and this leads to both him and Shaggy drinking more random substances, in search of an antidote, and they turn into other wacky things.  First off, why would SHAGGY drink the "antidote" for the thing that SCOOBY drank, and NITPICK POINT, this is a terrible message to send out to the kids.  If you drink something bad, boys and girls, just keep drinking more random things until you find something that makes you better, changes your gender or maybe kills you.

Shaggy and Scooby set out in this film to be more productive members of the team, and so they work on getting their shit together, so to speak. Well, it's about time. They end up being very helpful against the Cotton Candy Glob, putting their strengths to work - yeah, they eat a monster. Which is a bit gross, but it is an innovative way to solve a monster problem. And I can't think of a better metaphor for this film than cotton candy - it's light, airy, colorful and provides no nutritional value whatsoever. Plus it's bad for you if that's all you eat. Which is why I made this part of a balanced diet of movie consumption, and we're back on more serious matters tomorrow (are we really, though?)

Also starring Matthew Lillard, Linda Cardellini (both also carrying over from "Scooby-Doo"), Seth Green (last seen in "Shazam!"), Peter Boyle (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "The Jesus Rolls"), Alicia Silverstone (last seen in "The Art of Getting By"), Karin Konoval (last seen in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Calum Worthy (last seen in "The Big Year"), Stephen E. Miller, Zahf Paroo (last seen in "Seventh Son"), Christopher R. Sumpton, Kevin Durand (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), C. Ernst Harth (last seen in "Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball"), Ryan Vrba, Emily Tennant, Cascy Beddow, Laurne Kennedy

with the voices of Neil Fanning, J.P. Manoux (both also carrying over from "Scooby-Doo"), Dee Bradley Baker (last heard in "The Suicide Squad"), Bob Papenbrook, Michael Sorich, Terrence Stone, Wally Wingert (last heard in "Chappaquiddick") and cameos from Pat O'Brien, Ruben Studdard, Kester Moorhouse and Big Brovaz.

RATING: 3 out of 10 pickled eggs at the bar

Scooby-Doo

Year 13, Day 284 - 10/11/21 - Movie #3,952

BEFORE: OK, I know I set up this chain months ago, but now I find that I have to bend my own rules a bit in order to continue. Frank Welker carries over from "Scoob!" and Frank Welker's been a part of the Scooby-Dooniverse since the very beginning, he's the long-time voice of Fred "I'm Too Sexy for my Ascot" Jones, like, since the original series run began in 1969. Over 50 years later, he's still associated with the franchise, only he performed the voice of Scooby-Doo the DOG in "Scoob!" last year. So naturally it was easy for me to assume that he did the voice of Scooby in the 2002 live-action version. Umm, nope. He's credited, along with Jess Harnell, as doing the voice of "Creatures". Now, normally this would be against my rules - for the sake of expediency, I don't count voice actors as part of a cast unless they're credited with specific, ideally named, characters - otherwise I'd be here all night listing "additional voices" actors and people who do ADRs, aka the "loop group". Hey, you've got to have a cut-off somewhere, right?

But, if I make the cut-off in my usual place, then the chain is broken. So we can't have that, can we? I'm knocking off a bunch of long-avoided horror franchises this year, and my first preference is to keep all the films from the same franchise together, and in the "right" order, instead of jumping around between the franchises all willy-nilly. My goal is to watch films and present them to you in what I deem to the be right way, and I'm not making a connection where there is none, Frank Welker's voice is DEFINITELY in this film, so I'm going to say that the chain remains a chain, and is unbroken.

There is a precendent here, also with animated films - last year it suited my purposes, and my OCD to watch "Tarzan 2: The Legend Begins", Disney's prequel with Tarzan as a baby, before watching "Tarzan & Jane", which is set after Disney's first "Tarzan" film.  Young Tarzan, then old Tarzan, makes sense, right?  But the only voice actor who carried over between the two was... well, look at that, it was Frank Welker. Wikipedia says he provided the voices of two gorillas in "Tarzan & Jane", Nuru and Sheeta, but the IMDB didn't list him at all for that film.  For "Tarzan 2", Welker was only listed as providing "animal vocal effects", namely tiger growls, but because I really wanted to watch those two films back-to-back, with nothing in-between, that had to suit my purposes.  If you've got a problem with that, go on and prove that Frank Welker WASN'T the voice of two gorillas in "Tarzan & Jane". Ah, not so easy, is it?  

THE PLOT: After an acrimonious break-up, the Mystery Inc. gang are individually brought to an island resort to investigate strange goings-on.

AFTER: Last year's film "Scoob!" got really into some lessons about friendship, and the bond between Shaggy and Scooby got tested after Scooby started hanging out with Blue Falcon and Dynomutt. Here the WHOLE GANG goes on a break after taking down the Luna Ghost, who was haunting the factory that makes Pamela Anderson action figures. Though their plan went a bit awry, and there were a few accidents, nobody got hurt and they were able to prove it was the creepy janitor all along, the one who was leering after the Baywatch babe and then tried to ruin her financially after she wouldn't go out with him.  

We're kind of coming in here midway into the story of Mystery Inc. - these crazy kids have been together for a few years, and they've solved many cases together, sure, but they're getting on each other's nerves. Fred always takes the credit for solving the case, forgets to mention the other members of the team to reporters, and when the team splits up to check out the spooky houses, he always pairs up with Daphne (gee, I wonder why). Velma's upset, because she's smart and confident and there's no reason why she can't also make out in those spooky dark halls with Daphne. No, FRED, geez, did I say Daphne, that's ridiculous, why would Velma want to make out with Daphne? Clearly, she's got the hots for Fred. But maybe also Daphne...?

Daphne's upset because she always plays the hostage role, getting kidnapped by the bad guy pretending to be a ghost or pirate, and that means she always gets tied up, or hypnotized and then God knows what happens to her when she's separated from the rest of the group, right?  I think she also protests too much, maybe she kind of digs getting tied up and tossed around?  Just a thought. And Shaggy and Scooby are also tired of chasing ghosts around through spooky houses, remember how they're always acting scared? Why do these two hang out with paranormal investigators if they're so easily scared, and they'd rather just be eating themselves sick somewhere? You know what, maybe it is time for this group to take a break, so they can all figure out just what they want out of life.

(If what you want out of life is to really see these characters gettin' it on, there IS a porn parody of "Scooby-Doo" that's readily available on the internet. You really have to search hard for it, because it's called "Scooby-Doo: A XXX Parody" - which is probably exactly what you'd type into a search engine if you happened to be wondering if such a thing exists.  It does. And they do it, all of them, in a spooky house. Fred & Daphne. Shaggy & Velma. Daphne & Velma. And all four of them together.  And there's NO dog in the movie, because that would be gross. Yes, there's no Scooby-Doo character in "Scooby-Doo: A XXX Parody" and somehow that's both very strange and also a giant relief at the same time. Just be aware that after you watch that, you will be unable to un-watch that. Hey, there's a porn parody out there of every show, from "A-Team" to "X-Files". Yep, even "Seinfeld". Yep, even "The Brady Bunch". Yep, "Taxi", "I Love Lucy" and "Golden Girls".)

But let's put all that aside for a bit. Our heroes try to fill their time off with various pursuits, Shaggy and Scooby take the van to the beach and just live out of it, grilling up food and making weird sandwich combinations. I can get behind that - at least the van won't smell like weed and sex for a while. (Or will it?). There are plenty of "in-jokes" here about Shaggy being a stoner, like he falls for a girl named "Mary Jane" and he says that's, like, his "favorite name". Sure it is. 

There's a crazy billionaire who runs a tropical, horror-themed resort (is that a thing?) for twenty-somethings, he seeks out all five members of Mystery Inc. and lures them back into the paranormal investigation racket by offering them all money, free airfare, and for Shaggy and Scooby, access to the "all-you-can-eat" buffet. I can get behind that - like, dude, you had me at "buffet" too. Scooby is smuggled aboard a plane disguised as somebody's ugly, dog-faced grandmother, and then once they hit the resort, the team members split up in a competition over who can solve the mystery of why many young people come to the island all happy and energetic and leave all sullen and emotionless. I don't know, maybe their vacation just sucked and was a waste of money, and now they're depressed and poor?

Daphne checks out a voodoo priest who doesn't know he needs to use a LIVE chicken, Velma checks out a ritual with a pretend cult leader and some Mexican wrestlers, and Fred goes to the Sugar Ray concert. Yeah, that's helpful. Meanwhile, Shaggy goes for a ride with Mary Jane (if you know what I mean) and Scooby learns she may not be what she pretends to be. But before long each member's quest takes them to the big spooky mansion up on the hill, so before you know it, the gang's back together investigating all the secret passages, moving walls and floors, and animatronic beasties trying to kill them. Since this all takes place in a giant spooky theme park, it's hard to know where the amusement park ride stops and the real spooky stuff starts.

HOWEVER, underneath the fake cult and the plastic monsters, there seems to be a REAL cult and ACTUAL monsters, of a sort, anyway. You know, for a group of kids who made their bones de-bunking hauntings and paranormal stuff, they sure seem to encounter a lot of real spooky stuff that just can't be explained by holographic projections and luminous paint, things floating on wires and hallucinogens in the air or foreign substances in the drinks. There are genuine "creatures" here that are tormenting the park, only nobody really notices because of all the clearly fake ones, until their best friend gets eaten by a creature. This is a bit like "Jurassic Park", maybe, because perhaps those first few people who visited J.P. naturally assumed it was all special effects and fake dinosaurs, but that assumption only lasts until a raptor bites your arm off.  

If you've heard anything at all about this movie over the years, then you probably already know the ending, and who the villain behind the scenes is. It's a horrible cop-out, but they made it worse by telegraphing the reveal with an unwarranted flashback scene halfway through the movie. Why else would that even BE there, it doesn't prove any point otherwise. Very shoddy foreshadowing, for sure. And who wrote this screenplay?  Why, James Gunn, the guy who brought you "Guardians of the Galaxy" and also revived "The Suicide Squad". He was slumming on this one, but hey, it was early in his career, I guess when you're just starting out as a screenwriter you have to take what you can get.  

There's a whole demonic possession-meets-body-swapping bit here, as the souls of the Mystery Inc. characters try to get back into their bodies, though, they get a bit scrambled, and Fred's soul ends up in Daphne's body, Velma ends up in Shaggy's body, Shaggy's over THERE, it's a whole thing. I don't usually go for the whole "Freaky Friday" thing, I've avoided those films almost completely, except for the riffs on "Big" like "13 Going on 30". But now HBO is running "Freaky", which puts a whole horror spin on the body-swapping concept, I might give that one a go in the future. Here, in "Scooby-Doo", they don't really keep it classy - like when Fred's soul is inside a woman's body, he doesn't say, "Hey, this is great, maybe I can get some insight on women from their perspective..."  Nope, it's straight to, "Hey I can touch boobies!" and "I can see Daphne naked!"  Wow, man, that's so 2002 and it's no longer cool. Velma, meanwhile, DID want to get into Daphne's clothes, but not like this.  It's OK to say this because she's clearly LGBTQ.

I managed to successfully avoid this film for almost 20 years - it came out in 2002 and I thought it looked stupid.  Which it is, it's very stupid, it's really just a live-action cartoon, which isn't as much of a contradiction as it sounds. But now, this year, watching it gives me linking opportunities - Sarah Michelle Gellar's in at least one other notable horror franchise, and Matthew Lillard was also in the first "Scream" film. And I'm going to get to the "Scream" films this month, but a little later, like, next week, man. It turns out there wasn't one clear path through all the horror films I wanted to get to this time around, so I had to get a bit creative with the linking, but in the end, I think I'm satisfied with the result, and I hope you will be too.

Also starring Freddie Prinze Jr. (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Sarah Michelle Gellar (last heard in "Happily N'Ever After"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "The Perfect Score"), Linda Cardellini (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Rowan Atkinson (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "Life of Crime"), Miguel A. Nuñez Jr., Sam Greco, Charlie Cousins, Steven Grives, Holly Brisley, Kristian Schmid, Nicholas Hope, Michala Banas, with the voices of Neil Fanning, Scott Innes, J.P. Manoux (last seen in "The Island"), Jess Harnell (last heard in "The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature") and cameos from Pamela Anderson (last seen in "Baywatch"), Mark McGrath (last seen in "Fathers' Day") and the band Sugar Ray. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 burps and farts (keepin' it classy!)

Scoob!

Year 13, Day 283 - 10/10/21 - Movie #3,951

BEFORE: OK, I'm back from New York Comic-Con - it's not like I really went anywhere, not out of town, just across town. And I only worked the set-up, Friday afternoon/evening, and all day Saturday - but these days, that's enough to wear me out, so it makes sense that I've cut back.  In my younger days, I would have worked all four days, or traveled to San Diego a day in advance of set-up, and stayed an extra day to avoid the red-eye flight, which was essentially a week out of my life, and involved round-the-clock work (and some fun, when you factored in a couple parties and a few beer floats).  Yeah, when I was a younger man, I'd party out in San Diego and come back to New York, and it would take me a few days to recover.  

This was something of a "rebuilding year" for the convention, ticket sales were capped, the crowds were sparser than usual, at least on Friday, and everybody in attendance had to go through an extra vaccination check before they could pick up their badges.  Masks had to be worn - not just superhero or costume masks, the surgical ones too, and people still needed to follow the social distancing guidelines - no handshakes, no high-fives, and well, nothing more intimate than that either. (Not at the convention, anyway, what you do back at your hotel room with your cosplay gear on is still up to you...)

The NY Comic-Con used to be held in February, which never made any sense to me, but then, I'm not in charge of scheduling at the Javits Center.  Those first few years they had to find a place for it between the Auto Show, the Home Show, and other annual events, and it used to take up only like a third of the building, but it's grown so much that now it takes over the whole convention center, and they kept adding new wings and finding new spaces to handle the overflow. This year, there just weren't as many people, not as many booths, but that led to spaces on the main floor that just had tables and chairs for people to sit down and eat, also there were more food stands than usual, booths that sold BEER even, and one big booth that just sold fudge. Really? Fudge at a comic-con? Any other year that wouldn't make any sense, who wants to get chocolate all over their hands and then touch comic books and other collectibles? Madness.

Despite the semi-lack of crowds, our booth did more sales than ever, we had a really good year.  It doesn't make sense unless you figure that the people who DID show up were more serious about collecting animation art, and since last year's event didn't happen, they were twice as eager to buy some.  Umm, OK, we're happy to give them what they want and take their money - we had to pay for the booth in June, after all, at a time when nobody was really sure if the event would take place, or in what form.  Anyway, it's the last day today but I'm relaxing at home, my work is done so I can get back to movies and scheduling shifts at my other job.  

There's always a fair amount of Scooby-Doo cosplay going on, these characters have been around since the late 1960's and are now part of the collective consciousness.  I didn't see any GREAT Mystery Inc. costuming this year, but you can always just look out at the crowd and pick out a Velma or a Shaggy, the costuming is easy enough if you just have an orange sweater and a purple skirt handy, or a baggy green shirt and brown pants for your "shaggy" hipster friend.  

The voice of Jason Isaacs carries over from "The Cure for Wellness".  

THE PLOT: Scooby and the gang face their most challenging mystery ever: a plot to unleash the ghost dog Cerberus upon the world.  As they race to stop this dogpocalypse, the gang discovers that Scooby has an epic destiny greater than anyone imagined.  

AFTER: This 2020 film took the characters back to the beginning, for an origin story that nobody really needed - though, really, there have been about 87 animated movies with the Mystery Inc. characters over the years, and maybe just nobody thought to do an origin before?  It's the story that nobody really needed, but I guess it's nice to have - or maybe they have done one, and this counts as a reboot for the younger viewers, I don't know.  Seriously, if I sat down to watch all the Scooby-Doo movies that would be my entire month of October, and you know they probably do all link together, but I don't have that kind of time, or the interest.  So, I'm just limiting myself this year to the 2020 CGI film, and the two live-action movies that came out in the early 2000's.  This will make sense in a few days, I promise - I get the feeling that I maybe say that a lot. 

Scooby-Doo was once a stray puppy, and lonely loner Shaggy (aka Norville Rogers, don't ask me how I know that...) was a lonely kid who kept to himself and listened to songs about being lonely, until this stray Great Dane puppy came into his life. As with all rescue animals, there's debate over who rescued who - great message for the kids here, adopt, don't shop, only this could have been even stronger if Shaggy could have gone to an animal shelter and found Scooby there.  In this version, Scooby the dog is named after the Scooby snacks, but this seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse, right?  We've all heard the legend about how the dog is named after Frank Sinatra singing "Doo-be-doo-be-do" in "Strangers in the Night", but now this seems to be something of an urban legend.  Wikipedia points out that "skooby-doo" was already in use in Cockney rhyming slang for "clue", which makes some sense, but also the fictional band The Archies had a single in 1968 titled "Feelin' So Good (S.K.O.O.B.Y.-D.O.O.) and considering the CBS connection to "The Archie Show", this seems maybe just as legit as the Frank Sinatra reference.  Kids today don't have any clue who Sinatra was, so maybe the new name motivation is acceptable.  

Then they've just got to get the gang all together - so a couple bullies steal Shaggy's Halloween candy and throw it inside a notoriously "haunted" neighborhood house, and Fred, Daphne and Velma appear on the scene to help get the candy back. Because, you know, it's not really a holiday where you can just go get MORE candy from other houses, or just go to the store and BUY the exact candy that you want, instead of a bunch of random candy that you DON'T want given out for free.  (Seriously, kids, it's a dumb process, wouldn't you rather buy a small amount of your FAVORITE candy and be very happy, rather than have to sift through a giant pile of lame-ass licorice, lollipops and candy corn just to maybe find a Snickers bar or some Sour Patch Kids?  I think it's time to retire the whole trick-or-treating concept.). 

The four kids and the dog bond as a group, investigate the haunted house, recover the candy, and discover that the home-owners been running a "my house is haunted" scam, though I'm not really sure how that benefits him.  On the old TV show, there was always somebody haunting the farm or house or other property, and it was USUALLY the person who would benefit from getting the property or the land, even as a kid I realized there was a pattern, it became like "CSI" or "Law & Order" for kids, just follow the money and after a few shows, you could pretty accurately predict who was dressing up like a ghost pirate or evil clown to try to chase the rightful owner off the property.  And they would have gotten away with it, if not for these meddling kids...

But who haunts their OWN property?  What is there to gain?  This makes no sense, did the writers here not watch the old Scooby-Doo show and forget to follow the pattern?  Maybe he just wanted to keep to himself, and he didn't want anybody else to ever visit him, so he made his house seem haunted?  Yeah, there's an extra bit of motivation thrown in at the last second, but this all felt VERY forced as a story-point, there had to be a better way to get the five main characters together as a unit.  Still, this was probably the best part of the movie, because after this, it just descended into greater nonsense.  

The story fast-forwards into the present, where these kids are now young adults, traveling around in their van from one mystery to the next, as we're used to seeing them.  Since this is a kids' movie, there's not much said about the potential romantic pairing of Fred and Daphne, or Shaggy and Velma, or even Daphne and Velma (come on, you know it's possible...).  The only two love stories here seem to be between Shaggy and Scooby, and also Fred and his van.  It's the classic comic-book conundrum, like most superheroes are single and asexual, because kids are reading - plus most comic-book writers are single nerds who don't know how to write married characters, so Spider-Man can have girlfriends but not ever marry Mary Jane (or if he does, which he did, the next writer's only going to undo it...) and Superman dated Lois for like 50 years before tying the knot, then that marriage got undone by the next writer, then another re-boot and he's married again, but come on, how long can it last?  

Sorry, where were we?  Oh, right, Scooby-Doo.  The plot of this movie seems to pieced together based on what other characters from the Scooby-Doo-niverse the writers wanted to use, which means The Blue Falcon and Dynomutt, Dirk Dastardly and Muttley, and also Captain Caveman.  Somehow the story had to incorporate all of those characters, who last all got together in the Laff-a-Lympics cartoon back in the 1970's (look it up) which was ridiculous, but I think still managed to make more sense than "Scoob!" does.  Here goes:

Dirk Dastardly is trying to gather three giant skulls, which belong to the giant mythical three-headed dog, Cerberus (I don't know how a mythical/fictional creature left three REAL skulls behind, but whatever) and the Blue Falcon and Dynomutt are trying to stop him.  (This Blue Falcon is the slacker son of the original Blue Falcon, which is interesting but problematic, how can he be both a slacker AND a superhero at the same time?  A real slacker wouldn't even bother...). Blue Falcon and Dynomutt are aided by Dee Dee Sykes, a female and ethnically diverse pilot character who seems to be here mainly because she's ethnically diverse. (Prove me wrong.) Scooby is important because he's the last living decendant of Alexander the Great's dog, Peritas - which seems to me like it should be pronounced "Perr-eh-tass", as if it rhymes with "Veritas", but everybody here says it WRONG, like "Purr-EE-tas".  I'm also not sure how a dog from 2,500 years ago can have thousands of descendants, but only ONE is still alive, like literally his DNA should be in nearly every dog by now.  But whatever.

The Mystery Inc. team is split up, Shaggy and Scooby work with the Blue Falcon, Dynomutt and their ethnically diverse pilot friend, while Fred, Daphne and Velma take the Mystery Machine to track Dirk Dastardly to his hide-out - the method that Velma uses to find this location is very questionable, it just comes down to "Hey, I used science!" without any further details, but there's a lot of that going around here.  Like "Hey, I need to take over the radio control, I just need to find the right frequency!" or "I need to stop this beam, I'll just reverse the polarity!" because why let any kids know how real science works?  It's all a bit like letting teen Wesley Crusher fire the right beam from the Enterprise to win the battle by pressing a random button on the console.  

Anyway, the team gets back together on a hidden dinosaur island located under Antarctica or something, where they have to fight Captain Caveman, who's protecting the third skull.  Another box checked, they used all the licensed characters that we wanted to... But Dastardly deceives them all, pulls one of those "false face" disguise thingies and gets all the skulls together.  This somehow opens a gate to the Greek underworld (not the Christian one), turns the ancient Greek ruins back into new-looking ones, and gives Dastardly access to Alexander the Great's treasure, also his dog, Muttley, who's been stuck in the Underworld for months with nothing to eat. Yeah, it's a lot to take in.  

But still, it feels like the writers couldn't commit to any solid ideas here - Dastardly wants the gold, no, wait, he just wants his dog back. And the gold.  Shaggy and Scooby want to work with their idols, the Blue Falcon and Dynomutt. Only Shaggy then doesn't want this, because he feels inadequate and like he's losing his only friend. Then he's back on board and they work things out.  Jesus, stop with all the back-tracking already, pick a storyline and stick with it!  The team needs to separate, the team needs to get back together.  One member of the team needs to make a sacrifice, which says something about friendship - only there's a secret way around the prophecy, so everything's OK!  Well, I guess that sacrifice didn't really mean anything, then, did it?  This is what you get when you try to write a franchise movie via committee, I suppose.

Some of the voice casting here makes perfect sense - Zac Efron as Fred, Mark Wahlberg as the Blue Falcon, and Will Forte as Shaggy is totally great.  No-brainers, but nearly any actress could have voiced Daphne, there was nothing distinctive about who they hired there, so they clearly just went for the biggest name they could get (Anna Kendrick, Karen Gillan and Bryce Dallas Howard were considered.). Cameos are another story, I'll allow Tracy Morgan as Captain Caveman, and Kevin Heffernan voices a cop that looks just like his character from "Super Troopers", that tracks.  But Ken Jeong as Dynomutt?  I'm scratching my head there, but honestly I don't remember what the original character sounded like.  So, whatever. 

The franchise doesn't really know what to do with Velma, not at all.  She's been portrayed and voiced over the years by many different actresses, including Mindy Cohn, Kate Micucci, Linda Cardellini and Gina Rodriguez in this one - maybe there's a similarity to those voices (like a grown-up Marcie from "Peanuts", if you follow me) but there's no through-line to the character.  She's Hispanic, she's Asian, she's plus-sized, what can we do to her to be P.C. or portray her as ethnically diverse?  But "Velma Dinkley" doesn't sound like an Asian or Hispanic name, somebody's just trying to cover for the fact that in the 1970's the show's main characters were all Caucasian, but allowed guest stars of color, like the Harlem Globetrotters.  And all of the running gags with Velma, about her being brainy and nearsighted, they're just not funny any more, they all just make the brainy girls in the audience feel "less than".  At least she uses science quite a lot in "Scoob!", but too bad it's all junk science that could have been improved with just a little bit of research by the writers.  I'm going to put a pin in this topic for now, but in the next two days I'll probably have more to say on this - but at least if they'd made her a lesbian here it would have been another step in the right P.C. direction. 

Also starring the voices of Frank Welker (last heard in "Aladdin" (2019)), Will Forte (last seen in "Life of Crime"), Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Gina Rodriguez (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Zac Efron (last seen in "Liberal Arts"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "The Last Word"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "Hearts Beat Loud"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "All About Steve"), Tracy Morgan (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)), Iain Armitage (last seen in "I'm Not Here"), Ariana Greenblatt (last seen in "The One and Only Ivan"), Pierce Gagnon (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Mckenna Grace (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover"), Simon Cowell (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Christina Hendricks (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Henry Winkler (last seen in "Holes"), Harry Perry, John DiMaggio (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Kevin Heffernan (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Ira Glass, Henry Kaufman, Maya Erskine (last seen in "Wine Country"), Billy West (last seen in "Comic Book: The Movie"), Don Messick (last seen in "Diamonds Are Forever"), Fred Tatasciore (last heard in "Shazam!"), Justina Machado (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), John McDaniel, Pam Coats, Adam Sztykiel (last seen in "Rampage"), Alex Kauffman, Vanara Taing, Sarah Lancia, Tony Cervone.  

RATING: 3 out of 10 forced modern pop-culture references

A Cure for Wellness

Year 13, Day 280 - 10/7/21 - Movie #3,950

BEFORE: Cutting down my annual line-up for films for Shocktober to just 22 films has turned out to be the right move.  I'm looking at losing two days to New York Comic-Con this week, and then four days later in the month to my new job - so if I lay the new movie schedule over the calendar and block out the days I'm busy, I can JUST about make it.  I could theoretically still watch a movie on those days, but I need to also think about my sleeping schedule, which is bad enough already without trying to do too much.  Before the pandemic, I used to be able to oversleep, and with everything that's gone on, I seem to have lost that ability.  I'm slowly turning into one of those old people who gets up early and gets stuff done, and I don't like that, not at all.  I didn't use to worry so much about everything, either, from what I recall. If I didn't work so many hours in a week, who cares, it's the part-time gig life for me, right?  Now if I don't have two part-time jobs, and a crammed schedule, then I feel like I'm not doing enough and my bank account's going to dry up in two months.  These are the modern-day fears, in addition to all the pandemic concerns over health, the political nightmares we've all lived through, and watching the planet slowly change and die under our feet.  Is it any wonder I can't sleep more than six hours a night? Who needs horror movies when we have the news?  

Mia Goth carries over from "Marrowbone". 

THE PLOT: An ambitious young executive is sent to retrieve his company's CEO from an idyllic but mysterious "wellness center" at a remote location in the Swiss Alps, but soon suspects that the spa's treatments are not what they seem. 

AFTER: Just two films after "The New Mutants", we're back at another creepy medical facility - this one's a spa/wellness center located near the Swiss alps, one that caters to older people who happen to be rich corporate executives, and there's something inherently OFF about it, right from the get-go.  But the question then becomes, are appearances deceiving, could this really be just a nice, relaxing place for wealthy CEO's to spend time, relax and regenerate, or is there something more sinister going on. Umm, yeah, it's a horror movie, so guess what?  

Young Lockhart is rising up through the ranks at his corporate job, he just got a corner office after some poor executive suffered a heart attack (gee, if only there were a nice European spa he could have gone to...) and he's done some great work on the Reynolds account. Only he didn't, he pulled some kind of corporate shady deal to land the Reynolds account, or something, and the executive board is on to him. They won't turn him over to the SEC, though, if he'll just travel to the mysterious creepy spa near the Swiss Alps to retrieve the company's CEO, who's apparently enjoying the place so much that he never wants to leave. But since there's an important merger coming up, big financial corporate dealings being what they are, the board needs him back in NYC ASAP. It's an easy mission, a midnight run, what could possibly go wrong?  Umm, yeah, it's a horror movie, so guess what? 

Lockhart arrives at the spa and asks to see the missing CEO.  Bad news, it's 3:10 pm and visiting hours inconveniently end at 3 pm. So no dice. Lockhart persists, he meets with the manager of the facility, who says the CEO is having a "treatment" and won't be available until 7 pm.  OK, Lockhart can swing back at 7 pm, pick up the CEO, get him to the airport for the red-eye back to NYC, and everything will be fine, problem solved. But wait, remember, it's a horror movie. Absolutely nothing's going to be easy here. 

I've encountered this level of bureaucracy before, and I've sort of built my career in film production by learning how to navigate around this. Just yesterday we had to pick up two badges at New York Comic-Con, which usually is a simple procedure - my name's been on my boss's account as the point of contact for a decade now, so I usually just show up and get our badges handed to me. (They always threaten that the badges will be name-specific, which would not enable us to swap them among our booth-staff, but they never quite follow through on this threat.). This time my convention padawan and I had to find the proof-of-vaccination booth outside just to get wristbands, then with the wristbands we could get inside the Javits to get our badges, only she was pulling a wheeled cart with our merch in it, so she couldn't come inside with the cart. They wouldn't let me pick up two badges, because I was only one person, despite being the contact person on the account. After a while, this becomes like that puzzle where you have to get the fox, the chicken and the bag of corn across the river in the boat, but you can only take two items with you on each trip. OK, so I got my badge, we dropped off the merch and the supplies at our table, then went BACK to the badge counter, and now since we were two people we could pick up the second badge. I'm jumping through just as many hoops right now trying to qualify a short film for the Oscars, and navigating Comic-Con rules AND A.M.P.A.S. rules at the same time is double-fun, let me tell you. But this is what I do. 

The other thing that leaps to mind here, is that this spa is in Switzerland, which is very close to Germany.  Germans may even be running the place, and Germans are known for being notoriously rigid and stubborn when it comes to rules. I should know, I had a strict German grandmother who helped raise me, and I had to learn my way around all of HER rules and do things HER way, from coming home right after school to mowing the lawn on a regular basis.  I've tried very hard over the years to recover from this, but no doubt it all contributed to my OCD and my own rigid ways of doing things, patterns of behavior under which I feel comfortable just because they're familiar, but left to chart my own course, it's easy to feel lost and adrift.  

About 15 years ago, my wife and I visited this German lodge up in the Catskills, we'd been visiting the Poconos on and off for several years (and this was a few years before discovering the joys of Atlantic City) but this Mountain Brauhaus seemed like a fun change of pace. I think two meals each day were included in the cost of staying there, which I was fine with, but my wife found the selection a bit underwhelming. For lunch one day the menu had three items on it, and if you didn't like those items, there was a fourth option, which was to not eat. One day we decided to drive into town, check out a local restaurant with a larger menu, and when we got back the proprietors or the resort were very curious over why we didn't show up for lunch. When we said we wanted to eat one meal somewhere else, they asked, "Why?" Umm, maybe because your menu only has three items on it? To me, it was comforting and familiar, like being back at my German grandmother's house, with someone tracking my whereabouts after school.  But you know what, older German women can track my movements as long as they cook me a lot of delicious German food, it seems like a fair trade to me. And on our last night at the resort, just before they shut down for the season, there was a huge Oktoberfest-style feast, served family style, so it was all-you-can-eat, my favorite type of meal.  

Back at the Swiss spa, I don't know what kind of food they're serving on the menu, but the guests seem really into it. They're also really into the healthy properties of the spa's water, and they're encouraged to drink those recommended eight glasses a day, only for some reason this just seems to make everybody thirstier. Meanwhile, Lockhart was in a terrible car accident on his way down the mountain, so now he's got a broken leg and he's a resident in the medical wing until further notice. Now he's not going to make his deadline to get that CEO back to New York, but at least he's got lots of time to snoop around and figure out what's really going on here.  Who's the mysterious girl who doesn't seem to understand how life works outside the spa? Why doesn't Pembroke, the CEO, want to leave the spa? What's in all the little blue vials full of "vitamins"? And why can't European people do crossword puzzles correctly?

It's all connected somehow to the story of some baron from 200 years ago, who wanted to keep his bloodline pure by marrying his own sister. Ah, now we're really getting into the kinky side of German people, they're into all that weird fetish stuff, right? Plus, racial purity was kind of their brand back in the day, so this is all starting to make some strange kind of sense. But what's the connection between the past and the present? Who rebuilt the spa after the peasants revolted and burned it down? And how does a spa on top of a MOUNTAIN have access to an underground aquifer? This last one is a huge NITPICK POINT, because water tends to flow downhill, you see, so I think if you look at your various spas across the world that have access to natural springs, I'm guessing most of them are at sea level, or close to it. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but I think a spa on a mountain comprises some kind of inherent contradiction.  

Enough about the plot, I don't want to give any spoilers away, just wanted to raise the questions - because when the answers finally come, you'll have to decide for yourself if they're at all believable. But while we're on the topic of fetishes, this movie tends to take advantage of the phobias as well - whether you've got a fear of medical procedures, or dentistry, or confined spaces (plus others I won't name here) you'll probably find something here that will make you squirm in your seat, and isn't that what Shock-tober is supposed to be about, at the end of the day? This is one giant stress-dream, from the moment Lockhart sets foot in the spa to the end of the film. And here I thought that the spa was supposed to ALLEVIATE stress, only again, horror movie, so that's just not gonna happen. 

There's still the looming possibility that none of this is real - not just because it's a movie but also maybe Lockhart's lost his grip on reality, or having psychotic episodes, or the whole thing is a fever dream, or maybe he died in that car accident and he's in purgatory or hell. That's the basic checklist, I suppose, when a film shows us things that are just a little too far-fetched to be believable. If you take this one at face value, though, it's patently ridiculous, but so are a lot of other horror movies. Maybe you'll find it ridiculous in a good way, I can't be sure - but you may also be reminded of that quote from "South Park" - "Dude, what the f*ck is wrong with German people?"

There's an obvious allegory here to our current pandemic situation, even if this film was released in 2017, three years before any COVID-19 lockdowns. The majority of the guests at the spa are completely sold on the healing properties of the spa's water, despite the evidence all around them that they're not getting better, in fact their conditions are getting worse. But they've all been brainwashed, to some extent - does this feel familiar to anyone else? Ignoring the medical data, believing in a cure just because some charismatic person TELLS them that this cure will work, and refusing to listen to any evidence to the contrary. This spa water might as well be Ivermectin, or hydroxychloroquine, or hydrogen peroxide inhaled via nebulizer. There's a list on Wikipedia of unproven methods to cure or prevent COVID-19, which also includes ultraviolet rays, drinking bleach, cannabis, cocaine, colloidal silver, herbal drinks and many other products being hyped online. Meanwhile, we've got a 99% safe and effective vaccine readily available, and there's still a notable percentage of Americans who refuse to take it.  

You have to wonder (come on, don't you?) what some people on certain news channels hope to GAIN from hyping these false cures, when they themselves have received the vaccine. I'm left to conclude that they secretly want other people to NOT get the vaccine and die, which leaves more resources, jobs and money for the vaccinated people. Am I being too cynical, or can I just see past the lies, which not everybody seems willing to do? I'll admit that a TINY percentage of people have had bad reactions and side effects to the vaccine, sure, but compare that to the over 700,000 people in the U.S. and estimated 4.5 million people worldwide who have died from COVID, and ask yourself which group you'd rather be in? The living one or the dead one? OK, now what about your close family members, would you prefer them alive or dead? Because the vast majority of people filling up the hospital beds right now are coming from the unvaccinated group, so take that into consideration. But, if you'd rather place your bets on bleach or horse de-worming drugs, have at it, because I'm done trying to save dumb people. Maybe we've got too many dumb people in the world as it is, and the herd needs to be thinned out some more. But before I go, please, just take a hard look at the people pitching those "miracle cures", I can guarantee they got their COVID vaccine when it became available to them. Why? Because they want to make sure they stay alive long enough to enjoy your money, and you can count on that. 

I'll be radio-silent the next couple of days because I'm working at Comic-Con, but I'll be back here on Sunday to start up the last 50 movies of 2021. Halloween and Christmas are a lot closer than you might think!

Also starring Dane DeHaan (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Jason Isaacs (last seen in "Rio, I Love You"), Harry Groener (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Nanny McPhee"), Adrian Schiller (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Ivo Nandi (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Ashok Mandanna (last seen in "A Passage to India"), Tomas Nortström, David Bishins (last seen in "The Adjustment Bureau"), Carl Lumbly (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Lisa Banes (last seen in "Gone Girl"), Godehard Giese, Magnus Krepper (last seen in "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest"), Peter Benedict, Maggie Steed (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Craig Wroe, Tom Flynn, Eric Todd, Jason Babinsky (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Johannes Krisch, Rebecca Street, Bert Tischendorf, Michael Mendl (last seen in "Downfall"), Douglas Hamilton

RATING: 6 out of 10 vintage photographs

Marrowbone

Year 13, Day 278 - 10/5/21 - Movie #3,949

BEFORE: As I said yesterday, it's New York Comic Con week, which means that my stress dreams are back, right on schedule.  And they're being made worse by horror movies, so I've got that going for me.  The Con will be over by Sunday, then I'll just have regular real-life stresses to deal with, plus of course horror movies.  I've built up some form of resistance over the years, I think, because it takes a REALLY scary film to give me nightmares, something on the level of "It: Chapter Two" - "Salem's Lot" from 1979 just isn't going to affect me the same way.  

As far as linking goes, I was sort of forced over the last year to become an expert on the filmographies of the "New Mutants" cast, because it had to be re-scheduled again and again - so I have to be on the lookout for other films in this genre that will help me get where I need to go.  That led me to "The Witch", which led me to "Filth" and that also led me to discover "Marrowbone", with both Anya Taylor-Joy AND Charlie Heaton carrying over.  A double link gets my attention, for sure. 

"Don't Let Go" links to one other horror film this year, but it also links to TWO horror films being saved for next year, and that gets my attention, too.  It's got potential to get me out of a jam in 2022, and also gives me an opportunity to program "The Purge" and its sequels next October.  I'm not completely sold on that idea, but I want to at least have the option. 

THE PLOT: A young man and his three younger siblings, who have kept the death of their beloved mother secret in order to remain together, are plagued by a sinister presence in the sprawling manor in which they live.

AFTER: This one's all about the real estate - but isn't it ALWAYS about the real estate?  Especially in horror movies, there's always a spooky house, no matter where you go, right?  "Salem's Lot" had a spooky house in Maine, "The Witch" was set in spooky log cabins in colonial New England, and even "The New Mutants" was set in a very spooky medical institution (filmed in Medfield, MA, so this October has been very New England-oriented).  

OK, maybe I'm over-simplifying things.  But the fear is always there, if you're a homeowner - somebody's going to break into your house, somebody's going to burn down your house, some Korean family's going to pretend to be servants in your house, you know what I'm saying, right?  Actually this one does evoke some other memories of "Parasite", which was a horror movie in its own Korean way, though I never would have been able to link to that in October - January 1 was clearly where that film belonged, the proof is in the linking pudding, since I'm 5/6 of my way to another Perfect Year.  But jeez, was that THIS year when I watched "Parasite", it feels like five years ago - nope, that was 2021, an appropriate film to kick off the second calendar year of pandemic lockdown, perhaps.  Is it safe to leave the house yet??

"Marrowbone", on the other hand, is set for some reason around 1969 - there's footage on TV of the moon landing, and other cultural references like the Beach Boys song "Wouldn't It Be Nice", If not for that, this could have been set in the late 1800's, or the 1930's, because technology's not really that important, and the giant house sort of evokes those old spooky Victorian mansions, although it also retains the qualities of a quaint farmhouse in Maine, which I guess it is.  Seventeen bedrooms that you won't use, giant staircases, way too many mirrors and several coat-stands that you're bound to mistake for a person standing in the next room.  Plenty of storage space in the attic, but we'll get to that in a bit - and surprisingly, no spooky basement with poor lighting.  Sure, it's been abandoned for decades, but it's only a few miles to the nearest town - a little bit of dusting and it's ready for moving in, game nights playing Risk in the parlor, outdoor entertaining space and a large yard so you can see enemies approaching from the forest.  Wait, what? 

Let's back up a bit - Rose Fairbairn moves her four children (three teenagers and a younger son) from England to her childhood home in rural Maine, and while their past isn't detailed at this point, you get the feeling that they're escaping from a very bad situation - you know, HIM.  Rose makes a big deal out of leaving the bad nastiness of the past behind, making a fresh start in the U.S., and changing their last name to Marrowbone.  Because that's a common name that won't raise suspicion at all.  Things go well for a while, and a teen girl who lives nearby becomes part of the family and a potential love interest for Jack, the oldest child.  They go on hikes, beach trips, picnics and such, and life is great in Maine for the group until their mother gets sick.  

Rose's dying wish is to keep the family together, and that means keeping her death secret until Jack turns 21 - otherwise child services would get involved and split the family up, maybe this is one reason why the film is set in 1969.  Back in the Depression era, the government maybe didn't care if teenagers raised their younger siblings?  Anyway, maintaining this illusion means the family has to live in a form of lockdown, no strangers in the house, not even attractive neighbors who are love interests for Jack.  This sets up a love triangle between Jack, Allie, and Tom Porter, the town lawyer who needs Mrs. Marrowbone's signature on the paperwork that would transfer ownership of the house to her soon-to-be adult son.  Yeah, that might be a problem, I mean they could dig her up but she still might not be able to sign the papers.  

This would be the absolute WORST time for the person the family's been running from to show up, wouldn't it?  So naturally that happens, then the movie does a quick fast-forward to six months later, perhaps we'll get some understanding later on about what just got skipped over.  The family's still together, still under lockdown, with only Jack leaving the house to go into town, barter home baked goods at the general store for necessities, and visit Allie, who's working at the local library and still fending off Tom Porter's affections.  Some notable changes around the house, though, there are now sheets over all the mirrors to protect them from a "ghost", their dead mother's room is off-limits, and the door to the attic has been bricked up.  I'm sure there's a perfectly irrational explanation for all of this.  

Jack's able to deal with the lawyer looking to complete the transfer of the estate, because he's able to convince the lawyer that his mother is still alive, only ill and bedridden, and also get his sister to forge their mother's signature, plus he uses some of the money that belonged to that mysterious stranger.  It's British pounds, which is an inconvenience, but he overpays the lawyer enough that he doesn't care.  Besides, what could possibly go wrong, using some dead man's money to pay for something?  

OK, that's enough plot from me, I'm going to shut up now because spoilers - but perhaps I've said just enough to make this film sound as intriguing as it really is.  There's some trickery involved here, don't get me wrong, but if you're trying to figure out what happened and how things got to be the way they are, you still may be very surprised when the reveals start to come.  The plot had to be bent over backwards and sideways a few times to bring about the desired result, and there's a toggle between the past and the present that sort of evokes a very particular fake-out scene from "The Silence of the Lambs".  There are twists and then there are twists, and some famous movies that had them were "Psycho", "The Sixth Sense" and "Fight Club" - this one's not exactly like any of those, but I think it's kind of in the ballpark?  Yet also unique.  

There's just something a bit OFF about this film, maybe because it's a Spanish film, made in Spain but set in New England?  Nothing really looks right in a way, but you can tell yourself that's maybe just how things looked in 1969?  I don't know.  It doesn't really matter, since no Americans watched this film in the theaters - it grossed under $1,500 in North America.  Maybe it found a second life on streaming platforms?  I think it's at least worth a go - I watched it on iTunes but it's also on Amazon - not Prime but some of the specialty channels.  You can catch it on GooglePlay or YouTube - hell, you can watch nearly anything these days if you're willing to drop $2.99, which I only do if I have to.  

Also starring George MacKay (last seen in "1917"), Mia Goth (last seen in "Emma."), Matthew Stagg, Nicola Harrison (last seen in "The Impossible"), Kyle Soller (last seen in "The Trip to Spain"), Tom Fisher (last seen in "The Current War: The Director's Cut"), Myra Kathryn Pearse, Paul Jesson (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Robert Nairne (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Laura Brook and the voice of Adam Quintero.

RATING: 6 out of 10 kitchen matches

The New Mutants

Year 13, Day 277 - 10/4/21 - Movie #3,948

BEFORE: Trying to set aside October each year for horror films does keep getting tougher - or rather, it would be easy to do if I wasn't also trying to keep my chain unbroken all year long.  So I've taken a look at what my horror movie list will look like AFTER 2021, to see if it's even possible for me to do a similar month in 2022 AND also keep a linked chain going then.  And I'm glad I did this now, because there's a movie that I was going to watch at the end of October, but also links to some of the other horror movies on my list that I'm NOT watching this year.  

What I thought I had was one large grouping of linked movies left, and a bunch of smaller ones.  The big one was 12 films long, the next largest one was 6 films, then one that was 5 films long, a four-movie group, then a bunch of doubles and triples.  BUT, I then saw that with one small non-horror addition, I could make a chain that was 15 movies long.  AND, if I just take the last movie of this year's chain and move it to next year's chain, I can make a chain that's 20 movies long, maybe even 21. That's pretty respectable, as this year's chain was 23 movies, but now it's going to be 22.  

Look, a lot can happen between now and next October - maybe I'll find a bunch of new (to me) horror movies that all link together.  Maybe I'll end up breaking the chain next spring, accidentally, or get tired of linking movies altogether.  We'll see - but it would seem to make sense for me to delay this one movie, called "Don't Let Go", until 2022.  That seems to be the thing that makes next year's chain possible, and anyway, my 2021 chain was one film too long, and now it's just the right size.  And the end of the year is just over 50 movies away, so I'm glad I got this straightened out now, what a relief.  

Speaking of delaying movies, here's a film that's been delayed many times, both by me AND by 20th Century Fox.  Originally this film was supposed to be in theaters in April 2018, but then got delayed because of reshoots, also Fox didn't want this film to compete with "Deadpool 2" and also "X-Men: Dark Phoenix".  Then Disney bought Fox, and that caused further delays in the release.  So there were four release dates that came and went, and THEN the pandemic hit, so it got delayed a FIFTH time.  Finally, it hit theaters in August 2020, and I wasn't yet ready to go back into theaters myself, so I kept re-scheduling it, too, and finally it hit cable this past spring, and I recorded it in May 2021.  I sure hope this film is worth all the trouble...

Anya Taylor-Joy carries over from "The Witch". 

THE PLOT: Five young mutants, just discovering their abilities while held in a secret facility against their will, fight to escape their past sins and save themselves.  

AFTER: Wow, what an incredible disappointment - maybe no film could possibly live up to tow and a half years of re-scheduling, then another full year of people avoiding theaters because of the pandemic, and then FINALLY a cable release.  All for this?  What a waste of everybody's time.  Look, I'm a comic-book fan, I read the X-Men comics and I've been reading the New Mutants, too, for almost all of the time they've been around.  Sure, they started out as the "junior" X-Men, but they had very original powers and they managed to find their own audience, but the characters deserve a much better movie than THIS.  

This is not quite 90 minutes of nothing, but it's darn close.  There's no villain, first of all, so it's basically the same mistake that the first "Suicide Squad" movie made - it's just the team meeting each other, coming together, and then dealing with the strange powers of one of the teammates.  This is only the first act of a standard superhero movie, just the meet-and-greet-and-possibly-fight part, but then the team should come together, put aside their differences in order to work to defeat the evil power.  What would "The Avengers" be if the team came together and then didn't fight Loki and the Chitauri?  That would be a very boring movie, right?  My point, exactly.  

They could have easily compressed all the inaction here in this 90-minute film, and then added the reveal, that they're not being held in a facility run by Charles Xavier, but instead it's an evil facility run by Mr. Sinister.  Then having the team come together to escape the institution would MEAN something.  The rumor is that this was the original plan, and they may have actually filmed scenes with Jon Hamm as Mr. Sinister, but for some reason the plan changed and that story was scrapped.  (This could mean that those scenes were terrible, even worse than what ended up being in the final cut, who can say?)

But without those scenes, without a villain, without a point in getting the team together, it sort of feels like somebody forgot to finish this movie.  Also like they forgot to give these characters something to DO - Illyana Rasputin, aka Magik, is a very interesting character.  She can open portals to the Limbo realm, and summon demons to fight on her behalf.  She can teleport, and she's got a cool-looking SoulSword that also has powers.  But what does she do in this movie but act like a stuck-up bully?  What a waste.  

Other characters have powers that would also seem to be right at home in a horror movie - Rahne Sinclair, aka Wolfsbane, can turn into a wolf.  That's cool, but again, the story really fails to make good use of that.  Does she bite villains, tear them apart with her claws?  Nah, she just sees better in the dark and has enhanced smell.  Ho hum, what's the point of even becoming a wolf if that's the best part of it?  And Dani Moonstar, aka Mirage, is supposed to eventually be team leader, but here she hardly seems forceful enough to do that.  Her power is to show people their greatest fears, which is what messes up the whole team at night, in their dreams, because she doesn't fully understand her power yet, or how to control it.  So here she's like the Enchantress in "Suicide Squad", the whole team has to be put through the wringer because one member can't control her power.  

The male members of the team both have energy-based powers, Cannonball can fly really fast and blast things, and he's SUPPOSED to be invulnerable when he does that - only here he can't really control his power either, and he keeps getting hurt.  Roberto DaCosta, aka Sunspot, can absorb solar radiation and channel it back, and then, I don't know, burn stuff?  It's a bit unclear, even in the comics, but here he just sometimes turns into a man made of fire, and also then seems to lose control.  Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?  

(Two members of the original team are missing here, one is of course Professor X, who put the team together as a possible replacement for the X-Men, who I think were off in space for a while.  The other missing member is Karma, a Vietnamese girl who could use mind control to take over other people's bodies.  Was that too creepy, even for this film?  Or did somebody feel that the team was already ethnically diverse enough, with a Russian, a Native American and a Brazilian on board?)

Umm, yeah, about that - Sunspot's supposed to be Brazilian, like BROWN-skinned Brazilian, and here he just looks Caucasian, and doesn't even have an accent.  Kudos to Anya Taylor-Joy for at least faking a believable Russian accent without going all ridiculous like Florence Pugh in "Black Widow", but then Mirage is supposed to be Native American, and she doesn't really look like that, either.  Two steps forward and one step back for diversity, I guess. 

This Marvel comic was ground-breaking in the 1980's because except for Spider-Man and the X-Men in the 1960's, most of Marvel's super-heroes were adults when they got powers or built their super-suits or whatever.  But supposedly these mutant powers tend to kick in when puberty does, so it's a great opportunity to have characters who are the same age as most of the readers, who could see themselves and their problems reflected in those of the X-Men, then in the New Mutants when the X-Men had to grow up over time.  Great, moody, sullen and disinterested superheroes, that's what we all need - at a point in time where big changes are happening to their bodies, they're growing hair in weird places, turning into wolves, summoning demon portals and burning things with absorbed solar radiation.

This movie takes the relationship between Mirage and Wolfsbane even further than the comic book did - in the comics they have a "special bond", which is obviously code for "gay", not some telepathic link between Native Americans and wolves, except that it's that, too.  It's bad enough that Rahne Sinclair was raised Irish Catholic, and her local pastor was already beating her because she was a werewolf (work of the devil to him), if he knew she was a lesbian he'd probably have killed her outright.  But it's 2020 now, we can show two girls kissing on-screen, after the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" show and "Ally McBeal" and "Ellen" all paved the way.  Unfortunately, this only results in the world's most boring mutant lesbian relationship ever, all they want to do is stare into each other's eyes and share a kiss every other Thursday.  I think in the comic book Wolfsbane has a son with some Asgardian prince who could also turn himself into a wolf, so go figure THAT one out.  

Another problem with nearly all of these characters is that they killed a friend or family member when their powers first manifested - in Marvel, this is a long tradition that goes back to Spider-Man's uncle, who was killed by a gunman that Spidey SHOULD have stopped, therefore he has to spend the rest of his life fighting criminals, but that WON'T bring his uncle back.  Other characters have suffered similar tragedies, like Jean Grey lost (killed?) her parents and Cyclops thought his parents died in a plane crash, only to find out later his father became a space pirate.  And Wolverine has probably had to kill everyone he ever loved at different points in his life, thank God he doesn't remember most of it for some reason.  But here, with a whole team of mutants feeling guilty for having powers, and accidentally killing people, they're just positively paralyzed with fear and neurosis all the time, they probably don't even feel they deserve these powers, or the ability to control them.  So, you know, fun times. 

Sure, there are references to the Native American "Demon Bear", which was a big part of the first story arc in the original comic.  (Supposedly we all have two bears inside us, a good one and an evil one, and whichever one we feed, that's the one that grows?).  Dani Moonstar's bear is a big one, and he's hungry, and the whole team has to come together - maybe the doctor had the right idea when she said that Dani was dangerous and needed to be put down.  This doctor apparently never learned the Hippocratic Oath... but that's the sign that something's really not right at this institution, and that the team needs to escape.  Oh, if only they had somebody on the team who could summon portals to the Limbo realm and teleport them out of there, but I guess there's no point in wishing for things they can't have.  Giant NITPICK POINT there. 

When the team does come together to defeat the Demon Bear, then they all just leave the facility, without even packing a change of clothes, and head off, looking for a second act.  I hope these crazy kids find that someday, only it won't be in the form of a sequel to this snooze-fest.  Damn, this HURTS me to rate this film as just average, when with a little more work, a decent villain and better-defined powers, this might have turned into something.  Instead, this is how the X-Men movie franchise dies, very quietly in its sleep while the cameras are watching.

BUT, the timing is just great for me, I've landed on a comic-book movie just before New York Comic-Con, which starts on Thursday this week.  Today was my prep day for the event, getting animation art, other merchandise, and supplies ready to go to the Javits Center, which is just a few blocks from my office.  Last year's event was cancelled, obviously, so we haven't sold anything at a convention in TWO years.  Normally I'd work every day and wear myself out, but I'm getting too old for that - so this year I'm splitting the booth time with two co-workers, and I'm only working set-up on Wednesday, the second half of Friday, and all day on Saturday.  Sunday I plan to sleep, all day.  But that's why I'm loading up this early part of October with movies, because I'm going to need to take a break from horror movies REAL soon.  

Also starring Blu Hunt, Maisie Williams (last seen in "Mary Shelley"), Charlie Heaton, Henry Zaga, Alice Braga (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Adam Beach (last seen in "Hostiles"), Thomas Kee (last seen in "The Company Men"), Happy Anderson (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Dustin Ceithamer, Colbi Gannett, Jacinto Vega Spiritwolf with a vocal cameo from Marilyn Manson (last seen in "Lost Highway").

RATING: 5 out of 10 therapy sessions

The Witch

Year 13, Day 276 - 10/3/21 - Movie #3,947

BEFORE: You see my problem, right?  By treating romances and horror films as polar opposites, maintaining two separate months that are allocated just for those two types of films, I manage to miss out on a lot of connections.  James McAvoy was in "Becoming Jane", which was a period romance film, and then he turns up not only in "Filth", which I was treating as a horror film of sorts, but also films like "Glass".  Same goes for Anya Taylor-Joy, she was in "Emma." earlier this year, another period romance, and now today she's in a period horror film.  Things would be so much easier, perhaps, if I could mix all the films together - as it is, I have to look for actors who are in TWO horror films, or TWO romances, just to make everything work out.  So, it would be great if all actors could just confine themselves to making one kind of film, OK?  Thanks, I really appreciate it.  (Yes, both actors have appeared in the X-Men franchise films, but that doesn't help, that's not going to bridge the gap between February and October.)

Kate Dickie carries over from "Filth".  

THE PLOT: A family in 1630's New England is torn apart by the forces of witchcraft, black magic and possession.

AFTER: Yes, I know that on the poster, the name of this film looks like "The VVitch", with two V's in place of one W.  Supposedly that's because we didn't have the letter "W" back in the 1630's, but is that accurate?  How can that be possible?  We had the "Wuh" sound, right?  People didn't say the word "witch" like "vitch", so WTF?  Or, VVTF?  Besides, we call the letter "double-U" and not "double-V", so some more research is required here - however, I can't get Wikipedia to work on my computer, some certificate has expired, so that's making things rather difficult.  Let me try my phone....

Huh, according to Wiki, the classical Latin alphabet did not have the "W" character - the "wuh" sound we know today came from using two "U" letters together - but Germans were using the double-V or double-U in the 8th Century, and the changeover to a new letter was very gradual, which is maybe why the capital "W" looks like two V's and the small "w" sometimes looks like two u's.  But on Wiki there's a poster from the Salem Witch (sorry, UUitch) trials, that spells "Witches" with two capital U's - but ONLY in some fonts.  The first line of that poster reads "The Wonders of the Invisible World", and uses W's just fine.  But I guess if the particular font you wanted to use on your printing press didn't have a W, it was still OK in 1693 to use double u's.  Which is why we still call the letter Double-U.  

Still, I'm not buying it, because the U.S. colonials in the 1630's still should have known what a W was.  But bear in mind, these people also thought that the devil walked around in the form of a black goat.  This film is set a few decades before the infamous Salem witch trials, but clearly this is meant as a precursor to that.  Pretty much everybody agrees now that there might not have been actual witches in Salem, Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" took care of that - even though that play used the setting as an allegory for Communism and The Red Scare, it opened the door to other explanations for the Salem witches.  Either there were Puritans dabbling in the dark arts, or perhaps everybody was lying, or perhaps everybody was pointing fingers at others to save themselves.  Right?  

Look, you have to go back and think about who founded this country, a bunch of stubborn Puritans.  When I saw the Capitol insurrection that took place in January of this year, it made me think of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution - we had a bunch of angry Colonials who dressed up like Native Americans and dumped shiploads of tea into Boston Harbor because they were tired of oppressive government, high taxation and well, they were bored and frustrated and looking for an outlet.  So that's the same spirit that made people today dress up in buffalo heads and MAGA hats and try to tear down the Capitol - in some sense, it's who we are as a country (some of us, anyway) and while it didn't work this time, it came from somewhere in the past, the rebellious nature of frustrated, unsatisfied Americans.  

But the Puritans were different, although ultra-conservative in their own way.  These were the people who were so uptight about religion that they were kicked out of several countries in Europe, including usually uptight Britain.  (Eating butter was considered a sin, let that one sink in for a moment...). It's best to send them off to the wilds of America, where (if they survive the harsh winters) they can go to church twice a day, chastise themselves to remove their impure thoughts, and have enough missionary sex to populate the colonies, even if that just brings them waves and waves of guilt and regret.  

What do you get in a society that repressed?  The kids are being home-schooled, in between the 47 hours of farm chores that everybody had to do each day, so if the teenagers got a little randy, they were probably going to peek at their brothers and sisters undressing, or "take matters into their own hands", if you know what I mean.  Plus there were animals on the farms, doing what animals do, so all around there were triggers that led to bad, naughty things.  Plus, remember, it's the 1630's, so there were all kinds of fairy tales and folklore things, and then there was the Bible, filled with stories about the Devil and Hell, but also people from Biblical times gettin' it on, and fornicating here and there and begetting this person over there.  It was a minefield of temptation, sins, and then guilt and regret in a vicious cycle.  

This film shows how religion, folklore, a bit of careless teasing between kids, combined with dealing with the rugged weather, relentless, mind-numbing chores, and a bit of normal teenage horniness might have come together to create a perfect storm of shame, blame and falsehoods regarding things like witchcraft.  A teenager might easily dabble with a spoken wish or a spell or even knowledge of a local herb as a form of escapism, and with the Puritans being hyper-sensitive about the influence of the Devil, from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump to being accused of witchcraft.  And then as the finger-pointing and denials start flying, the family unit could get torn apart in the process.  

Look, bad luck's going to happen, a crop's going to fail here and there, maybe there's not much food wandering by the cabin this week, and back then you couldn't just pop down to the corner store for bagels and cream cheese, everybody was living on the frontier.  This family shown here left their colony to strike out on their own, maybe be the first ones to start a new town, and in so doing, they're out in the woods, surrounded by wild animals and who-knows-what.  Maybe it's a little weird that the twins are claiming that their goat can talk, but hey, kids, what can you do?  Twins are weird in general, that's for sure.  It's probably a little more upsetting that young Caleb's trying to sneak a peek down his sister's blouse, but he's at that delicate age.  Meanwhile Thomasin, who's supposed to be watching the twins, is also responsible for helping her father undress after he's been out hunting - yeah, that seems perfectly OK, no triggering behavior there.  

I got pretty concerned after a while, because there just seemed to be a whole lot of nothing happening, and I thought that maybe this was the "Blair Witch Project" situation all over again.  Remember that film?  It was a shaki-cam "found footage" sensation back in the day, but eventually fans realized that in 80 minutes of movie, absolutely nothing happened.  "The Witch" might be another slow burn, but eventually the excrement hits the fan, and the little grievances between the family members, combined with bad luck, cabin fever and paranoia all come to a head.  Everybody suddenly accuses everybody else of consorting with the Devil, and it's a long downward spiral from there.  

But then, what is reality?  Maybe there really is a witch living out in the woods, maybe a whole coven of them, and this family (with no discernible last name) just picked a really bad corner of Colonial New England to move into.  Sure, and maybe goats can really talk to kids.  Who can say?  Better to take those teen girls, tie them up and throw them in the river to see if they'll float, perhaps.  Jesus, did we really DO that as a society?  It's a wonder that anybody made it out of the 1600's, right?  The good news was that for the next 200 years, there was a whole lot of space for us to fill, if you felt cramped up or overly repressed you just packed up and headed west, for someplace like Wyoming or Alaska where you could just build a little cabin, live your life just like you wanted to, and then go silently insane by yourself - or find a spouse, settle down and raise a family that could then fall completely apart later.  And there were plenty of common enemies, like Native Americans and then later Nazis and Communists, for us all to agree on, that kept us pretty busy.

But it's still not a large leap from the Puritans of the 1630's to the conservatives and "Karens" of today.  People who believe in religious freedom for themselves, but don't think that right should be extended to Muslims.  People who signed off on a separation between church and state, yet keep trying to get the laws of our country to reflect Christian values, whatever that means.  People who want the guvmint to not mandate vaccinations or mask-wearing to combat COVID, because it should be their bodies, their choice - but then they want to restrict reproductive rights for teens because somehow God told them that abortion is wrong.  (But if their own daughter needed an abortion, that's totally different...). And they can't see the inherent contradictions and hypocritical positions that have resulted.  

So oddly, we're kind of back where we started as Americans - you can't repress people and tell them what to do, what to think, how much to pay in taxes, without eventually causing some kind of riot.  Or all those repressed feelings and naughty thoughts have to go SOMEWHERE, you can only suppress them for so long - and then all it takes is one invisible threat to tear the family, or the country, right down the middle.  And all that just does NOT lead to good things.

Look, we can get really bogged down here discussing the nature of man, is there such thing as original sin or is it possible to resist all the world's temptations and live a meaningful life that is also, you know, somewhat interesting?  Are humans in control of the world around them, or just pawns of the universe, subject to forces both earthly and other-worldly?  Or, maybe this family's eldest daughter is just terrible at playing "Peek-a-boo" with a baby.  That's possible, too.

Also starring Anya Taylor-Joy (last seen in "Emma."), Ralph Ineson (last seen in "Dolittle"), Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Julian Richings (last seen in "The Red Violin"), Bathsheba Garnett (last seen in "Mean Girls"), Sarah Stephens, Axtun Henry Dube, Athan Conrad Dube and the voice of Daniel Malik.

RATING: 6 out of 10 cords of chopped wood