Interzone #267 - November-December 2016
Page 17
A different branch of Storks’ creative family, which traces its lineage back to Judd Apatow’s Freaks & Geeks crew, is behind the more aggressively disruptive animation SAUSAGE PARTY, which licenses the power of cartoons to go to places live action dare not in a gleefully confrontational allegory about the tyranny of religion. There’s something of the Trolls dynamic in the romance between Seth Rogen’s sceptical sausage Frank and his virginal bap-bride Brenda, who find their dreams of erotic destiny threatened to its foundations as disturbing cracks begin to emerge in the foodstuffs’ myth of an eternal transcendent afterlife in the humans’ glorious world of light and joy, when scarred revenants who make it back to the store report a nightmare world of hellish torture and extinction. But this is a cartoon world, and savage violence, hardcore foodstuff-on-foodstuff action, and even militant faith-baiting and rationalism are permitted in its cheery toon-toned faux anthropomorphism. A long development has given Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and their co-writers space to tauten the script to a muscular hardness, and the carnage payoff when it comes has a horrible exhilaration. Throughout the film you’re haunted by the question of what possible happy ending could ever await these perishable characters so void of agency in their fragile and all too temporary shelf-life; but then the ending pulls a triumphant Doctor Strange resolution out of the bag that returns the point to the animated medium itself.
Ridley Scott’s boy Jake makes his feature debut with MORGAN, this year’s Turing-test fable about an android in a deepwoods facility being scrutinised for signs of humanity while the humans are being scrutinised right back as part of a darker purpose with a chain of twists ready to release. Anya Taylor-Joy is the engineered child-woman protected and feared by her makers, and Kate Mara the fixer sent in after an unfortunate incident has left Jennifer Jason Leigh confined to two scenes and a single afternoon’s filming. To nobody’s surprise but the cast’s, things go rapidly chips-up, especially when Paul Giamatti turns up for an extended cameo to do the obligatory two-handed table scene. The impressive international cast are all a bit too good for the script, whose twists are fairly foreseeable until the ambiguous final-shot sting, but Taylor-Joy makes a good fist of the android performance that is apparently now part of the cursus honorum for breakout female stars, while Mara makes the most of her character’s essential blankness by playing for a chilly unreadability that pays off when the big reveals, as they must, come out of the machine.
THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR sees the high-performing Blumhouse franchise go topical and 24, as Frank Grillo’s character from the second film re-emerges as personal security to a presidential candidate committed to rolling back the regime of the New Founding Fathers under which all crime is sanctioned for one night a year. (Policy summary: “The money generated by the purge lines the pocket of the insurance companies and the NRA. It is time to appeal to the better angels of our nature.”) This of course paints a giant target on her come Purge Night, and a by now familiar story shape assembles as groups of characters from different parts of the city get drawn together in a fight for survival that turns by degress into a fightback against the masters of the world. Like its predecessors, it uses the Purge premise as a way to talk angrily on film about class, inequality, and social control, with America’s elite meeting in panelled rooms with decanters of Scotch to exchange grim opinings like “They want the impossible: everyone to have.” (Of course they turn out to be in league with the Catholic church and practising human sacrifice.) There are interesting new ideas like the murder tourists that in the event go nowhere, but Grillo is quite fun now that he’s got over his demons from the second film (summarised here in two crisp sentences) and distilled his character down to its functional essence, and the result is the most enjoyable instalment of its dubious trilogy, though it’s hard to see a place left for a fourth film to go.
The urban apocalypse is all too real in Iranian ghost story UNDER THE SHADOW, in which a young mother finds herself trapped during the 1988 bombardment of Tehran in a rapidly depopulating and disintegrating apartment block with her daughter and a malevolent djinn which rides in on an Iraqi missile and moves by sinister degrees from making favourite toys go missing to more sinister and sensational forms of Babadookish torment, while the apartment, building, and city around them break down under the combined assault from outside and within. It’s a powerful genre allegory of repression (the heroine is a former medical student blocked by the 1979 revolution from completing her studies and fulfilling her destined career) and the familial and personal breakdown that life in a time of terror brings to the urban bourgeoisie, with spirits of evil ancient and modern converging in a nightmare that finds new implications in old wives’ tales: “They travel on the wind, moving from place to place until they find someone to possess … If you take a personal belonging, something that you treasure, there’s no escape from them. They’ll always know where to find you.” The end is pretty much the same shot as the similar-but-nothing-like A Girl Walks Home at Night, but here with a much darker and more despondent implication.
A more genteel urban dystopia unfolds itself in SET THE THAMES ON FIRE, a low-budget under-the-radar British indie from Sadie Frost’s production company that channels the spirits of Derek Jarman and Angela Carter for a slow but beguiling vision of how our cities will more likely die. In a flooded future London inexorably surrendering its remaining landmarks to the water, an introverted piano man and an up-for-it escapee from a psych ward are thrown together by, and increasingly entangled with, the drowning city’s tyrant, who comes across as a ghastly of Albert Spica and Harold Shand, with a supporting cast of randoms including Sally Phillips as a tarot-turning white witch and Noel Fielding as a motley pimp so exuberantly depraved that for one pivotal scene their most usable take still has one of the leads openly corpsing. More mood piece than narrative, its plot is little more than a washing-line on which scenes are loosely pegged out in a post-apocalyptic diorama of character performances and melancholic comic turns, with the real stars the lovingly crafted optical plates of a washed-out city reclaimed by its river as the tube tunnels flood and Tate Modern goes under. The film equivalent of an upstairs pub theatre production in Streatham, it makes a lot of its modest resources, shooting inventively around the fact that the budget doesn’t seem to have stretched to any actual water. But as the Ancient One says, “You cannot beat a river into submission; you have to surrender to its current and use its power as your own”; and one of the minor disappointments of Doctor Strange is that of the three global sanctums in “cities of power”, we never get to see the heralded London sanctum, which falls offscreen with none to hear. It’s nice to know that somewhere in this vast multiverse there are fantasy universes in which people still talk with wistful hopelessness of getting the Overground running again. For those on the Barking line from Gospel Oak, that’s a dream beyond the vision of the Vishanti.
LASER FODDER
TONY LEE
ARROW SEASON FOUR
THE FLASH SEASON TWO
DR. STRANGE
Green Arrow! You have not failed your genre! Although Oliver Queen ran away from home in Star City to play house in suburbia with A-team’s hacker Felicity, his archery gang soon ask them for help to fight evil Damien’s pursuit of ultra-hammy Halloween style havoc with his HIVE of homicidal hoods. ARROW SEASON FOUR (DVD, 5 September) reunites Green Arrow with sidekicks Black Canary, Spartan, and Speedy, in defence of a city forever on the edge of chaos. Ongoing problems for our unreliable heroes lurch between soap clichés (long-lost brother found, unknown son discovered, sitcom mother visits, old flames return, gay marriage), and middle-class melodramas of secrets, lies, and hypocrisy, where mapped-out destiny misdirects law-keepers and -breakers, and justice always costs a fortune in bloodlust.
Ridiculously frequent heart-to-heart talks, especially for self-pitying characters that doubt or simply don’t know who/what they are (at any age!), never mind how to cope or deal with traumatic life, are offset by the series’ ambitious production value
s. Arrow spotlights many well-staged action scenes, blending parkour-mania, anti-gun fu, biker stunts, gadget deployments, and TV-sized explosions on cinematic streets of gyre. As usual, Arrow suffers far too many shuffled flashbacks to five years ago, when bad-hair-day Ollie was sent on a mission back to that mysterious island of Purgatory. Said flashbacks devolve such narrative function from the built-in series-prequel, as in previous seasons, to a Highlander 2 solution for muddled storytelling. The location in the past makes telefantasy island a joint of anything-goes wish-fulfilment, so Arrow’s scriptwriters can freely smoke the DC comics-lore stash. Breaking the show’s timeline of causality for some ret-con revisionism of this milieu so that, of course, the stranded Ollie once met questing John Constantine, back then – and they bonded on BFF terms (with contractual obligations for some future Arrow episodes).
But showing the previously-unknown past does provide an intro for magic into the series, and the rewriting welcomes guest-hero Constantine, who’s later called into the city for a soul-restoration job in the present-day. The original Black Canary (Caity Lotz) is not the only resurrection, and themes of re-birth rule this season’s plots, right up to the climactic threat of a nuke-scorched planet with a subterranean ark for a new world survivalism scenario. MIA scientist Ray Palmer returns as hero Atom, while an Egyptian warrior-priestess is reincarnated as Hawkgirl in paired/cross-over episodes that mix Arrow’s usually pragmatic urban vigilantism with The Flash’s esoteric meta-human crises.
In a later Arrow story, we find a man made of networked-robot bees has only a short life-span, but such a super-menace seems fairly ordinary if compared to weirder attackers in THE FLASH SEASON TWO (DVD, 12 September). Where Arrow is salvaged from its dead-end story by a comics-industry standard of ret-con flashbacks, The Flash has not-right-here-and-now stuff that’s actually more like DC’s Elseworlds material, spillage from Earth-2 shenanigans, and time-travelitis. So, everybody keeps a secret or two, betrayal/forgiveness are passing twists, and a big-story development gets all tangled up with doppelgangers. Out on patrol in Central City “the fastest man alive” has plenty of enemies and some (un)healthy competition in run-around stakes. Jay Garrick, the Flash from from Earth-2 arrives, powerless against super-humans of offensive intent, sent on an episodic basis by unstoppable villain Zoom (unfortunately named since lame comedy Zoom, 2006) to kill the Flash. As top villain, growler Zoom would be a more effective terrorist if only he could actually talk as fast as he runs. His masked mouth moves in slow motion, but nobody actually bothers to use the peculiar weakness against him. They just stand there and listen to his every croaking word.
Initially, there are 52 wormhole breaches (same number as New 52 DC comics range), and so various pseudo-eerie “spontaneous energy malfunctions” are the least of uncanny problems for squad F. Like nukes in 1950s B-movies, here it’s dark energy and antimatter that enable miracles of transformation. The Flash’s rogues’ gallery has much sillier absurdities than Arrow’s average villains. Sand Demon spills all over the place, Dr Light shines bright yet briefly, anti-kinetic inertia-fiend Turtle slows good to a sluggish crawl, while ice-queen Killer Frost (Earth-2’s Dr Snow) and Black Siren (Earth-2’s Canary) prove that an evil double simply means a goth makeover. There’s quake-magnet Geomancer, female speedster Trajectory (Velocity was already in use for Jay’s ‘speed’ drug!), bulky shape-shifter Tar-Pit, phantasmic time-wraith (whatever next?), the Speed Force incarnated, and the most fun of all, fish-zilla King Shark (Jaws meets the Hulk!), and the return of telepathic gorilla Grodd (Kong for a Beauty & Beast with twists). Both talking monsters are treated with a po-faced aplomb to make The Flash a cult above its cartoonish competitors.
Flash learns how to throw lightning bolts, and gets a tachyon booster for extra power. The squad have to find a new host for Firestorm’s nuclear matrix. STAR Labs’ techie Cisco (Carlos Valdes – a typical hacktor, there’s no beginning to his talent) gets visions and becomes insipid psychic/seer Vibe – instantly making him thirteen times more of an annoyingly smug geek than he was before…a panto irritant level that rises to seventy-eight times worse as his Earth-2 doppelganger, the boringly contrived Reverb.
Just like Arrow, The Flash is cursed with the same old soap bubbles: long-lost sibling, dying parent, abused kids, temp disability, surrogate this, foster that, adopted other. Although it shares some of their faults, Supergirl relies upon lively sitcom with less moribund soap for its off-duty moments, so it turned out to be a better superhero adventure series than either of them. Spin-off Legends of Tomorrow expands the DC telly-verse with time-travelling by a curious hodgepodge of second-league characters.
Just ahead of Scott Derrickson’s supercharged movie for Marvel’s sorcerer supreme, Philip DeGuere’s curiosity from 1978 DR. STRANGE gets a very welcome release on DVD, 17 October. While other Marvel superhero icons like The Amazing Spider-Man (1977–9) and The Incredible Hulk (1978–82) enjoyed successful runs as favourites of telefantasy fans, the master of the mystic arts was not so lucky, and only a pilot movie was produced. An urban fantasy set in New York, it presents the intrusion of uncanny powers including teleportation, possession, and shape-shifting, accomplished with a batch of low-key techniques. There’s fifty minutes of hospital politics, psychic intrigue, and questions about a mysterious destiny, until the final half-hour of psychedelia on the astral plane and beyond.
“I’ll die if I go to a sleep again.” Traumatised student Clea (Anne-Marie Martin, who later co-starred in cult cop-com Sledge Hammer) forms a dreamscape bond with Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten), here a psychiatrist and not the surgeon of creator Steve Ditko’s Chandu-inspired comic book stories for Strange Tales in 1963. John Mills is a gentlemanly mentor as Master Lindmer (the Ancient One in comics), calmly evoking Jedi mind-tricks like he invented them. Seductive villainess Morgan Le Fay (Jessica Walter, Play Misty For Me) kidnaps novice wizard Dr Strange away to her weird lair in another dimensional realm for the climactic battle of spectacular and still amazing light-blasts. Strange, of course, is forced to abandon all professional objectivity when his rationality is challenged, first by subtlety and then by the brute power of a world-threatening evil. He overcomes modern scepticism, but never loses his compassionate humanity, and this origin set-up of a shrink becoming a sorcerer, in tandem with the emergent New Age culture, seemed a promising idea for genre TV back in the 1970s.
Despite its outrageously fantastic appeal and obvious quality as adventure it’s not hard to imagine why this fine intro failed to launch a series. Perhaps the network was understandably nervous about esoterical stuff being taken seriously? They might have remembered horror films Night of the Demon (1957) and The Devil Rides Out (1968) but magic on family telly had been almost exclusively the province of sitcoms such as Bewitched (1964–72) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965–70). Bill Bixby’s hit The Magician (1973–4) was about stagecraft, not fantasy, although it found a sympathetic hero in Bixby – shortly before he attained greater celebrity as Dr David Banner. Other major shows with just as much if not always more drama than comedy, like Charmed, British cult series Hex, and – of particularly underrated relevance – The Dresden Files, were a generation away, and mainstream acceptance of unashamedly magical themes in contemporary TV drama must have appeared to conservative executives like a very unsafe bet as humourless entertainment.
Apart from Jeffrey Combs vehicle Doctor Mordrid (see Interzone #251) – that was another Dr Strange movie in all but name – the most recent screen appearance of the superhero magician was 2007’s animated movie Doctor Strange (see Black Static #3). However this year’s epic remake turns out, at least it won’t have to contend with looking too bizarre for popular culture to accept its caped hero without a sitcom-type laugh track.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
Editorial
Future Interrupted
Time Pieces
Ansible Link
Black Static
Alts
; Dogfights in Olympus and Other Absences
The Hunger of Auntie Tiger
Crimewave
You Make Pattaya
Rock, Paper, Incisors
My Generations Shall Praise
Book Zone
Mutant Popcorn
Laser Fodder
Back Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
Editorial
Future Interrupted
Time Pieces
Ansible Link
Black Static
Alts
Dogfights in Olympus and Other Absences
The Hunger of Auntie Tiger
Crimewave
You Make Pattaya
Rock, Paper, Incisors
My Generations Shall Praise
Book Zone
Mutant Popcorn
Laser Fodder
Back Cover