Comedy

Bats versus Bolts: Universal Women

Dracula brought Universal back from the dead.

In 1931, Carl Laemmle Junior made a bet on the sickness and depravity of the American cinema-going public and made out like a goddamned bandit, turning his father’s ailing, indebted studio into a money-making powerhouse (for a while) and cementing Universal’s reputation as the natural home of American horror cinema.

It is a truth Universally (heh) acknowledged that a studio in possession of a hit must be in want of a franchise and Dracula’s Daughter debuted in 1936, five years after the original.

Likewise, plans for a sequel to James Whale’s classic Frankenstein were being laid even before the movie was released. After the rapturous response of early test screenings, the ending was re-shot to allow for the monster’s survival. Whale was tempted back to direct and proceeded to give as few fucks as an openly gay man in 1930s Hollywood might be expected to give; bupkiss, and by all accounts just decided to have fun with it. He had fun with it, and the result is widely regarded as even better than the original, one of the greatest films of Hollywood’s Golden Age and altogether quite good.

Dracula’s Daughter, by contrast, is primarily known (where it is known at all) as an obscure curio mostly of interest for its queer subtext.

Well, I am also an obscure curio mostly of interest for my queer subtext and I’m going to spoil something right now: this particular bout of Bats versus Bolts might be a lot more closely fought than you’d expect.

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Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

Hey, you know that series of novels featuring impossibly gorgeous vampires that’s sold more copies than The DaVinci Code?

If you said “Twilight”, hang your head in shame and face the wall.

Hideyuki Kikuchi, as well as having a name that cheers you up when you say it, is the author of the Vampire Hunter D series, clocking in at a whopping 58 novels. The story tells the story of a “Dunpeal”, a half-human, half-vampire vampire hunter in the far, far distant future. It is also not, as I had assumed, a manga. I learned this when I ordered the first omnibus for research only to find myself holding a novel roughly the length of Lord of the Rings with four days before the review was due to go up.

My contribution to the male reading crisis notwithstanding today’s movie is the second anime adaptation of Vampire Hunter D; Bloodlust from 2000. The first was 1985’s Vampire Hunter D which I haven’t actually seen but sound off in the comments if you’d like me to cover it.

The reason I wanted to review Bloodlust (apart from needing something vaguely spooky for October) was that I’ve had the DVD for this sitting in my collection for around a quarter of a century and yet I’d only viewed it maybe once and I could remember precisely two things about it:

It was one of the single most beautiful pieces of animation I’d ever seen.
I didn’t really enjoy it.

But I’m older, wiser, greyer and more infused with a sense of apocalyptic dread now. Time for a reappraisal.

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A Little Bit of Curry: Over the Garden Wall (2014)

And so we come to the end of Shortstember 2026 and we close out with a Tim Curry performance that we’ve actually already covered on the blog; his voicing of Aunty Whispers in 2014s Over the Garden Wall.

This role, obviously, has historic significance as it was Curry’s first role after his near fatal stroke in 2012. And, on the one hand it is definitely noticeable. Curry’s delivery has utterly changed and if you didn’t know it was him voicing the character you probably would never guess. All the more incredible then that we have yet another case of Grand Theft Curry, with Curry managing to be quite possibly the best element in the entire production, a production that absolutely bursting at the seams with fantastic actors giving fantastic performances.

Curry’s new voice, slower and weary sounding, perfectly brings to life the massive turtle-eating witch who may not be wicked exactly but has certainly found a way to turn this whole “girl lodger possessed by a man-eating demon” situation to her advantage.

What I find so heart-breakingly wonderful is that you can still hear the performance of a man who absolutely loves acting and who is having the time of his life. He knows how to wring just the right amount of camp menace out of each line. There is a wonderful sense of play with his deliver of “And no one shall be…devoured, tonight?”

He is relishing this role, as he relished every single role that ever crossed his agent’s desk.

I didn’t know Tim Curry and it’s always important to remember that, no matter how big a presence in our lives an actor has you never really know them. All I can give you is the impression that his work left me with.

That this was a man who loved his life. I cannot imagine Tim Curry getting up in the morning and saying “fuck, I have to act today”. This, I think, was a man who got to spend his life doing something that made him happy.

Good for him.

The Day the Earth Blew Up and Coyote Versus ACME

Since the nineteen sixties Warner Bros has had what must be a uniquely frustrating problem:

They own some of the most beloved and iconic cartoon characters in history but have no viable format with which to use them. The Looney Tunes were the absolute masters of the theatrical animated short, which these days is like being the world’s best court jester. Impressive, but how exactly does one make money from that?

Each one of these characters was honed by a process of rigorous cinematic evolution for one purpose; deliver as many fantastic gags as possible within a seven minute span. And, like any creature that evolved for a super-specific niche, they don’t handle changes to their environment well.

Part of the problem is that their style of comedy is primarily visual. Oh sure, there’s plenty of great verbal comedy but the bulk of the laughs come from Mel Blanc’s delivery and some of the most sublime animation ever put to film. And you’re just not going to get that on a TV animation budget. Especially not Mel Blanc.

As for movies, Warner Bros have tried to make the Tunes work in feature animation for decades. These were usually anthology films, taking several classic shorts united by a common theme (horror, sci-fi, show-biz) and weaving them into a loose narrative. At their best, these films are fine. But they are very obviously classic cartoons interspersed with visibly weaker animation and an audibly older and tireder Mel Blanc. They don’t really work as movies and that comes down, fundamentally, to just the different nature of how Warner Bros crfated these characters compared to, say, Disney.

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Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #64: Zootopia 2

My friends, I ask you to consider a simple hypothetical:

Maybe we’re the assholes?

This meme did the rounds last year after Pixar’s Elio crashed and burned and someone at Disney had gotten into the hard liquor and had some feelings they needed to express. And while I do believe that 90% of the time creators blaming the audience for the failure of their project is the mark of a talentless hack so high off their own farts that they genuinely believe that the only way anyone could dislike their output is if there was something morally wrong with them…

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

…you know what? I gotta give them this one. And I can say that, because I am actually one of the two people who saw Elio (Micro-Mouse is the other one). Elio is not a perfect film and I probably won’t watch it again. But it was charming, well animated, sincere and, yes, not a retread or rehash or cynical nostalgia bait cash grab and we all just left it to die on the road like a leper.

It’s one thing for Disney to complain that we didn’t give them a participation trophy for Strange World or Wish. When we said “we want original animated films”, the rider “…that aren’t absolute bobbins” should have been taken as read.

But with Elio, they showed up. They gave us what we said we wanted. Aaaaaand it turns out we were a bunch of lying hoors because we instead gave a billions dollars to this:

I’m acknowledging this exists. Enjoy it while it lasts because this is the only time.

Then again, this year saw the hugely succesful release of Hoppers, which was not merely good like Elio but genuinely excellent with a truly original premise, animation that actually innovates and shakes up the old Pixar house style and some great comedy. Well, I say “original”. Clearly they stole wholesale from Don’t Trust Fish.

But it doesn’t matter! Because the next Hoppers might end up like Elio. We can’t be trusted, and once you’ve proven you can’t be trusted no one will ever deal with you because they know you’ll never negotiate in good faith and now somehow fucking Iran has the world’s economy by the goddamn short-hairs.

I mean, that’s how we get Zootopia 2.

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K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025)

Heeeeey it’s me, Unshaved Mouse, your favourite writer/blogger who overpromises because he’s terrified of disappointing people and ends up taking on WAAAAY too many writing projects and then spirals and completely burns out!

So, as you all know I’m currently preparing for my first North American book tour at the end of this month while also facing a huge quivering mass of deadlines so this review is going to be shorter than the queues for Melania.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I do have things to say about this movie.

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“Everyone keeps telling me how my story is supposed to go. Nah. Imma do my own thing.”

Sometimes, less is more. This is true with most things, but it’s especially true with writing. While there are definitely times when it’s fun to get fancy or even downright purple with your prose, the real masters know that when you want a piece of writing that cuts a reader right to the bone and leaves them wondering what the hell you just did to them, you keep it simple. Take, for example, the opening monologue of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Let’s do things differently this time… SO differently.

His name is Miles Morales.

He was bitten by a radioactive spider.

And he’s not the only one.

He hasn’t always had it easy.

And he’s not the only one.

Now he’s on his own.

And he’s not the only one.

You think you know the rest.

You don’t.

I thought I knew the rest.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t want to hurt him.

But I did.

And he’s not the only one

On paper the prose seems incredibly basic. But there is a cadence to it, and a power that comes from the constant repetition. It’s like a drum beat, growing in intensity. And, when given to an actor like Hailee Steinfeld who absolutely knows how to wring every ounce of emotion out of it?

Which is a weird point to start a review of this film with, because while less is sometimes more, more is also sometimes more. And Across the Spider-Verse is one of the greatest arguments for cinematic maximalism since Ben Hur.

This movie is HUGE. It boasts the largest animation team of any cartoon in history. It has a cast of hundreds of characters and stretches across six universe each with their own distinct artistic style. It is a truly epic work, one of the most ambitious projects in the history of animation as a medium.

And, fittingly, even its production problems were epic in scope. A writer’s strike. A global pandemic. Whatever the hell happened to Shameik Moore. And, of course, the now notorious levels of crunch and overwork that the animators were subjected to. I won’t say Spider-Verse 2’s doctrine of “biggest of all time” extended to the suffering meted out to those who worked on it because North Korea produces animation and they probably have that particular category locked up but STILL. It’s definitely something that shouldn’t be forgotten.

I mean, I’ll still watch it but I still watch The Shining and that movie damn near killed Shelley Duvall, you come to me for movie reviews, not moral guidance.

Jesus, I hope you don’t come to me for moral guidance.

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The Fantastic Adventures of Unico (1983)

Back around the time the first eukaryotic organisms were developing on the Earth’s sea floor, I coined the term “Tar and Sugar Movies” to describe the earliest films of the Walt Disney Animated Feature canon. I chose the name in reference to the often jarring tonal shifts between cloying cutsiness and shocking darkness of those films. In retrospect though, I think I got it wrong. The true Golden Age of the Tar and Sugar aesthetic was not the late thirties and forties, but the nineteen eighties.

Here is the typical eighties cartoon experience:

“Golly Gee! This sure is a fun picnic! I just hope that mean ol’ Lord Hexxodrexx doesn’t show up to spoil everything.”

“I HAVE COME TO DEVOUR YOUR FUCKING SOULS!!! GRAAAAAAAA!!!”

And I think, with today’s movie, I may have found the ultimate Tar and Sugar movie. And, as in most things in this life, they do it better in Japan.

I don’t have to introduce Osamu Tezuka by this point, do I? Born in 1920s Osaka, created manga and animé as we know it, the Japanese Walt Disney, one of the most influential animators of all time you know all this. He was also quite possibly one of the most prolific creators in history, writing and drawing well over 700 manga series in his lifetime encompassing virtually any genre you could think of and targeted at every possible age demographic. The basis for today’s movie was the children’s manga Unico, about a cute little unicorn who has magical powers that he uses to bring happiness and joy to everyone he meets.

Well, I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly take a dark turn.

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Bats versus Bolts: The 2020s

Funny how these things work out. I was pretty sure I had run out of candidates for this particular feature and then look what happens! A Dracula* AND a Frankenstein movie arrive within a year of each other. Both critically acclaimed, big budget adaptations directed by genuine auteur directors. Bats versus Bolts is back from the dead like a…what’s a good analogy. A mummy? Sure, that works.

So join me in what promises to be a real knock-down drag out fight. Robert Eggers 2024 Nosferatu versus Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. FIGHT! (Oh, and spoilers past this point).

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The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I just shouldn’t be allowed near CGI animated dinosaur films. I don’t know why this particular mircogenre of movies manages to so consistently stick in my damn craw. I, of course, have Dinosaur sitting proudly at the very bottom of my rankings of the Disney canon and I have every hope that it will remain that way for a long time.

And I would still gladly watch Dinosaur over The Good Dinosaur. Mainly because, I can at least watch Dinosaur from beginning to end. The Good Dinosaur is the second last movie on my requested reviews because I have put it off over and over and over again. I cannot finish this thing. It bores the piss out of me.

But, before we crack on, I want to explain why I’m not doing a full plot recap for this one.

I was feeling ever so poorly.
I actually had a lot on this month. Um…I don’t know if you heard but some stuff happened.

Still not entirely sure this isn’t my wife pulling off an amazingly ambitious prank.

3. This movie has practically no plot to recap.

4. Disney Plus was dicking me around something fierce, constantly crashing and freezing and making the experience of watching this movie even more interminable than normal. This, by the way, was also during Kimmelnacht so you can understand why I was eyeing my Disney Plus subscription with a steely eye and whispering…