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 secondanime adaptation of Vampire HunterD; 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.
It’s actually quite hard to pin down when Supergirl first appeared as a character because, once you have Superman, the idea of Supergirl already exists in a conceptual form and it’s just a matter of time before someone puts pen to paper and actually draws her. There were several Supergirls and Superwomen before the one everyone is familiar with, and even more after her. Sometimes she’s the future daughter of Lois Lane and Clark Kent. Sometimes she’s a fallen angel. Sometimes she’s an alien shapeshifter or a refugee from an alternate reality. And sometimes she’s Claire Kent, the identity Clark took on when he was changed into a woman by an alien witch as punishment for being sexist.
Man, those are some woke rural Kansans in the fifties. Good for them.
But the most famous and long-lasting version of the Maid of Steel debuted in Action Comics in 1959 drawn by Al Plastino and written by Otto Binder, who I don’t think gets enough credit for being a genuine trailblazer in terms of creating female superheroes. He also created Mary Marvel for Fawcett and Miss America for Marvel (confusing, I know).
This version, Kara Zor-El, the blonde teenage cousin of Superman, has endured as one of the most popular and iconic female superheroes in the medium probably second to only Wonder Woman (at least prior to the MCU). And, like most long-running superheroes she’s undergone many changes in her portrayal. Early on she was depicted as essentially her cousin with a higher hemline but modern stories have leaned into the interesting wrinkle of Kara actually being raised on Krypton and having a much more alien perspective on Earth than the All-American Clark.
She’s a fascinating character with a rich history who deserves a great movie.
What she got was one of the WORST MOVIES EVER MADE.
“Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them” said the great Christopher Lee and Tim Curry probably followed that advice better than any actor barring Lee himself.
Which is not to say that Fern Gully is terrible. It’s a well animated, tonally uneven, achingly sincere environmental parable suffering from a chronic case of Aladdinenvy but there are worse things in this life.
EDIT: Well smack my buttocks and call me Susan, I had remembered this movie as coming out after Aladdin and assumed that it had been chasing its coattails with Robin Williams given free reign as a comedy sidekick (and also having Douglas Seale playing the female lead’s cuddly bearded father). But no, Fern Gully actually beat it to theatres by half a year. Thanks to Torchesandaardvarks, Ian David and Abigail Kane for pointing this out.
But this movie (Curry’s first animated feature role) is a great showcase of Grand Theft Curry, the phenomenon of Tim Curry walking into a project and just running away with it. He is the best thing in this movie and it’s not even close.
Fern Gully takes place in the titular Australian rainforest which is ruled over by lovely fairies living in harmony with nature. But a logging company starts cutting down trees including one which just happens to contain Hexxus, the imprisoned spirit of destruction voiced by one Timothy James Curry.
The joy here is that Curry gets to play all his greatest hits. Hexxus starts off as a little, almost cute goo creature, transitions to a lantern jawed, breathy-voiced smoke monster and ends as an absolutely terrifying burning black skeleton. It’s an escalating rollercoaster of comedy, sensuality and menace. It’s basically a speed-run of his entire career in one movie.
Oh, and he gets the best song in the whole movie and audibly orgasms twice.
If they didn’t want him to, they shouldn’t have hired him.
So how did Tim Curry, camp icon and transgressive titan of pop culture get his start in animated voicework? Where did he begin? Voicing a drag queen serial killer in some seedy Ralph Bakshi picture?
No, he got his break in straight-to-video Christian media.
Don’t try to put him in your little boxes.
The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible was a series animated by Hanna Barbera which had three children from the modern day travelling back in time and meeting various figures from the Bible. And holy shit, this thing had a STACKED cast! Rob Paulsen, Alan Oppenheimer, Ed Asner, Jeffrey Tambor, Helen Hunt, Helen Slater…TONY JAY AS CAIPHAS?!
EDWARD FUCKING JAMES FUCKING OLMOS AS PHAROAH!?
YES! AND IT IS AS PERFECT AS IT SOUNDS!
But, anyway, you knew as soon as I said it who Curry ended up playing. Come on. You knew.
“Plaaaaay me the best soooooong in the world. Or I’ll eat your souls.”
It’s often been said that Morgan Freeman is the Voice of God. As in, he’s just how people naturally assume God sounds like. I would like to propose Tim Curry as the Voice of Satan. There’s not really that much I can say about his performance as the serpent, suttlest beast in all the field.
“Do you have any…tattoos?”
I don’t know if I was expecting some sign of inexperience or roughness given this was his first voice role. But, no, he gives exactly the performance you’d expect and it’s pretty much perfect. No notes. I also do like that they gave him limbs. In Genesis, the serpent only became legless as punishment for tempting Adam and Eve which almost every depiction forgets, so kudos.
Apparently, Curry had such a nice time working with Hanna-Barbera that he decided that voicework was definitely his bag. Hallelujah.
Now, all that’s left is to categorise this in one of the four categories of Tim Curry performance.
Evil, Sexy, Evilly Sexy or Funny Accent?: Very much Evilly Sexy.
Superman 3 is probably the most reputationally fluid of all the Reeves-era Superman flicks. One and (to a lesser extent admittedly) Two are uncontested classics of the genre, Supergirl and Quest for Peace were seen as dogs when they were released and are seen as dogs now. But the third outing is where I think consensus breaks down. Some people hate it even more than Superman 4. Mad people, I suspect, gibbering loons who should not be allowed out of the house unsupervised but they are an important and influential constituency in modern affairs and we overlook their views at our peril.
Superman 3’s standing at any given moment really depends on the general public’s taste in superhero media and how tolerant they are feeling towards silliness. For this is, let us be very clear, a deeply silly film. Richard Lester, now fully in control and having banished the last vestigaes of Richard Donner’s weighty, epic solemnity is ready to give us his thesis statement on what Superman is. And his answer boils down to; “Superman is very silly”.
The gall, sir! THE UNMITIGATED GALL!
So, Lester decides that Superman should be funny. And, if you’re the Salkinds that doesn’t just mean getting a comic actor to join the cast. That means getting THE BIGGEST STAND UP COMIC IN AMERICA *PUFF CIGARS*.
Now, the Salkinds’ “bigger equals better” approach served them quite well in the past but here I think it came a serious cropper. Richard Pryor is, and always will be, on the Rushmore of American comedy legends but (heresy incoming) I don’t think he was a great comedic actor. He certainly isn’t in this movie, most of his schtick (and oh my Christ is there a lot of it) comes across really laboured and kinda leaden. There’s a couple of problems here. Firstly, Pryor isn’t performing his own material. He’s an actor performing someone else’s script. Second, I think the Salkinds expected Pryor to do what Bill Murray did in Ghostbusters and just do his own thing while treating the script with a kindly disregard. But here’s the thing: Richard Pryor loved Superman and treated the material with a respect that is admirable but not particularly funny. To be sure, there are parts here that I find humorous but that’s more a result of waging a war of attrition. Pryor gets a whopping half an hour of screentime, compared to around forty minutes for Superman. He is very much the deuteragonist. In fact, the very first shot of the movie is his face.
In my review of Superman I mentioned how I consider it to be the ultimate “eighties” movie but I think this might have it beat. Superman 3 opens with a black man applying for unemployment benefit and being denied because he kept getting fired for stealing and being incompetent, only for him to see an ad looking for computer programmers and immediately getting a stable and well paid job because gosh darn it the economy is just that good. That may be the most eighties thing I have ever seen.
As mind bogglingly ambitious as Richard Donner’s Supermanis, it’s incredible to think that the original vision was even more epic in scope. The idea was that Superman 1 and 2 would be released in quick succession and would constitute one single, massive saga, much like what Quentin Tarantino did with KillBill years later. Instead, mid-way through production Donner was fired by the Salkinds and replaced by another Dick, Richard Lester, who famously declared after seeing Donner’s vision for the film that he wasn’t interested in doing that “David Lean thing” (Lean being an English director famous for big, lavish epics).
It’s easy to cast Donner as an artistic savant whose vision was crushed by soulless Hollywood suits and it’s not even like that’s an entirely invalid read. Many people have made fun of the Salkinds, including me, Unshaved Mouse, in literally my last review.
But the truth, of course, is a bit more complicated than that. Donner was a notorious, almost Kubrickian perfectionist and his shoot ran way over time and, oh yeah, was the most expensive film in history at that point. It’s very easy to say that the Salkinds should just have backed off and let Donner cook when it’s not your money he’s cooking. And, to be fair to the Salkinds, they actually had a reputation for being very director friendly as producers go. Not takings sides, probably faults all around. Anyway, the result is we have two versions of Superman 2. The first is the entirely reshot version directed by Richard Lester. The second is the Richard Donner cut, a version assembled by Donner in 2006 using a combination of his own surviving footage, out-takes, screen-tests and some footage cribbed from Lester’s version. Both versions are worth your while, neither is the equal of the first film and both are fascinatingly flawed in different ways.
The plot, at least, is the same in both, at least in the broad-strokes.
The three Phantom Zone Criminals are freed by a nuclear device launched into space by Superman and begin to make their way to Earth. Lex Luthor escapes from prison with the help of Miss Teschmacher and they schlep all the way to the North Pole where they discover the Fortress of Solitude and learn about Zod. Meanwhile, Lois Lane deduces or is just basically shown that Clark is Superman and confesses her love to him. He consults with a holographic version of his father or (depending on the version) his much cheaper mother and is told that he can be Superman or have fine Earthling booty but not both. He gives up his powers and returns to civilization only to learn that Zod has basically conquered the Earth and is calling him out on national TV like Ultimate Warrior calling out the Hulkster. Superman returns to the Fortress of Solitude, bullshits his way into getting his powers back, flies to Metropolis, gets his ass beat and flies away. Lex Luthor, who has basically ingratiated his way into Zod’s inner circle, tells him where the Fortress of Solitude is and they take Lois hostage and fly over there. Superman fights them and then tricks them into losing their powers like he did whereupon he and Lois either possibly kill them (Lester cut) or DEFINITELY KILL THEM (Donner cut), thus saving the Earth.
But make no mistake, they are VERY different movies.
Thus far, the games I’ve recommended have all been of a very recent vintage so how about we look at one of the canon classics?
Grim Fandango is an adventure game written by Tim Schafer, originally released in 1998, presumably for the Ediphone. Since then it’s been remastered and released on virtually every console you can imagine.
The game takes place in the Aztec underworld, reimagined in 1950s Art Deco style, and follows Manny Calavera, a travel agent whose job is to sell travel packages for newly dead souls beginning their four year journey across the Land of the Dead. Frustrated by the poor quality of his clients, he poaches the case of the beautiful, virtuous Mercedes Colomar and ends up inadvertently exposing a corrupt conspiracy at the heart of the afterlife.
And while I definitely recommend playing it, I do have a couple caveats.
Superman (1978) is the greatest movie of the eighties.
I know what I said.
Yes, fine, there’s the number “1978” after the title but who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? Superman for me is the starting pistol of that era of huge populist genre blockbusters (Indiana Jones, ET, Back to the Future, Never Ending Story et al) that roared into American cinemas as the stings of Vietnam and Watergate began to fade and America discovered a new Reaganite swagger, for good and ill. It is the harbinger of the cultural era that would climax with the collapse of the Berlin wall and the apex of American power and prestige, a victory so total that serious people were able to proclaim the end of history itself and not be laughed out of the room.
And it’s the ultimate eighties movie with regards to the logic that went into creating it. I can almost picture Alexander and Ilya Salkind (the father-son producing team behind the film) chomping on cigars as they hash out their vision.
“We’re gonna make a movie about the BIGGEST SUPERHERO OF THEM ALL!”
“Yeah, and we’ll spend MORE MONEY THAN ANY PICTURE IN HISTORY!”
“Know who we’ll get to write the script? MARIO PUZO, WHO WROTE THE GODFATHER WHICH IS THE BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME WHICH MEANS HE’LL WRITE THE BEST SUPERHERO MOVIE OF ALL TIME!”
*pause for vigorous puffing of cigars*
“Yeah, and we’ll get the BIGGEST MOVIE STAR IN THE WORLD AND PAY HIM MORE THAN ANY ACTOR IN HISTORY FOR TEN MINUTES OF SCREENTIME!”
“And we’ll film the sequel SIMULTANEOUSLY! BACK TO BACK!”
“But Pop, what if the first movie’s a flop?”
“HOW COULD IT BE A FLOP?! LOOK AT HOW MUCH MONEY WE’RE SPENDING!”
“I LOVE YOU POP!”
“I LOVE YOU SON!”
“AND WE BOTH LOVE CIGARS!”
And when you think about it like that, it feels like it had to fail right? It’s like with the Titanic. Once people start talking about how God couldn’t sink this ship, you damn well know that iceberg’s coming. That kind of hubris can’t go unpunished.
I make fun of Alan Moore sometimes, but rest assured it comes from a place of purest admiration. He’s who I want to be when I grow up.
When I’m in my seventies I want to be a mouthy old beard engaging in magic duals with gender-ambiguous wizards, worshipping a snake god and complaining about everything all the time.
“That’s not true! I stop when I’m asleep, don’t I?”
And today, while hacking my way through this goddamn draft, I will take a break to briefly review what is (I believe) literally the only adaptation of Alan Moore’s work to receive his blessing, Justice League Unlimited’s second episode, For the Man Who Has Everything.
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 Worldor 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.
“You’ll be hearing from my lawyers.”
“Our lawyers ate your lawyers. And left their bones in a pile outside the entrance to “It’s a Small World””.
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.
