Frankenstein (2004) – The genesis of this TV-movie is more interesting than the movie itself. A number of people, including Dean Koontz and Martin Scorsese, were involved in developing this is as pilot for a potential series. Due to that bugaboo “creative differences,” Koontz pulled out (so did Scorsese, but he came back). Eventually, the deal became that Koontz could take his ideas and go do what he wanted with them. He did, and it became the mega-bestseller novel series Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein. By comparison, this pilot movie was released on the USA Network and never went anywhere.
The movie itself? “Deucalion” (Victor Perez), the initial two-hundred-year-old creation of Dr. Helios, the “real” Dr. Frankenstein, is a scarred-but-hunky anti-hero in New Orleans, where others of Helios’ later but still imperfect creations form their own underground minority, and where one of them turning into a serial killer might bring too much scrutiny to all of them. So he feeds information to homicide detective Carson O’Connor (Parker Posey) to bring him down before he upsets the whole apple cart.
It doesn’t really feel like a story with a compelling need to be told, the identity of the serial-killing creation involved some of the oddest casting ever (that’s my spoiler-safe way of putting it), and Deucalion, again, is only scarred as far as will not interfere with his hunkiness. Koontz definitely got the better end of the deal here.
Monster Island (2004) – Entirely unrelated to the movie called Monster Island that I reviewed a couple of months ago, this movie makes me want to roll out the 1,800-word review format I used to do for Cold Fusion Video — there’s just so much to comment on here, and most of it bad:
- – A British Columbia shooting location that does NOT stand in well for the Caribbean setting; placing ferns in the foreground can only do so much to make a deciduous forest look “tropical.” In one evening scene, you can actually see the actors’ frosty breath.
- – Shoddy stop-motion for the giant bugs running/flying around this “tropical” location (and, thanks to the Canadian location above, really poor coordination between the “tropical” backgrounds of the stop-motion sequences and the live-action footage.)
- – Three distinct and mutually exclusive explanations for the mega-insects, including toxic waste dumping, nuclear testing in the ’50s, and “shucks, it’s always been this way.”
- – Daniel Letterle, a twenty-five-year-old actor playing the “high school senior” protagonist Josh, combing his hair forward to cover his incipient male pattern baldness.
- – Carmen Electra, as herself, singing.
And yet, and yet… there’s a certain tongue-in-cheekishness that causes me to forgive much of that. The premise is that MTV has awarded a random senior class a tropical beach party; the movie was produced by MTV Networks, but we’ve got the main character bitching about being a part of a soulless corporate promotion. Adam West shows up as “Dr Harryhausen,” the scientist left behind when the Army pulled out in the ’60s, talking to himself and playing with the mutated creatures he’s concocted. Mary Elizabeth Winstead shows up in an early role, as Josh’s estranged “save the whales” girlfriend who gets possessed by the goddess of the island’s aboriginal people, and playing it completely straight. And the mountain at the center of the island that looks like a cartoonish volcano in miniature shots and which we therefore expect to erupt in the third act turns out not to be a volcano at all: It’s an anthill!
It’s not like I would ever watch it again, but I don’t begrudge having watched it once.
Beyond the Gates (2016) – Two estranged brothers come back together after the disappearance and presumed death of their father, to close down and dismantle — finally — the VHS-heavy video rental store he’s been running for almost two decades. In the course of doing so, they find the VHS boardgame Dad had been watching right before his death and, curious, watch a bit of it… to find that the vamped-up Barbara Crampton on the screen has sucked them into a very real game of damnation, just like she did with Dad.
It’s not entirely a successful movie, but it is an interesting one. There’s a pang of nostalgia in looking around this stuffed-with-tapes video store (shot on the premises of Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee, one of the last remaining cult video stores), especially when the camera lingers lovingly on a VHS tape of Animated Stories From the Book of Mormon. There are moments of fleeting but bloody gore, which seem out of step with the general low-key foreboding of the rest of the movie, and the characters certainly seem to make intuitive leaps as to the import of certainly vague “rules” in the game that I don’t think are all that obvious. But I definitely recommend it for all of us children of the ’80s.
Abandoned movies: Werewolves of the Third Reich, On the Silver Globe, Navajo Joe, Ten Wanted Men, Crumbs.