Man-Thing (2005) – Listen, I get really, really peeved when movies treat a sheriff as a town official at the mercy of the mayor, or someone who’s appointed or just “sent in” after filling out an application. Listen up, Hollywood! A sheriff is (a) a county office, not someone over a specific town, and (b) an elected office — that means he’d have to be a known quantity in the area to win the election. The most unbelievable part of this movie (a movie about a mystical tree-monster worshiped by Indians) is that, when the old sheriff disappears for months, the unknown new one just shows up and says, “I’m your new sheriff.” THIS ISN’T OBSCURE KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE. THIS IS BASIC GROUND-LEVEL CIVICS.
Okay, I’m better now.
This movie, based loosely on the Marvel Comics character, was produced before the renaissance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, when you didn’t know whether to expect an adaptation to be The X-Men or one of the Incredible Hulk TV-movies. By those standards, then, it’s okay, in a “script written by a rudimentary A.I.” sense: you’ve got magic Indians, money-grubbing oil tycoons, beatific eco-warriors, and venal rednecks, all hitting their marks and performing exactly the role and function that their label demands. At least some of the swamp scenes were shot in an actual swamp, and the swamp set for the other swamp scenes wasn’t terrible. And while we’ve come to expect the requisite “fan-boy call-outs” among character names, it wasn’t the overused “Kirby/Ditko/Buscema” variety; we’ve got supporting characters named Mike Ploog, Gerber, and Val Mayerik here, all whom worked on the Man-Thing comics in the ’70s.
(The Man-Thing himself is a little more cthulhoid than he is in the comics — sort of a combination of Man-Thing with DC’s Swamp Thing — realized by a combination of man-in-suit and sometimes-effective-sometimes-distracting CGI tree root tentacles. And nothing burns at the touch of the Man-Thing, whether it knows fear or not.)
The Last Hard Men (1976) – James Coburn is Zach Provo, a ruthless outlaw who’s been in prison for eleven years, since 1897. Charlton Heston is Sam Burgade, the retired lawman that put him there. When Zach leads a breakout with a handful of other convicts, Burgade volunteers himself out of retirement as the only one who knows how Provo’s mind works. But he miscalculates: Provo doesn’t come for the gold shipment that Burgade arranges as bait, Provo comes for Burgade’s daughter just to make him suffer.
There’s a certain faded glory to end-of-era Westerns, as older actors with genre bona-fides play characters who’ve similarly outgrown their golden age. (People were doing this long before The Unforgiven, you know.) These movies also tend to strip the dime-novel patina from Western legends; this movie stops being “fun” when Burgade is forced to let two convicts rape his daughter rather than give up his position and get them both killed. This ain’t the Westerns of the previous decades — even American-made Westerns had buffed the gilt off the frontier.
Kill Command (2016) – In the near future, a military team reluctantly does their duty testing a new iteration of combat robots at an isolated testing facility. Unfortunately, the self-evolving robots have decided that they’ve learned all they can in non-lethal tests, and decide to use real ammunition to up the ante.
I’ve probably seen a dozen lousy “killer robots who get more killeriffic” movies. It shouldn’t be that surprising when one of them is competent, but there it is — this a good little movie. The special effects are good, the pace is fine, the character interaction is believable — both among the soldiers, and between them and the “chip”-enabled observer (Vanessa Kirby) from the military contractor who made the robots, who is distrusted by the soldiers but ends up essential to their survival.
It really makes you wonder why it’s so hard to make a solid movie that isn’t trying to change the world.
And just because the reasons for abandoning these movies tends to garner some attention:
Abandoned movies:
Outcast (2014) – Hayden Christensen and Nicolas Cage in a movie about Renaissance soldiers in China. It’s beautifully shot, edited and scored, but the script is so clumsy I couldn’t take more than half an hour.
Warhead (1996) – I gave up when the plot had tried three times to figure out where to start the story.
Timelock (1996) – Stories about interstellar penal colonies are already annoying — why bother with the expense to transport prisoners to another solar system? But this was extra-annoying, as the worst of those prisoners were THEN put in frozen “suspended animation” — and they were literally suspended, hanging from chains and covered in ice. But they don’t bother to freeze them for the space flight, because otherwise, how could they cause trouble in transit?
Termination Point (2007) – Jason Priestley as a top-of-his-game FBI agent? I think I see your first mistake right there. Then throw in Lou Diamond Phillips as the time travel physicist, who apparently took this role so he could emote uninterrupted for minutes on end in his videotaped rant about the danger of letting the military get their hands on this technology, and…
Hannah Queen of the Vampires (1973) – How do you make up for having a dialogue-free, plot-free first ten minutes? By spending the next ten in an industrial-grade infodump, of course.
Boggy Creek (2010) – Little better than a camcorder epic. And what better way to introduce your main character than show her jogging for minutes on end?
Lancelot: Guardian of Time (1997) – Marc Singer (and his fake mullet) and Robert Chapin (and his real mullet) as Lancelot and Gawain, neither of whom even attempts an English accent. Oh hey, let’s start with an interminable practice swordfight in what looks like a municipal park in Los Angeles!
Gun Duel in Durango (1957) – Outlaw Will Sabre is going straight and his old gang doesn’t like that, so they tell him to decide: Rejoin us or die! Also, you have thirty days to make that choice FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON.
Running Red (1999) – Problems in the first ten minutes: (1) Jeff Speakman, as a member of a covert Russian strikeforce, cannot fake a Russian accent like the rest of the team. (2) Jeez, even I would be better at staying behind cover and not getting my ass shot than these top-of-the-line operatives. (3) Boy, villains just love to exchange expository dialog with each other, don’t they? (4) Wait, the extremely mean commander of this covert military unit is also AN ASTHMATIC? Yeah, that makes for foolproof field ops…
That whole misplacement of where the sheriff’s office is located in the political hierarchy probably comes from the writers being from big cities spanning several counties, e.g. New York City in which the mayor actually does appoint the sheriff directly, and/or from all those old Westerns featuring a town that pretty much is the only place people are living in the whole county (e.g. the sheriff protagonist of High Noon). Also, many movies’ writers tend to figure if the rest of the world doesn’t work the way the particular piece of it where they live does, then it ought to work that way; so fie on the rest of the world! No matter where the movie’s supposedly set, you can therefore generally expect the local politics to be arranged Hollywood’s preferred way rather than the real way.
I will nevertheless continue to be pissed.