“Are you telling me there’s some thing running loose in this city ripping the hearts out of people and eating them so he can take their souls back to Hell?”
“Looks that way.”
I think you will be surprised to hear that I never saw SPLIT SECOND until now. Released against LEAVING NORMAL and NIGHT ON EARTH on May 1, 1992, I guess we could say it was the first sci-fi or action movie of Weird Summer. It’s part of that brief, beautiful phase when Rutger Hauer could be the protagonist of action movies (see also WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE, BLIND FURY and THE BLOOD OF HEROES).
He plays Harley Stone, an infamously burnt out London homicide detective in the futuristic year of 2008. His first line of the movie is “Police, dickhead,” said to a barking guard dog while flashing his badge. Later he’ll call the dog a dickhead again and accuse him of knowing something about a murder. So he’s a pretty good action hero.
Forty-six years after MGM’s beloved Technicolor musical THE WIZARD OF OZ, Walt Disney Pictures produced their own journey through the world of L. Frank Baum. Though titled and framed like a sequel, writer/director Walter Murch and co-writer Dennis Gill (WALK THE LINE) treated it more as a literary adaptation, basing it mostly on book #3, Ozma of Oz, combined with some characters from #2, The Marvelous Land of Oz. In an article by Alan Jones in the July, 1985 issue of Cinefantastique (my most quoted source in this review series, you may have noticed), executive producer Gary Kurtz (THE DARK CRYSTAL) says they “pondered at great length” whether to even use the iconic ruby slippers, since in the books they were silver.
Like its predecessor, the not-really-sequel is full of whimsical characters and underpinned with fairy tale menace, but in most other ways it’s wildly different. The colors are subdued rather than vivid, the settings are grounded rather than stagey, it stars 10-year-old newcomer Fairuza Balk as Dorothy rather than a teen like Judy Garland, and she doesn’t sing, because it’s not a musical. While WIZARD’s costumes, jokes and dance numbers come out of the vaudeville tradition, RETURN creates its world and characters with the rapidly evolving cinematic puppetry, animation and visual FX technology of the Lucas/Spielberg era. Murch told Cinefantastique, “At first I was worried about using state-of-the-art animatronics, but so many of the OZ personnel are graduates of The Muppets, STAR WARS, and THE DARK CRYSTAL that I realized it would be pointless to worry.”
The result is a classic entry in the unique-to-the-‘80s subgenre of dark, imaginative, FX-heavy fantasy for children, preceded by THE DARK CRYSTAL and THE NEVERENDING STORY and followed by LABYRINTH. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN is a cool fucking premise: a sort of Victorian era Justice League made of literary characters with unique talents or abilities. In this world, the famous stories of English literature (plus Mark Twain) really happened, and the Queen puts together a super-team to try to stop an attack on Venice. So James Bond’s M (Richard Roxburgh, VAN HELSING, STEALTH) recruits the adventurer hunter Alan Quatermain (Sean Connery, FIRST KNIGHT), Dracula’s Mina Harker (Peta Wilson, SUPERMAN RETURNS), the Invisible Man (but actually not the same H.G. Wells one, for legal reasons)(Tony Curran, Priest from BLADE II), Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng, BRUISER), Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend, director of BATTLE IN SEATTLE) and Captain Nemo (veteran Bollywood star Naseeruddin Shah).
Sort of like MYSTERY MEN, this is based on a comic that’s a riff on the super hero team stories, but made when X-MEN was the only straight up movie version of that sort of thing. The comic, written by Alan Moore, is apparently very different, thicker in obscure literary allusions and lighter in summer movie type spectacle (sword fights, shoot outs, flying CGI machinery, explosions). The adaptation is credited to another comic book writer, James Robinson, who wrote alot of Superman. His previous screenwriting work was CYBER BANDITS, COMIC BOOK VILLAINS and a swing and a miss in the long line of writers trying to figure out how to do FREDDY VS. JASON. (read the rest of this shit…)
Before there was such a thing as Marvel Comics movies, there was BLADE.
Technically it wasn’t the first Marvel movie. It was the fourth. But nobody would’ve expected Marvel Comics to take over the movie business the way they have now. There had been the infamous flop HOWARD THE DUCK in 1986, and a few low rent b-action movies: THE PUNISHER starring Dolph Lundgren in 1989, then Albert Pyun’s DTV movie of CAPTAIN AMERICA in 1990. A Roger Corman production of FANTASTIC FOUR had been made in 1994 merely to extend the movie rights to the characters; it was never released, and the negatives have since been destroyed. I still kinda like THE PUNISHER, but until BLADE came along in 1998 none of these really connected with audiences, and there was no reason to think they would. James Cameron and Golan & Globus had an equal amount of success in trying to make a Spider-man movie, and Marvel had gone bankrupt.
Let’s be honest, most of us never heard of a Blade before the movie. He came from the ’70s series Tomb of Dracula, part of a team of Dracula-hunters made up of descendants of Mina Harker, Abraham Van Helsing and Dracula himself. He wore a red leather jacket and green pants and spoke what creator Marv Wolfman later admitted was “cliche ‘Marvel Black’ dialogue.” But screenwriter David S. Goyer was a fan of the character when New Line Cinema, inspired by the success of FRIDAY, wanted to do a black super hero movie.
At the time it was easier to compare to other vampire movies. Anne Rice style romantic bloodsuckers had dominated the image of the subgenre since at least the movie version of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE in 1994, and BLADE was part of a pushback that included FROM DUSK TILL DAWN two years before and John Carpenter’s VAMPIRES two months after, all reminding audiences how much fun these creatures could be as vicious monsters that need to be exterminated. Each has their own version of the rules and their own leather-clad hunters with weapons made from silver, garlic, holy water or wood, but only BLADE (and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then two seasons in) treated it as an opportunity for martial arts. (read the rest of this shit…)
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Recent commentary and jibber-jabber
Muh on Abigail: “Glaive, you never know but I’d be surprised if the movie had a lower key ending…it’s Radio Silence who always…” Apr 23, 13:32
Muh on Abigail: “Marketing was right to spoil this…first, most people don’t really care that much about general spoilers. They’ve focus tested that.…” Apr 23, 13:26
Glaive Robber on Abigail: “NO SPOILERS. I saw the trailer for this in front of several movies over the last few months, so I…” Apr 23, 11:34
MaggieMayPie on Abigail: “I agree with Vern that Newton and Durand were the best parts. I loved when SPOILER Abigail reveals herself as…” Apr 23, 11:24
Rodrigo Citon on Abigail: “Coincidentally, this is the third movie I’ve watched in the last week or so with cinematographer Aaron Morton (this, NO…” Apr 23, 08:38
Dreadguacamole on Abigail: “I didn’t really like this one – the dialog just didn’t work for me at all, especially the humour. Bummer,…” Apr 23, 08:15
jojo on Abigail: “i.e. The Psycho poster didn’t depict : SPOILER FOR THE MOVIE “PSYCHO” Anthony Perkins in drag standing over Janet Leigh’s…” Apr 23, 07:44
jojo on Abigail: “it kinda seems like it was designed without considering how it would have to be advertised. In order to explain…” Apr 23, 07:35
grimgrinningchris on The Voyeurs: “Also, I wonder if naming dude Sebastian (Seb) was a reference to Sebastian Valmont in Cruel Intentions/Dangerous Liasons etc… I…” Apr 22, 20:33
grimgrinningchris on The Voyeurs: “That’s rad, Vern! Yeah, I’ve got it put into at least 10 friends queues from my recommendations so far… we’ll…” Apr 22, 17:22
Glaive Robber on Five Fingers For Marseilles: “Cool find! Indeed, this looks visually gorgeous, and I could tell from “Love And Monsters” that this guy had chops.” Apr 22, 13:32
VERN on The Voyeurs: “If you don’t mind let’s agree to disagree with JoJo on the intimacy coordinator thing. I think we’ve argued that…” Apr 21, 18:23
Glaive Robber on Road House (2024): “https://lwlies.com/articles/road-house-remake-original/ Pretty enjoyable article comparing the original to the remake.” Apr 21, 17:31
grimgrinningchris on The Voyeurs: “The point, JoJo that as so many others, including Vern, have pointed out is that if there are stunt coordinators,…” Apr 21, 16:12
Muh on Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire: “I might have been interested in this although it seems visually kind of okay but probably boring…was waiting for this…” Apr 20, 15:32
VERN’S “I RECOMMEND THE SHIT OUT OF THIS PRODUCT” CORNER: