"Electra Woman and Dyna Girl" (TV Pilot, 2001)

WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN:

 HOT DISHES IN SPANDEX!

THE OLD GUY WHO LIVES IN THEIR BASEMENT!

HOLY DERIVATIVE!

GOTH BATGIRL!

THAT LADY FROM KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS! 

UHH...THIS GUY!

BUT WAIT! THE WILDEST IS YET TO COME!

Franchise reboots are tricky. The rules are essentially the same as remaking a movie - get it right and your work will be identified as "this generation's so-and-so"; get it wrong, and if you're lucky it will be forever compared to the original, and never in a positive light. Sadly, while some find their own success, many reboots fall into the latter of these two, either because its showrunners make too many changes to the source material or simply because the fans have such fond memories of the original.

The science fiction genre is no stranger to reboots. Battlestar Galactica got one, Flash Gordon got one, Doctor Who got one, Star Trek had several throughout the '90s... even Star Wars got a fresh set of movies (and I know "fresh" is stretching things a bit) back in 1999, plus we've started seeing teasers for a seventh installment.

Sid and Marty Krofft caught the reboot bug back in 1991 when they re-imagined their most popular '70s green screen puppet show Land of the Lost, which ran for two seasons on ABC Saturday morning and was co-produced by the people who brought you Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

Then in 2001 they tried again, and what with the popularity of Buffy and the Gilmore Girls, this time they chose to revive a series they felt would fit in perfectly. One that managed to grow from a meager one-season run as a "show within a show" to become one of their most popular Saturday morning offerings.

That's right - we're doing the failed pilot episode of the 2001 attempted relaunch of the bicentennial seventh-grader's answer to Adam West's Batman, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.

Conceived for the WB Network and never aired on television, today this TV pilot exists only in the realm of bootleg video and preserved for posterity deep in the bowels of YouTube's servers. And the best part is, it's only fifteen minutes long, so this review won't take as long to read as most of the others.

So we begin at an amusement park, where a little girl running around unsupervised decides to take a ride on a Ferris wheel. Suddenly the cable on her car snaps and overturns, leaving her hanging precariously over imminent doom! But luckily for her, a lady in a familiar-looking costume with an oversized wristwatch in on the scene--it's Electra Woman, who climbs onto the wheel to rescue the poor girl and bring her down.

Dyna Girl rounds out the cast.

"You should know better than to wander off by yourself. Remember what happened to that kid on Lidsville?"

Fast-forward a few years, and that little girl is now a young Anne Stedman who is still crazy obsessed about Electra Woman. In fact, as it happens, her fancy-pants pretty-people-only college which I assume is some Professor Xavier-type academy for superheroes or something (which would explain all the cameos) is having a homecoming parade in which they have invited a number of superhero graduates to participate in some kind of thank-you float or something, and she's insisting that her long time idol participate in the proceedings.

Her name's Judy, by the way.

Sadly, since that episode, her rescuer has since disappeared from the public eye and is now an estranged middle-aged divorcee played by Markie Post from Night Court living in a trailer park and smelling of cigarettes and booze. Seems the original Dyna Girl ran off with her husband and since then her self-worth has hit an all-time low. She doesn't even think of herself as a superhero anymore - not compared to Superman being an alien, Batman having that goth thing going for him, and Wonder Woman having bigger--

Wait...divorce? Sex? Bosom envy? Wasn't this based off a kids' show? That was made during a time when you weren't allowed to punch people on a kids' show?

Oh, that is sad. Supergirl SHOULD have gotten that sequel.

Judy can't help but notice that Electra Woman's invitation went return-to-sender on her, not that anyone planning the parade cares since Judy's not even on the planning committee and EW was a drop-out, and pays her a visit to find out what the dilly-o. She discovers Laurie's--I'm guessing that's her name--sad state of affairs just in time for the two of them to tumble out of the back of the trailer as it's being towed away while they were still inside it, which I must admit was pretty funny.

So the main gist is that Judy now aims to bring her childhood hero back into the spotlight by hiding her booze, booking her publicity gigs, and risking bringing up one of the worst traumas of her life by digging out the original Dyna Girl costume and putting it on.

Uhh, Judy...when you get home after Laurie throws you out of her hotel room, find a dictionary and look up the word "tact."

Judy books the two of then an appearance at a local pawn shop, where nobody shows up, Laurie isn't exacly crazy about the idea, and Judy loudly announces that her leotard is "creeping into her secret places." Her words, not mine. Fortunately, nothing quite breaks up the monotony in a pawn shop quite like a pair of armed robbers who quite cartoonishly knock out the guy behind the counter and start pointing rifles at things. Judy has to goad Laurie into foiling this heist as the security guard rather ineffectually clutches his inhaler and after a moment's disillusionment, Laurie reluctantly gets involved.

Thus follows one of the most bizarre dialogue exhanges within fifteen minutes of anything.

BANK ROBBER A:
I'm holding a GUN. A BIG GUN.

ELECTRA WOMAN:
Oh please. I've had bigger things than that up my--

WHOA!!! Too much information.

At the very least, it sets off something you NEVER saw in the original TV show - a fight scene.

Which also includes something ELSE you never saw in the original TV show - Dyna Girl kicking a bad guy in his Bugaloos.

Conclusive evidence.

And as luck would have it, a news van drives up right outside just as the bad guys are beaten into submission.

So Electra Woman and Dyna Girl are officially back in the public eye, Judy celebrates by immediately leaking her new secret identity to her horny boyfriend, and Laurie celebrates by--

OH GOOD LORD SHE'S A COUGAR!! OH I'M HAVING SUPERGIRL FLASHBACKS!!

Yeah...she's decided to move in with Judy and finish her degree. And she's already made herself right at home.

Chest windows? This MUST be the 21st century!

Okayyyyyyyy...good points:

Well, compared to what we were given in the original series, the writing felt more mature. Obviously it wasn't 1976 anymore, and this was made to attract older primetime audiences, so taking it in a more adult direction was a given, which honestly is not a direction normally taken in a Sid and Marty Krofft production--not even in any of their variety shows. We even got a fight scene. And a crotch kick. And at least this aborted continuity goes out of its way to explain Laurie and Judy's living arrangements. If this had actually gotten past the pilot stage, it might have been interesting to see this expanded upon.

And who was Laurie's ex-husband? Frank Heflin?

Euggghh...no. Not if Dyna Girl stole him away.

Which leads us to the bad points: the writing is a little TOO mature. There were way too many sex and female anatomy jokes in it, and whoever wrote this went a little overboard in making Electra Woman 2.0's life miserable. In fact, she kinda comes off as a sleazy, sex-starved old lady, and a lot of that made me quite uncomfortable. You wouldn't think the people who gave you something like H.R. Pufnstuf could pull off a superhero costume with a chest window.

When all is said and done, based on this pilot, I think I would probably have prefered the original. At least I had fun with its camp nature and low production values, and I would rather cringe at the writing quality than at superheroines making rapid-fire vagina jokes.

Why so serious?

Escape From New York (1981)

Shoot a cop with a gun
The Big Apple is plenty of fun
Stab a priest with a fork
And you'll spend your vacation in New York!

Rob a bank, take a truck
You can get here by stealing a buck
This is bliss, it's a lark
Honey, everyone's going to New York!

No more Yankees
Strike the word from your ears
Play the roulette
There's no more opera at the Met

This is hell, this is fate
But now this is your home and it's great
So rejoice, pop a cork
Honey, everyone's going to New York!

Hey, it's another movie about how much the future will suck! (What is this, our sixth now?)

And it's our first movie from director John Carpenter! The guy who gave us Halloween, Christine, Big Trouble in Little China and The Fog! The director who often composes the music to the movies he makes!

And it's the movie the Watergate scandal inspired him to make, even though it came out seven years after it happened!

Hey, it's that guy who appeared in four other John Carpenter movies! Including the sequel to this one!

In the far-off year of 1997, the Spice Girls reach the apex of their popularity, an over-hyped James Cameron film becomes the most popular movie in the world, the crime rate in America has increased exponentially, and the once lively city of New York has been converted into the world's largest criminal containment facility. A wall is constructed around the entirety of Manhattan, all bridges leading into the facility are mined, and guards are stationed around the perimeter. Roaches check in, but they don't check out.

I'm not exactly sure why the U.S. government decided to turn the country's largest city, a thriving metropolis with a culture all its own that millions of tourists visit every year, into a massive penal colony. There is a sequel to this film, Escape from L.A., that goes into more detail as to what kind of sick dystopian ruling party would think this was a good idea, but that's a film that wouldn't come out for another fifteen years, so this is the hand that we're dealt.

Worst. White House Easter Egg hunt. Ever.

One day, President Donald Pleasance, the man who signed off on this idea I would assume, is on his way to a summit meeting with the Chinese and the Russians for world peace or something like that when Air Force One is hijacked by terrorists and crashes inside the New York City prison. The President manages to eject from the plane in an escape pod just before it hits, but lands within the walls anyway and hasn't been heard from since. Since Glenn Close isn't here, Police Commissioner Lee Van Cleef decides to hire a felon by the name of Snake Plissken, a disillusioned war hero convicted of robbing a Federal Reserve Bank and played by Kurt Russell, to break into New York, find the Commander-in-Chief and bring him out again before his summit meeting in exchange for a full pardon.

And just to give him that extra spark of motivation, explosive charges are injected into his body that will burst his arteries and kill him within twenty-two hours, and the Commish has promised to neutralize them on return of the President.

(So they close off a whole bunch of tourist attractions--the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, every last theater on Broadway, choking off a major source of economic growth for an entire state--just to build a prison?)

They're Maggie and the Brain, yes, Maggie and the Brain...
One played a radio DJ in a California seaside town, the other a detective investigating haunted-car related murders...

Plissken enters the facility armed with a device that tracks the President's heart monitor and a countdown clock to when the explosives in his body are set off. The signals lead him to the basement of a decrepit theater, where he assumes the worst when he finds the heart monitor on the wrist of a drunken wastrel. When he contacts the police and they refuse to let him back out, a new lead suddenly emerges when Ernest Borgnine of The Black Hole appears as a cab driver who recognizes Snake at the theater, picks him and kindly informs him a gunpoint that the President is being held hostage by a man known only as "The Duke" ("The Duke of New York, A-Number One" to you) played by 70's music man Isaac Hayes.

It becomes apparent that the prisoners of New York City have somehow organized themselves into some kind of pseudo-civilization. We learn they have their own gas and oil supply, they have their own generators with which to produce electricity, and it seems they have some kind of anarchy-built political system going in which the Duke assumes a leadership position and governs the masses through antagonistic means. It also appears that this collective no such thing as social class, as the people who hang around the Duke are just as disheveled as the people who line up on both sides of the road and throw things at cars traveling on Broadway.

(What about the U.N.? Where are THEY meeting now?)

They say this Duke's one bad mother--
Shut your mouth!
I'm talkin' about the Duke!
We can dig it!

Cabbie takes Snake to see a couple of his associates - Christine's Harry Dean Stanton and The Fog's Adrienne Barbeau playing Brain, a former colleague of Snake's who now runs his own oil rig in the basement of the New York Public Library, and his main squeeze Maggie, respectively. They reveal that the Duke is holding the President as collateral to orchestrate a jailbreak across the heavily mined 69th Street Bridge, and also take him to where he is being held (with a little coercion from Snake, I assure) only for him to caught by the Duke and his cohorts.

(No more Christmas trees at Rockefeller Center Plaza?)

This must be what it's like for the President whenever Congress is in session.

Hours pass so as to increase the tension of whether or not Snake will make it out of the prison with the President and save his life and conveniently wind the clock down so that the inevitable rescue will come down to the last minute. The Duke has Snake fight who looks like a Siberian bear wrestler for his amusement while Brain and Maggie suddenly decide that they're good guys and rescue the President, while Snake kills the dude he's wrestling and all of them meet up in Cabbie's taxi for a car chase between them and the Duke. Snake's new friends are all killed one at a time while navigating the minefiend at the 69th Street Bridge while leading the President to the perimeter wall, where once his safety is finally assured, he rains hot vengeful machine gun fire on the Duke, mocking all the way.

(So NBC just cancelled Saturday Night Live? Just like that?)

And THIS must be Congress in session.

As the President prepares for a televised speech to the summit he will now have to miss, the explosives in Snake's bloodstream are neutralized with seconds to spare, and after the President thanks him for saving his life (while snubbing the people who were killed in the process), publicly humiliates him by swapping a very important tape that was in the briefcase he was handcuffed to that had nuclear secrets on it or something for a recording of "Bandstand Boogie" that Cabbie was listening to throughout the film.

(Saks Fifth Avenue? F.A.O Schwarz? Where have THEY gone?)

"Brain, get that paper out of my face, I'm trying to drive here!
Mr. President, you stop kicking Maggie in the shin right now!
Don't you make me pull this car over! I SWEAR...!"

Escape from New York subscribes to a Family Guy-style system of characterization, in that it makes most of its characters so utterly unlikable that it's difficult to cheer for them. In Snake Plissken's case, it's perfectly all right - he's an anti-hero whose only motivation for being put in this protagonist position is the full pardon, AND the people who gave him the job made him a walking time bomb. He probably didn't even vote for the guy. Ironically, his badass factor does make him an action movie guy you can get behind, even though his total kill count is, like, TWO.

(What about the Macy's parade? Is there still even a Macy's?)

Everyone else I'm not really compelled to give two craps about. Brain kinda waffles between whether he wants to be on Snake's side or not until the last moment, Maggie doesn't really do much of anything until she tries to avenge Brain's death without success, President Pleasance turns out to be kind of a dick (which I could also give a pass in a Watergate-inspired movie), and as for Cabbie...okay, I kinda liked Cabbie. He was the fun one, even though he's got a bit of a mouth on him.

If I could recommend this movie for any reason, it's to see Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, a man who is overqualified to enter the maximum-security hellhole of a city-sized penitentiary and come back out again with all his teeth, all his fingers and one and two-thirds functioning legs.

(Where's the ball gonna drop on New Year's Eve? ...oh, right, in their juvenile offender wing)

So what do we call you? "Snake" or "Plissken?" Or perhaps "sir", that works just as well.

Dante's Peak (1997)

I've always been better at feeling out volcanoes than people and politics.
--Pierce Brosnan's character

Making a disaster movie is very simple.

Step one: think up some stock characters of varying stock personalities. They can be any type of person you want, but try and include one or two children, someone in a position of power like an army sergeant, city mayor or president, and a scientist or otherwise really smart guy whom nobody will listen to until the disaster happens.

Step two: give them something going horribly wrong to react to. This can be either man-made, natural or supernatural. Examples include a massive explosion, a giant meteor shower, a major earthquake, a plane about to crash, a boat about to sink, an animal attack, nuclear holocaust, alien invasion, or if you're Roland Emmerich, the whole world blowing up.

Step three: spend the first part of the movie developing these characters while setting them up for their impending doom. These characters will be survivors, so make sure that the best-known actors in your cast play them.

Step four: after a senses-assaulting barrage of special effects, show your characters' human strengths and/or weaknesses by having them either cope with the aftermath or try to escape before something even worse happens. Have two of them fall in love with each other along the way. While it is okay to kill off all your extras, make sure that most of your best-known actors live at the end, as well as any children or pets in your group of survivors.

Every disaster movie ever made, or at least all of the ones I've seen, follow this formula. Example: Irwin Allen's The Poseidon Adventure. 1972. The characters: Gene Hackman plays a priest, Ernest Borgnine plays a cop who marries an ex-prostitute, Shelley Winters and Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory play an elderly Jewish couple, Leslie Neilsen plays a ship's captain, plus two children. The disaster: a tsunami capsizes the ocean liner they are all traveling to Europe in. The aftermath: they must all now make their way to the resurfaced bottom of the boat and try and escape before the ship sinks completely. The end result: Ernest, Grandpa Joe and the kids survive, as do a waiter and a singer in their party who both fall in love with each other.

This method, however, does not guarantee that the disaster movie you're making will be a good one. There are much more important factors than the ones listed above - scientific accuracy, plausibility, the quality of the script and the special effects, things like that.

For instance, a movie about a disaster such as, say, a volcano in the Pacific Northwest would be logical. We learned that in 1980, when Mount St. Helens erupted.

On the other hand, a movie about a volcano in Los Angeles, a city sitting next to a fault where tectonic plates move past each other and do not produce ash or magma, is not.

If you've read my review of Volcano, one of many late-90s disaster flicks that were all sound and fury signifying nothing, you may have caught on a couple of references to another film from 1997--namely, Dante's Peak, another volcano disaster movie from 1997, released by Universal in February of that year (two months before that OTHER film), practically a more tolerable and slightly more scientifically accurate film, and also the more financially successful offering.

And yet of the two it has a lower rating on the Tomatometer.

Where is the justice?

Looking at the film's vital statistics alone gave me more hope for this movie. For instance, Volcano just had Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche. Sure Jones would fight aliens as a Man in Black that summer, but he was practically the only thing propping up that film. Dante's Peak went and got two people more experienced with disaster--JAMES BOND and SARAH CONNOR.

All right, Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton.  But you must admit, that still sounded awesome.

"I've saved the world from corrupt media moguls, rogue secret agents and mad oil heiresses!"

"Big deal! I'VE saved HUMANITY'S FUTURE from a evil robot uprising!"

Pierce plays a widowed volcanologist who must warn the residents of a small rural town in Washington* state sitting dangerously close to a dormant volcanic mountain that it is about to explode. Linda plays the mayor of said small rural town in Washington state sitting dangerously close to said dormant volcanic mountain that is about to explode.

Typically, nobody seems to be in the mood to listen to Pierce as the town is in the middle of their Pioneer Days Festival and is right now enjoying the boost in tourism. See, Dante's Peak (that's the name of the town, incidentally, I thought I should mention that) is not a very big city, with a population of just under 8,000 people, and they're not about to let something as minor as a dormant volcanic mountain that is about to explode sink the local economy. This is particularly emphasized by Pierce's boss, played by Charles Hallahan of John Carpenter's The Thing, who adamantly refuses to listen to him, telling him they are only here to observe, not drive a thriving small mountain town to financial ruin.

Even if he does find two vacationing lovebirds boiled alive in the nearby hot springs (a raise in temperature of geothermal waters doesn't always signal a volcanic eruption but for the sake of the plot let's say it does) as well as an unusual number of dead squirrels lying around.

Oh well, at least while Pierce tries to convince everyone they're in danger while the USGS team he brought with him monitors the volcano, he can get to know Linda.

We're sitting at the foot of a dormant volcano and we're not moving! Whoopee!

Only when Linda's youngest daughter asks for a glass of water do they finally realize that maybe Pierce has a point after they discover that sulfur dioxide has leaked into the drinking water. Next thing you know, Linda's on local news telling people we're in danger and the city council is finally persuaded to get off their asses and do something.

Rather coincidentally, the townspeople are meeting at the high school gymnasium discussing an evacuation procedure when the time comes for the disaster that they are supposed to be evacuating ahead of to occur. Of course, volcanic tremors don't usually cause earthquakes strong enough to break a small town to pieces, but for the sake of this movie we need something for the extras to run around in a panic in, so let's give them a major earthquake to knock over buildings and splinter freeway overpasses.

Meanwhile, Pat Robertson watches the news, aware that Washington state has legalized marijuana, and smiles approvingly.

And once again, we have the trope of children whose sense of self-preservation utterly fails them. Linda's two kids, worried about their grandmother who lives in a house up the dormant volcanic mountain and refuses to evacuate, hop in a truck once the mountain explodes and drive off by themselves to pick her up. Never mind the fact that they're too young to operate a motor vehicle, the roads are clearly not safe and the ash fall is so thick that even with the headlights on, they can't see where they're going.

And speaking of ash fall, remember that scene in Volcano where they had helicopters flying around the eruption in a hail of cinders? Well, this movie demonstrates the danger of doing that - a helicopter pilot charging money to airlift evacuees out of harm's way fails to take into account that the ash could get sucked into and clog the engine and promptly crashes in a fiery explosion, killing all on board.

So remember, kids, DON'T FLY HELICOPTERS AROUND A VOLCANIC ERUPTION WITH HEAVY ASH FALL.

The fools. Will they ever learn?

And when the kids, Linda and Pierce finally meet up at Grandma's house and all must flee when the building succumbs to a river of lava (Pacific Northwest volcanoes don't produce lava that flows that freely, and certainly not at the same time as ash), they take a speedboat to the other side of the lake to escape the magma when they realize the water has turned to acid and it's slowly eating away at the boat. Well, when I say "slowly", I should really be saying "instantaneously." Once the propeller to the engine is eaten away (that would slow them down more, to be honest) , the grandmother steps off the boat and into the water to pull the rest of them to the shore on the other side.

Then she collapses and dies two scenes later and everyone stands around her having a really good Hollywood cry.

So other than that, how was the trip to Grandma's house?

Then Pierce finds and hotwires an abandoned truck at a nearby ranger station and must drive across an insanely hot river of debris, ash and fire that is blocking their path. Despite the fact that their tires immediately burst into flames, and that the heat from the lava is turning the undercarriage into undercarriage soup, which normally would strand them in the lava as the intense heat bakes them all to death, they somehow manage to get across it just fine. They even have time to rescue the family dog, who ran off after the initial eruption and suddenly reappeared on a solitary boulder stranded in the river of fire.

As for Pierce's boss, he pays the price for not listening to him when his team tries to flee across a rickety bridge crossing a muddy lahar that proves too much for it. His van is stuck when the bridge breaks apart and his crew watches as it topples, tossing him into the mudflow with a Wilhelm scream.

Bet you wish you'd listened to him NOW.

Finally as the mountain violently explodes sending ash clouds thundering down the mountain demolishing everything in its path, Pierce, Linda and the kids race through the streets OUTRUNNING THE ASH CLOUDS CLEARLY MOVING FASTER THAN THEY ARE and eventually seek refuge in an abandoned mine as the entire town is destroyed. Luckily, Pierce had the foresight to pick up a beacon device designed by NASA that his team had brought along with him just before they escaped, so that when he's trapped in the truck and separated from Linda and her family when the mine partially collapses, he can signal for help.

In another one of those will-they-make-it-or-won't-they moments where you already know they'll all be rescued alive, they're all rescued alive and airlifted out of the scene, discussing plans for a deep-sea fishing trip.

And now for dramatic effect, here's a random shot of a child crying.
That other movie made you feel sorry for a PIG in BANDAGES.

Dante's Peak doesn't necessarily offer anything original to the disaster genre. Most if not every cliche we covered at the start of this review is present and accounted for, and watching it feels like we're checking off each of the little boxes. There is sentimentality, there are special effects aplenty, and there are times when the plot follows movie laws of physics instead of actual real-life laws of physics. There's even a gratuitous scene of a pet in danger. The characters weren't even interesting enough for me to remember all their names. It's a typical, by-the-book disaster flick.

Still, it's much better than that Tommy Lee Jones crapshoot. No shoehorned social commentary, no on-the-spot obvious news coverage every twenty seconds, the kids are less annoying, the heroics aren't overdramatized, the science is slightly more accurate, the dialogue is more tolerable, there's no improbably stupid miracle plan to save the town like lava-resistant concrete freeway barriers and swimming pool water...they even go as far as telling you why flying a helicopter around a volcanic eruption with heavy ash fall is bad.

There are worse disaster movies out there than Dante's Peak. Granted, there are BETTER disaster movies as well, but I'll give this one a Mulligan.

Aww, man. I wanted one of those funnel cakes.

(Source of geological information specific to this movie: http://www.geol.umd.edu/facilities/lmdr/dante/dante.htm)

Flash Gordon (1980)

Pathetic Earthlings...who will save you now?

Flash Gordon is a product of the science-fiction/fantasy/adventure craze that hit the comic pages in the 1930s. Created by cartoonist Alex Raymond and first published by King Features on January 7, 1934, Flash Gordon was one of many comic adventure stories inspired by and created to compete against Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, but since then has taken on a life of its own, having been reprinted many times under many publishers, adapted into a number of TV series courtesy of the DuMont Network, the Filmation cartoon studio and the Siffy Channel, and has recently been featured in the works of Seth MacFarlane, a guy who's somehow made a lot of money by trying to pass off pop culture references as jokes.

Though, to be honest, MacFarlane was not referencing the comic itself, but rather the 1980 movie based off of it.

The one produced by Dino De Laurentiis, the Italian film producer who gave us Barbarella, the 1976 King Kong remake, and both Conan the Barbarian movies, riding the wave of sci-fi/fantasy movies inspired by the original Star Wars.

The one screen-written by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who also wrote the first Batman movie. No, the FIRST Batman movie.

The one with the kick-ass theme song performed by:

Of course it's not like there's another Flash movie out there. Apart from the serials.

Once upon a time, there was a nice, kind, benevolent emperor named Ming (played by Max von Sydow of The Seventh Seal and The Exorcist) who ruled a very far-away planet called Mongo. One day he happened upon a planet named Earth, and decided he likes it so much he wanted to play with it, with earthquakes, hurricanes, and somehow triggering nasty volcanic eruptions to terrorize the population.

Oh, did I say "nice, kind and benevolent?" I meant "horribly, horribly evil."

Looks like a cross between Bruce Willis, Fu Manchu and Queen Amidala.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the barren wasteland of somewhere in the United States, a plane is boarded by Melody Anderson playing traveling journalist Dale Arden and the star of this movie, nude Playgirl centerfold Sam J. Jones as Flash Gordon--in the original comic a polo player from Yale University, in this film star quarterback of the New York Jets.

Ming sends in a plague of "hot hail" (couldn't it just say meteorites?) which pummels the plane and somehow makes its pilots disappear, leaving Flash and Dale to try and keep the plane in the air, but despite their best efforts, it crashes into the greenhouse belonging to one Dr. Hans Zarkov (played by Topol, whom I remember as one of James Bond's allies in For Your Eyes Only), an ex-NASA scientist who believes that these disasters are the cause of an alien invasion, an extraterrestrial force that is slowly pushing the moon towards the Earth.

Zarkov doesn't seem to mind that Flash and Dale have crashed an airplane into his house. In fact, he even invites them to fly his new rocketship with him to investigate these alien goings-on. At gunpoint, mind you, but, hey, at least they get to ride a rocket.

Okay, so which one of you is Flash?

The rocket takes them all to Mongo, where they are promptly captured by stormtroopers and brought before Ming. The fuehrer decrees Flash to be executed, Dale to become his new concubine, and Zarkov to have his mind wiped for entry into his secret police, and then...a football game breaks out between Flash and Ming's soldiers. Yeah, a football game. Flash plays quarterback, Dale plays cheerleader, and Zarkov reveals that he was a first-round draft pick for the Kansas City Chiefs by accidentally braining Flash with a forward pass.

At Flash's execution, however, he is rescued at the last minute and smuggled from his coffin out of the palace by Ming's daughter Aura (Ornelia Murti) who, I've gotta be frank here, is a TOTAL SLUT. I'm not just saying that, she is literally a tease. She already has a relationship with Prince Barin of Arboria (played by another Bond actor, Timothy Dalton) yet she seduces the royal surgeon to smuggle Flash out of Ming's palace during his execution, and while teaching Flash to fly the airship that's taking him to freedom and teaching him how to telepathically contact Dale and tell him he's alive, keeps trying to put her tongue down his throat.

Hey, hands on 10 and 2, buddy.

Anyway, Aura drops him off at Arboria, which looks a lot like the Ewok village from Return of the Jedi, and returns to the palace to be interrogated and tortured. And Prince Barin proves himself to be most hospitable to Flash by locking him in a cage and dumping him in a swamp, daring him to stick his hand in a hollow tree stump that is home to a poisonous stinging thing, and then saving his live from a carnivorous plant...so as not to be denied the pleasure of killing him himself.

Eventually everyone gets abducted (including Dale, who escapes Ming's palace with a very-much-not-mindwiped Zarkov, and Zarkov as well) and taken to the airborne kingdom of Sky City, home of its ruler Prince Vultan (played by BRIAN BLESSED, who has since become the most notorious actor in this film) and his army of Hawkmen (no relation to the DC superhero). And Vultan's first official act is to have Flash and Barin fight to the death on a rotating spiked platform.

But not before Dale is briefly reunited with Flash and hurriedly pops the question to him, after knowing him for just the span of a few hours, most of which she spent unconscious flying in a space capsule.

I don't think he expects you to talk.

The battle comes to an end when in a show of good sportsmanship Flash saves Barin from falling to his death, much to Vultan's disappointment, but word has gotten out that Flash has survived and it isn't long before Min's mingions...Ming's mingings...minmingminamin...the baddies turn up and recapture everybody. Except for Vultan and the hawkmen who fled at the arrival of Ming, and Flash, who rejects Ming's offer of a kingdom of his own after seeing how he turns everybody's neighbors against each other as insurance against a possible owverthrow of government and is left for dead at Sky City as it is to be demolished.

Having conveniently found a vehicle he can ride to escape just as Sky City is destroyed, Flash must now rescue Dale from marrying the universe's biggest prick, somehow save Barin and Zarkov from execution, and though I personally don't think she deserves it, stop Aura from being exiled to the coldest, iciest, most uncomfortable part of Mongo. Tall order for a first-string quarterback.

"Errm...which one of you is the bride again?"

Luckily a newly reformed Aura escapes her own exile and frees Barin and Zarkov just as Ming's army notices that Flash is not quite dead again and sends some army guys to make him not not quite dead again. Flash thinks to the newly-displaced Vultan, and together he and the Hawkmen launch an invasion of Ming's palace and stop the wedding. This includes a flying laser battle fight scene on Ming's battleship Ajax, complete with THE BEST MUSIC YOU COULD POSSIBLY SET TO A FLYING LASER BATTLE FIGHT SCENE.

Have a listen:

Queen could make a FAMILY REUNION sound epic.

Anyhoo, long story short, Barin manages to lower the palace's lightning field, allowing Flash to suicide-plunge the Ajax into the exact spot where Dale is becoming Ming's new sexual playthi--marrying the bastard, and without even bothering to wait until the "speak now or forever hold thy peace" part of the ceremony, finally crashes, skewering Ming on the long pointy end of the vessel, where he eventually...makes himself evaporate.

Oh, yeah, and the Earth is saved somehow, I guess.

Barin and Aura become the new Emperor and Empress of Mongo, Vultan is named their new general, and a big thank-you party is thrown in Flash's honor as he, Dale and Zarkov contemplate getting back to Earth.

Meanwhile, an unknown hand picks up Ming's ring in the final shot, setting up a possible sequel that never happens.

Earthling drivers.

It's very easy to dismiss Flash Gordon as comic book camp but, let's face it, it is. Any movie where half the characters dress in silly costumes and act like they're supposed to be taken seriously IS camp in its purest form. It was written by the guy who wrote the 1966 Batman movie, and knowing the sort of material he came up with for THAT feature, of course it would be a tad theatrical. Plus, anybody who could get BRIAN BLESSED to dress up in feathery shorts and wings with no shirt on...do I HAVE to spell it out for you people!!

Don't give me that look. It's not necessarily a bad thing to be overly theatrical. Adam West's Batman is regarded not just as a TV classic, but as a major influence to certain elements of the Batman comic we know today. And Electra Woman and Dyna Girl gets a pass because, well, it's Sid and Marty Krofft and I wouldn't expect anything more or less from them. Not sure what was the deal with Supergirl, though...

I enjoyed Flash Gordon. It was very entertaining. The visual effects were nice to look at, the action was pretty good, there was obvious attention to detail paid to its source material, and, of course, the soundtrack was kick-ass. And if no one else, at least Brian "GORDON'S ALIVE?!" Blessed appeared to be enjoying himself, even if his outfit wasn't doing him any favors.

That is the face of a man whose place in pop culture has just been cemented.

Casino Royale (1967)

CASINO ROYALE is too much...for one James Bond!

James Bond turned fifty last year. Though he hasn't even aged a day.

After twenty-three movies, six actors and so many women I'm surprised he hasn't picked up at least one sexual disease, people still love him.

Can't blame him, really. Good, bad or indifferent, there are so many awesome and memorable things to list from this long-running franchise. The fight scenes, the fancy cars, the innuendos, the elaborate gadgetry, the volcano hideout in You Only Live Twice, the amphibious car in The Spy Who Loved Me, John Cleese playing Q in that one movie, the bizarre henchmen like Jaws, Oddjob and Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, the women characters with suggestive names like Pussy Galore, Plenty O'Toole, and Holly Goodhead...

This week, however, we'll be looking at a James Bond film that nobody remembers--Casino Royale.

Actually, there are TWO James Bond movies that aren't part of the official canon--there's this one, and there's also the 1983 film Never Say Never Again, in which Sean Connery (at the age of 53) returned to play 007 in what is essentially a remake of Thunderball.

When Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli won the film rights to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and stories, there was one title they didn't get--the very first novel from 1953, Casino Royale, which had already gone to CBS for a 1954 episode of their Climax Mystery Theater series. When those rights wound up in the hands of Columbia Pictures, producer Charles Feldman originally wanted to make the movie WITH Saltzman and Broccoli, but ended up producing it by himself when they couldn't come to terms, and neither could he cast Connery himself to play Bond...so he decided to make the film into a comedy. Too bad he didn't tell most of the actors who genuinely thought it was a straight-up Bond flick. David Niven, Fleming's original choice to play his super-spy character, was given the lead.

This was not the only problem this film had.

Guess how many people directed it.

Normally one is enough, unless it's a Coen or Wachowski flick.

This movie had SIX DIRECTORS--SIX--each helming different parts of the film. One of them (who went uncredited) was the stunt coordinator in charge of the final sequence. Another one, Val Guest, was put in charge of piecing this whole thing into as close of a coherent story as it gets.

Now, any movie that goes through six directors would surely have some wondrous tales of production hell. And this film does not disappoint - Orson Welles and Peter Sellers never got along, and Welles' good friend Princess Margaret, the Queen's sister, did nothing to douse the animosity; the original budget was $6 million but eventually ballooned to twice that amount; Sellers and co-star Woody Allen made frequent contributions to the screenplay, as did others including film director Billy Wilder and Dr. Strangelove's Terry Southern, whom Sellers brought in to try and outdo Welles. The end result was a mish-mash of a film that led to reviews ranging from lukewarm to negative from critics who called it indulgent, lacking discipline, and hard to follow. Despite this, and unlike many of the films I've done, it did manage to make its money back in theaters.

Many people in this film have also appeared in official Bond movies, the most obvious guess being co-star Ursula Andress, the Bond girl from Dr. No. The list also includes Vladek Shaybal (From Russia with Love), Caroline Munro and Milton Reid (The Spy Who Loved Me), Angela Scoular (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), and Burt Kwouk (Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice), who also appeared alongside Peter Sellers as Cato in the Pink Panther movies.

Look for a guy in a Frankenstein's monster costume at the film's climax. That's David Prowse in his first film role. You know, the guy who would later appear on camera as DARTH VADER. (Yes, you read that correctly. Frankenstein's monster.)

And incidentally, who should design the opening titles of this film than our old friend Richard Williams.

The first scene in the movie shows Peter Sellers standing in a French pissoir meeting a police inspector who shows him his...err...credentials.

This really won't make sense without a picture, so here is one:

Nothing comes of this scene.

David Niven plays James Bond 007, the ORIGINAL James Bond as it turns out, who retired from the British Secret Service 50 years ago (didn't know the Cold War was running that long) and has been living in resentment of the gadget-obsessed, sex-crazed buffoon that MI6 gave his name and number to after he left. His old boss, M (played by John Huston, father of the Grand High Witch herself) visit him with representatives of the CIA, the KGB and French intelligence in hopes of coaxing him out of retirement to stop the evil organization SMERSH from eliminating their secret operatives.

(Before you think SMERSH is a silly made-up word, it was actually an umbrella name for the Soviet Union's counterespionage agencies. The name comes from the Russian phrase smiert spionam, meaning "death to spies", which many Bond fans may recall was a plot device in 1987's The Living Daylights. Here they've given the name to a SPECTRE-like global terrorist group, while I'm left wondering why the KGB guy is there.)

Anyway, when Bond turns them all down, M has his mansion blown up for some reason...and then apparently dies in the explosion. Even though it looks like it only just blew off his toupee.

Old guy, young lady...I think this was how Never Say Never Again went, come to think of it.

Bond travels to Scotland to console the widow M, who has been replaced by a SMERSH agent named Mimi (Deborah Kerr) who has also replaced everyone in M's castle home with SMERSH ladies in hopes of seducing Bond and destroying his abstinent image. All their attempts fail, and even agent Mimi falls in love with him and saves his life when the other girls try to kill him during an exploding grouse hunt.

Now the new head of MI6, Sir James (we'll call him Sir James for clarity's sake) returns to London, acquaints himself with Moneypenny...'s daughter (Barbara Bouchet), and is briefed that British spies all over the world are being killed in bordellos and geisha houses by lady SMERSH agents who are preying on their inability to refuse sexual favors. As a countermeasure, he orders that all remaining MI6 agents will change their names to "007 James Bond" to throw SMERSH off his--I mean, their trail, and establishes a program to train spies to resist sexual attraction. Moneypenny Jr. brings in a new trainee, a karate expert named Coop (Terence Cooper) who doesn't really do much of anything if I recall.

Meanwhile, retired agent/millionaire Vesper Lynd (Andress) finds an expert baccarat player named Evelyn Tremble (Sellers) to become another James Bond, go to Casino Royale and play some cards against a SMERSH agent known as Le Chiffre - in the more recent movie a terrorist mastermind, but in this movie Orson Welles playing a guy who embezzled SMERSH assets to feed his compulsive gambling habit.

Right now at least one part of him is violating the Official Secrets Act.

Meanwhile, in another plot point that goes nowhere, Bond looks up his estranged daughter Mata Bond (Joanna Bettet), his long-lost daughter whom he sired with Mata Hari (yes, THE Mata Hari), to infiltrate a spy school in East Berlin that is really a SMERSH cover operation. She finds that Le Chiffre is also selling embarrassing photos of world leaders at an "art auction" to raise the money to pay SMERSH back, steals the photos, flushes them down a toilet and escapes in a cab driven by Wilfred Mott from Doctor Who.

Back at the casino, after Evelyn/Bond must fight off a lady SMERSH agent by the name of Miss Goodthighs, he goes off to play baccarat, but not before learning that Le Chiffre wears a special kind of infrared sunglasses to help him cheat. The baccarat game is a clear metaphor for the feud between Sellers and Welles on set - Le Chiffre and Evelyn/Bond trade off magic tricks and comedic foreign accents almost like schoolchildren on a playground. When Vesper steals Le Chiffre's infrared sunglasses, Evelyn/Bond easily cleans him out, but his victory is short-lived when Vesper is kidnapped outside the casino and Evelyn/Bond chases after her.

Or at least I think he chases after them, because there is a bit of a jump cut after he gets in his car and is about to give chase. Suddenly he's strapped in a chair about to be tortured by a sore loser Le Chiffre.

And he is. Psychologically.

As he is hallucinating being attacked by bagpipers and more women in bathing suits, Vesper appears to rescue him...and then shoots him.

So...does that mean he's dead or something? I mean, we don't see him for the rest of the film, and I know Sellers walked off the set at one point, but is he killed for real if he's killed in his freak-out? That needed to be explained a bit.

"Excuse me, which one is directing this scene? ...erm...am I in the right movie?"

Equally inexplicable is what happens immediately afterward, when some SMERSH agents suddenly appear out of nowhere and shoot Le Chiffre in the forehead.

Meanwhile, in London, Mata Bond is abducted by a SMERSH agent posing as a Royal Guardsman on a horse and taken onboard a...flying...saucer?

Okay, this movie's not making any sense now.

Sir James and Moneypenny track her back to the casino, where some friendly SMERSH agents with guns take them to their basement headquarters and present them to their leader Dr. Noah (no relation) face to face--Jimmy Bond. Yes, it turns out Sir James' lesser-known, ill-regarded nephew, played by Woody Allen, is so jealous of the size of his uncle's metaphorical penis that he started up a supervillain club to kill off all the sexually attractive secret agents. He's also devised a biological weapon to make women more beautiful and to kill every man taller than 4'6", to make him the most desirable man in the world.

He's also got this second plan to have all the world's leaders assassinated and replaced with robotic clones that obey his every command, but, again, nothing comes of this.

I didn't know he first auditioned as a Bond girl.

He's captured this other lady James Bond we saw training Coop (Dahlia Lavi) and offers to make her his new queen, and she complies only to trick him into swallowing a pill he's developed that turns him into a walking atomic bomb.

The climax of the film...uggh...I have no idea what's going on. Sir James reveals Lynd as a double agent, suddenly some cowboys bust in and then a free-for-all breaks out. Every character who's still alive at this point as far as I know are there beating people up, and people are running around screaming and I think they're ALL supposed to be James Bond, a couple of seals are there for some reason, and then we get some Indians parachuting out of a plane and they start shooting everyone with arrows and dancing around and...there's also a chimp...and all the while Jimmy's walking around counting down the number of small atomic explosions yet to go off inside his stomach before he finally hits zero and blows up the entire casino and all the James Bonds die and go to heaven except for Jimmy.

They all die at the end. Yeah, THAT'S how much sense this film makes.

The 1967 Casino Royale starts out as a straightforward satire of the Bond films, genuinely playing on Bond's natural attractiveness and reliance on gimmicky cars and watches and things. Unfortunately, at some point into its running time, the movie sort of forgets all of that. Actually I'd go as far as to say that the movie loses all sense of coherence and descends into psychedelic, madcap nonsense. As an early entry in the spy spoof genre, it is well-intentioned, and the talent of its all-star cast is accounted for, but as you can expect from a film with six directors and too many cooks in the screenwriter's broth, the execution is rife with dropped subplots and useless characters and just falls apart. By the end of the film, the filmmakers just throw their hands up in the air and say "screw it, may as well end on SOMETHING."

Of course, little did anyone involved in this film know that at some time in the future, there would be a moment where people would be tired of the old formulaic structure of a Bond film--the sexy girls, the gadgets, the double entendres, and the witty postmortem one-liners--and decide that the franchise was overdue for a reboot. (I think it was probably around Die Another Day, which was so by-the-book it really stung.) And so, in 2006, one movie in the official series would start the story of Bond all over again. This time, with a more serious Bond, a more action-oriented Bond, a Bond who doesn't just shoot guys in a tux with a girl hanging off his leg while drinking a martini (shaken, not stirred).

And that movie would be called...Casino Royale.

And incidentally, THAT movie WAS just the right size for ONE James Bond.

What, another--oh, this movie can go to HELL.