The Not-So-Crazy Crazies

Esteemed drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs has a single three-word critique of a certain kind of genre picture: “too much plot.”  That's a little easy and dismissive, but it does speak to an underlying truth: the best horror and suspense movies have to be easy to follow, or you're in trouble. This particular genre is all about being In The Moment, especially if The Moment is designed to scare the heck out of you, and forcing the audience to pause and say, "Hey, wait a minute: why’s he doing that?  Who’s that guy again? Why is he doing that?" rips the viewer out of that Moment.  Beter to Keep It Simple.  Or even better: Keep It Relentless. 
The Crazies, Brent (Sahara) Eisner's from-the-bottom-up remake of George Romero's little-seen 1973 horror flick, definitely has that problem: way too much plot, too much confusion, for what should be a pretty straightforward story: a government toxin (or virus? Or ... something bad) is accidentally released in a small Ohio town. Exposure to it makes one go gradually, violently insane. And once a few random act of violence have been perpetrated on the small-town citizenry, the U.S. Government at its most sinister sweeps into town to round everybody up -- the healthy, the diseased, and the might-be-either-ones. The local Sherriff and his wife the local doctor must fight off the infected Crazies (who look more and more like your standard Romero zombie the more infected they become) while trying to avoid the equally dangerous U.S. troops in their evil khaki and creepy gas masks, who will just as soon kill or imprison you as look into your red, rheumy eyes.

Simple. Scary.  Bring in the zombies.
Unfortunately, The Crazies isn't that simple, even though it should be. The story is rife with convenient but inexplicable leaps in logic, inconsistent plot points, and an erratic pacing that goes from truly Romero-esque bang-bang chomp-chomp to very long, very slow sneaky-weaky jump-out-of-the-shadow moments that, quite frankly, we've seen a million times befoe.

No question about it, the actors are the best aspect of The Crazies. Timothy Olyphant of Deadwood and Justitifed is the quintessential strong but silent good guy, just like he’s been before and will be again.  Radha Mitchell, the Australian actress best known for Pitch Black, is sympathetic without being weak or stupid, and as surprisingly American doctor-wife. And British actor Joe Anderson, who’s met with unfortunate quasi-supernatural fate before in The Ruins, doesn’t fare much better here as Olyphant’s deputy. In fact, he has the toughest character arc of all, going from charming good ol’ boy to prick to hero in the space of ninety minutes (and with a lot of time off screen). The production values are very high as well, and there are a few "keeper" sequences that will please horror fans regardless of the total package. Expect to hear folks talking about the bone-saw scene, or the pitchfork scene, or the car wash scene, or the truck stop scene. All are terrific .. but all of them,  taken together, comprise about fifteen minutes of the movie. Which leaves a whole lot of waiting around for those few cool moments.

The "wait a minute, what?" interruptions are the real spoilers here. From the very beginning, you find yourself asking, "Wait, is this a toxin? Is it a virus? Is it only carried in the drinking water, or is it airborne, too? If it is in something as ubiquitous as the drinking water, how come some people are affected right away, and others not at all? And what exactly does it do to you? The first couple of victims are not enraged berserkers a la 28 Days Later, or mindless shamblers out of Romero’s Day of the Dead. The first victims look more befuddled than insane; the next set look mildly pissed off but absolutely rational in the stalking and incinerating of his innocent family.  And then the 28 Days contingent show up in full, rotting, glory. That's one of the oddest things about The Crazies: nobody seems all that crazy, at least not for the longest time. Though you can't blame the marketers for that; a movie called "The Sullens" or "The Befuddleds" probably wouldn't do nearly as well with the horror fanbase.

Then there's the completely illogical behavior of the U.S. Government. Not that you don't expect them to be evil -- hell, that's almost a given in horror movies. But you at least expect a certain level of competence as being so evil. After all, they've had plenty of practice.  But here, even though it's obvious very early in the film, barley after the credits, that the U.S. Government is not only behind this but well aware of the accidental infection from the before the beginning, it takes them forever to show up. The Crazy-Juice is a tailored biological agent, after all; the Feds know what it's going to do to the populace. So why do they hesitate on the evacuation until things get really bad? More: they have total satellite camera surveillance (again, we see that in the first three minutes); so why do they have such trouble finding rebellious evacuees and errant Crazies wandering around in broad daylight? Why can't they seem to construct a decent perimeter around a tiny Ohio town of 1,200 -- one sitting out in the open plains no less -- without holes big enough for an eighteen wheeler to drive through -- literally, an eighteen-wheeler.  In fact, if the Feds are as ruthless as they seem, why bother with evacuation at all? Why not initiate the Nuclear Option -- which the do, with only partial success -- right away, rather than day later. It's not like they're ever going to let any of the uninfected back into the public sector anyway -- this is a secret infection.  And thier concern for the well-being of the innocent citizenry is absent from Day One, Hour One.  So get on with it, man!

Maybe, underneath all the illogicality, the biggest problem with The Crazies is the sheer predictability of it all. There's not a scene, a character, or a camera move we haven't seen before, and some quite recently.  Eisner, who showed just how ham-handed he can be with action pictures in Sahara, shows the same unsurprising fumble-fingerosity right here. He isn't content to pull out every one of these well-worn horror-movie tropes a single time; we ge to see them two or there or even four times each. There's the "cheat," where a main character appears in the foreground, entering a scene ... then CAMERA ADJUSTS and oh! there's a bad guy standing right behind her, in the background!  There’s the "offscreen banger," where a Bad Guy gets the drop on a Good Guy -- gun in the face, pitchfork in the air -- and BANG, someone unexpected and unseen, off-screen and off-scene SHOOTS though a window or an open door and DROPS the bad zombie and SAVES the day! And of course there is the classic SHOCK CHORD, when something Bad or Good jumps out of the dark. As if the sudden boo! isn't enough, the director ads a ZINGGG! on the sound track -- which makes you jump in acoustical pain as much as psychological shock. 

It could be worse -- far worse. But there are just way too many been-there-done-that's and way too many questions for what should be an easy, straightforward slice of quasi-zombiesque Theater of the Paranoid pic to make this a worthwhile screamer. 
All that doesn't make The Crazies bad; it just makes it ... not bad.

Super-Bad: The Day the Costumes Killed the Justice Society

We checked in over at Smallville this week. Been a while since we stopped by, and boy, have things changed. Superboy -- d'ah, Clark -- still refuses to fly or wear the stretchy suit, but Lana's gone and Lois Lane, annoying reporter, is in, and Lex is 'dead' -- uh-huh -- and there are so many characters from the DC Universe running around even veterans of the Comics Divison of AAtR International need a scorecard to keep up ... especially when the versions were seeing here are all funhouse-mirror Smallville versions of the characters we know and love.

It's the costumes, y'see. The costumes freak people out, including the producers.

Never was that more true than in the early February episode called "Absolute Justice" (the name itself a pun on a super-deluxe edition of some recent DC Justice League reprints), in which a Smallvill version of the Justice Society of America -- the masked mystery men of the Golden Age, their offsprint and protoges -- show up in Metropolis when their members start getting picked off one after another by a secret kil -- hey, WAIT a minute! We already SAW Watchmen!.

In fact, the script for this two-hour superextravaganza, penned by comics superstart Geoff Johns, isn't bad at all. Lots of lively dialogue, a plot with a few cool twists in it. And the casting for most of heroes of old and new -- Stargirl, Hawkman, Dr. Fate -- isn't bad at all, though some of them get very little to do.

The real problem -- the big problem -- is with the suits.

They're ... well, they're goofy. Michael Stargate Shanks's Hawkman suit because, quite likely, Mike hasn't got the abs for it. They put Stargirl in a uniform that is, unfortunately, way too true to her "masked cheerleader" look in the comics, and add a mask that's so bulky it looks inflated and hair that look like a bad wig. Even Dr. Fate in the cape looks -- well, dumb (though the helmet's cool, we admit that.) In fact, the costume design is such a complete failure that it overshadows all the much better production values of set design, acting, writing and special effects. It basically ruins the show.

When Smallville premiered early in the century, when all Clark and Lana and Lex had to worry about was the "space rock" mutant of the week, there was a hard and fast rule. The producers said Clark would never fly and never put on the stretch-suit and cape. This was all about his life before that, they said. And it turned out to be a very smart move: you could take the characters a little more seriously, even when they were shooting fire out of their eyes or freezing off a victim's fingers, if you didn't have to get past the aesthetic of the stretchy-suit -- a 'look' that works perfectly well in the comics but is terribly, terribly risky in 'real life.' (Ask the costumer designers who have struggled for decades on the Superman and Batman and Spider-Man franchises. It is hard to make a supersuit that doesn't look silly, even on a great body.)

And this just proves they were right -- at least as far as the reach of Smallville can extend. Oddly, the producers' good-hearted desire to remain true to the show's comic book roots is a big part of the problem (as opposed to, say, The Human Target, which bears no resemblance to its DC Comics version, and even hides its funnybook origins). Michael Shanks just doesn't have the big-ass, almost brutish body that could maybe handle the 'real' Hawkman suit, and even that's no guarantee. Stargirl's athletic-shorts-and-halter-top duds look kind of goofy in the comics on purpose -- that Coutney! -- but on film it's just plain embarrassing. And people, please: taking the same design as the stretch-suit and simply doing it up in colored leather is not an answer. It didn't work for one of the many version of the Batsuit and and it didn't work for Dr. Fate here. They would have been far better off doing what they did a couple years back when they introduced Smallvillian versions of the Flash (that is, Impulse), Aquaman (Aquateen? Why does that make us hungry?), and Cyborg, among others: stick with the street clothes and add a little flair, or glow-y eyes. Also: avoid big, thick gloves. And boots of any kind. And please, no sleevless outfits unless you have the guns to justify it (yeah, we're talking to YOU, Shanks .. and in a much nicer way, to YOU, Green Arrow. Rowr!)

Many decades ago, in a different time and for a different company, there was a serious attempt to relaunch then then-moribund X-Men by having the lose their costumes, hit the mean streets, and cruise around in a convertible. No. Seriously. A wonderful artist named Gil Kane, who epitomized the 'look' of Green Lantern for years, gave it his very best effort. But after a very short time, the Powers That Were at Marvel realized that superheroes in street clothes just don't cut the mustard -- not in the comics.

Maybe it's time we admit the opposite: that superheroes in capes and tights have a real tough time being taken seriously on TV. Maybe someday somebody will pull it off ... but not this time. And not on Smallville.

From Watercooler to Parking Lot at the Funeral Home

Remember those TV shows we used to talk about at work the next day? The thrillers or science fiction or cults shows or action series that everybody was watching then; they were the talk of the lunch room and water cooler and the first ten minutes of any committee meeting you didn’t really want to attend. In the old days it was shows like The X-Files, Friends, and ER. More recently, it’s been Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, 24, Survivor, and Lost. And as this season began, you heard some chatter about V and FlashForward.

But here’s the weird thing. According to our patent-pending mega-scientific Rush Survey, there is exactly one show on that list that people are actually still talking about … yet all the rest are still on the air.

What happened?

Lost seems to have reinvigorated its water-cooler status by making a big deal about this being The Final Season. This, of course, implies that the nearly endless series of “wtf?” questions will actually be answered by the end of the arc (but come on, does anyone really believe that?). But the rest? If you asked most people who were avid fans just a season or two ago, they’d give you the copyrighted “ER response:” “What, is that still on?”

Heroes got mucked up in the time-travel repeat-myself add-more-characters-no-MORE-characters! disease in Season Two, then got hit by the writer’s strike and never recovered (this season, sadly, is not much better as well as unwatched)

Battlestar Galactica finished its initial run with a mildly satisfying tie-up, and then tried to bleed turnip stone with a series of spin-offs and prequels that, really, seriously, nobody cares about.

24 just stopped being able to top itself. Once you’ve revealed a black presidents years before Barack Obama was even a blip on the radar and nuked an American city … I mean, really, who cares?

Survivor … excuse us, why did we like Survivor in the first place? Memory fails us …

Meanwhile, this season the two new water cooler possibilities have stumbled right out of the gate. FastForward started with a great first episode, but almost immediately bcame mire in illogic and soap-opera clichés. V ended its very brief first arc on a wildly uninteresting “reveal” and banked on a group of characters that, with the exception of Anna (Morena Baccarin) are dishrag uninteresting and predictable.

There are still shows worth watching. We love us our Human Target and Chuck and Castle and True Blood and Bones and Lie to Me and Leverage and Big Bang Theory and even the occasional Mentalist. But none of those whip up the “gotta see it” compulsiveness of the past.

And once Lost is lost … we all will be.

Gird your loins, people. There void approaches.

Bye Bye, Echo. We Hardly Knew Ye.

So Dollhouse finishes up with an episode that's a sequel to a year-old episode that never actually ran on FOX.  And if there was ever pure evidence of an idea wasted by ... what, network timidity?  The shortfall of a creative vision?  Or just the structure of American television itself? ... this is the one.

Wonder what would have happened if FOX had been able to accept the idea of, say, a one-season show -- thirteen parts with a stunning opener, an unexpected twist every week, and a killer closing that didn't allow for a second season or sequels?  You know: a story.

Instead, at least according to Whedon, the net forced a rewrite and reshoot of the pilot, played it out of sequence, and broke the back of the progressive concept in exchange for putting Elisha Dushku and her cohorts in really short skirts and silly melodramas for the whole first season. And very soon, very easily, nobody cared anymore. 

It's a bit of a mystery as to why FOX brought Dollhouse back for a second season at all.  Maybe they saw the error of their ways; maybe they simply didn't have anything else in the hopper that was worth a go at the time, and thought Whedon could put the pieces back together.  Ultimately, of course, he couldn't: by the time Echo had become the supercool Women of a Thousand Brains and the true, horrible plan of the Rossum Corporation was fully understood, the cancellation order had been issued, and the audience and moved on.

But the thing is ... it should never have happened.  This story -- at least what we saw of it, right up to the very end -- was perfectly structured for the "British Model."  One season. Maybe two, tops.  Beginning.  Middle.  And a stunning End that actually works. 

So to hell with FOX for screwing the pooch in the beginning, and kudos to same for letting him finish it as it should have begun.  Epitaph Two, the series finale showed us what might have been.  Elisha was never more fierce and beautiful, Whedon’s dialogue never sharper.  Everybody (except maybe poor Summer Glau, who got killed a few eps back) got a chance to shine, and Topher --Fran Kranz -- who started this show as almost pure comic relief, the most smart-assy Whedonesque voice of all, ended as the strongest and most sympathetic player in the bunch (if you blinked you missed him in Donnie Darko; he was wonderful and completely overlooked in The TV Set, a great movie about making a bad TV series – whaaa? – and next he’s doing another Whedon project, a feature called Cabin in the Woods, with – among others – Amy Acker!  Yay!).  Young Adair Tishler, last seen as the power-hunting li'l girl on Heroes, does an amazing, wise, spooky job as "Caroline" stuck in a tiny body (thirteen years old, but does a very convincing ten or eleven).  And also: thanks to whoever brought Alan Tudyk back, even for a few scenes (what, like he wasn’t busy enough with V and Sundance and all?) and gave Felicia Day, sweetheart of the internets, yet another small exposure in the wide world of TV (FOX is clearly Felicia’s friend; she was even more charming than usual in a recent turn on another FOX series, Lie to Me, not to mention that hot-hot pictorial – along with awful copy – about "Twitter celebrities" in the current Vanity Fair.)

FOX had a couple of tough years in there, post X Files.  Except for Bones, they couldn't seem to make any of the right decisions for Rush-type programs, and the disappointments that were Fringe and yes, poor Dollhouse, were the bottom of the trough, so to speak.  (Don’t mention 24.  Please.)  But now there’s the aforementioned Lie to Me and even more recently The Human Target, and things are looking up -- just a little.

You can read a bunch more on Contrariwise, out big-long-essay section. But briefly: Epitaph Two is great.  If only the restof Dollhouse had been half as challenging, exciting, touching, or just plain cool.  You can catch the finale right here on Hulu, and on Fox as well.  It's good stuff, especially if you saw the prequel, Epitaph One, floating around the net or hiding on the Season One DVD.  Either wait, it's worth it.

Too bad it was too late for Joss Whedon and Dollhouse -- not that a season either way would have mattered; it's more like the timing was always off, from the very beginning.  Still, it's a shame: it could have been so cool.