As you can tell, I liked Godzilla vs. Kong, but I can’t deny that there are a few, ahem, scientific implausibilities in the film, and Screen Rants Pitch Meeting guy digs into those with gusto:
Of course, remember what franchise we’re talking about. Compared to “He must have programmed himself to get big!” (Jet Jaguar in Godzilla vs. Megalon), Godzilla vs. Kong‘s leaps in plausibility are mere hopscotch…
Godzilla vs. Kong
Directed by Adam Wingard
Written by Terry Rossio, Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields (story), Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein (screenplay)
Starring Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Julian Dennison, Kaylee Hottle and Demian Bichir
This is the best of the Monsterverse movies. The people at Legendary Films seem to have finally figured out what viewers actually want (hot kaiju-on-kaiju city-destroying action) and what they want left on the cutting room floor (boring human backstory).
The movie opens with King Kong contained within a Truman Show-type dome over Skull Island and Godzilla attacking the Florida research facility of sinister Apex Cybernetics (think Yoyodyne or Weyland-Yutani). The movie quickly splits into two strands: Millie Bobby Brown’s character (a bit less useless than in Godzilla: King of the Monsters), her tubby geek friend (Julian Dennison) and a conspiracy theorist (Brian Tyree Henry) try to penetrate Apex systems to learn The Real Truth, while Kong, along with his deaf Child Monster Whisperer companion (Kaylee Hottle; think Kenny from Gamera, but much less annoying) and guardian Rebecca Hall (the bank-teller from The Town) help Alexander Skarsgard take Kong to Antarctica on an Apex-underwritten mission to the hollow earth to uncover a new power source.
If the last part sounds extremely unlikely, you’re right, but they’ve cannily kept explanations to a bare minimum to keep you moving on to the next monster scene. (You know that 5-15 minute segment where they have to knock out Kong to get him on the ship? They snipped that sucker entirely out and cut to him already in giant chains mid-voyage.) The first battle between Godzilla and Kong takes place at sea, with round one going to our reigning lizard champion.
There’s some delightful stuff with Kong reaching the hollow earth, where he roams the verdant green-and-purple landscape, fights some Quetzalcoatlesque giant flying serpents (which this rundown dubs “warbats”) and finds a giant ancestral throne room and (plot point alert) a Kong-sized Zilla-spined axe.
In the other plotline, the Scooby Gang discover that Apex is breeding Skullcrawlers (from Kong: Skull Island), and are promptly whisked via high speed underground tunnel to Hong Kong (Monsterverse tech seems to be advancing much faster than our own), where they discover that Apex head honcho Walter Simmons (Demian Bichir, basically playing Evil Tony Stark) has built to his own Mechagodzilla to put man back at the top of the food chain.
If you watched the Toho Godzilla films, you pretty much know how this is going to turn out.
We finally get Godzilla and Kong smashing up neon-lit Hong Kong in a truly epic battle royal that Mechagodzilla later joins. Legendary really makes use of the possibilities of CGI to make you feel like you’re in the middle of a battle between two giant monsters, with the viewpoint frequently swooping in and around the action. There’s even a scene where Mechagodzilla emerges from a hillside that I would swear is an almost exact lift from a Toho hillside monster emergence scene.
This is the Godzilla movie where Hollywood finally figured out how to get out of its own way. No “reinvented” Godzilla, no tedious backstories, no time wasted on pointless human drama, no 15 different studio executives having to stick their dicks in the soup to justify their salaries. Just compelling kaiju on kaiju action rendered with top-notch modern CGI that puts you in the middle of the city-stomping. (And none of the “they make their own weather so everything is dark and stormy” effect used to excess in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.) It bests all previous Moinsterverse films in just about every area (except Kong: Skull Island in cast; Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman and Tom Hiddleston beat Eleven, Ben Affleck love interest and a random Skarsgard hands down).
And it’s light-years better than the 1962 King Kong vs. Godzilla, which features perhaps the saddest Kong ever committed to film. (Banglar King Kong doesn’t count.)
If you like Godzilla movies, this one is well worth catching while it’s still in theaters.
MST3K creator Joel Hodgson has launched another MST3K Kickstarter to help fund the show that was dropped by Netflix after two seasons. Their minimum goal is $2 million for three more episodes (which I think they’re going to breeze past today), with stretch goals out to $5.5 million for 12 episodes (plus 12 short films).
Plus something called “The Gizmoplex,” which he describes as “an online theater for live screenings & special events!”
1. Live Premieres & Events: Each month for our first year, The Gizmoplex will host at least* one live event, where you can join me, our cast and writers, and some special surprise guests. Each live event will be like a night at the theater, and will have a lot of fun surprises. Our live events could include new sketches, trailers (done “MST3K style”), live Q&A panel discussions, interviews, contests… even the return of the MST3K “viewer mail” segment.
2. The MST3K Watch Club: To make it easier to watch MST3K with your friends, The Gizmoplex will also be the official home of the MST3K Watch Club! Each month, you’ll get on-demand access to a new selection of episodes, and the ability to host your own live screenings for up to 10 people! Anyone with a Gizmoplex Pass can join for free, and if you want to invite someone who doesn’t, they can get a “Day Pass” for just $0.99!
And, if we reach our stretch goals, the Gizmoplex Pass will get even more valuable!
3. Gizmoplex Apps: If we raise $3.3 million, we’ll be able to develop apps that bring The Gizmoplex to mobile devices and TVs! Right now, the plan is to include apps for six of the most popular platforms: iOS, Android, AppleTV, AndroidTV, FireTV and Roku. Like Crow says: we’re gonna conquer cyberspace, man!
Also: “I really want The Gizmoplex to feel like something new: less like another Netflix with nothing but MST, and more like a charming, off the radar, suburban cineplex that plays movies for 99 cents, long after their first run.”
Though not stated, the ad campaign suggests they’re keeping the Season 11 and 12 cast, and Jonah Ray appears in the Kickstarter video.
There’s also some interesting discussion of the economics behind the show and Kickstarter:
1. Without a network supporting us, we need to fund everything ourselves. During our first Kickstarter, we estimated that, once production was up and running, we’d be able to produce new episodes for about $250K each. In the end, though, the budget for each new episode ended up being closer to $350K. For the last two seasons, we were able to cover the difference through our deal with Netflix… but this time, we’re on our own. We’ve got a lot of ways we can keep the budget lower, but, you know… it’s still going to cost something. And when you think about it, $350K for 90 minutes of television is still one of the best deals in show business.
2. We still can’t spend everything we raise on Kickstarter to make the show.
Campaign Fees: Between Kickstarter and the credit card processor, we pay about 8% of your pledge in fees. There’s also a fee for CrowdOx, the platform we’ll use to manage all of your surveys and rewards after the campaign ends.
Making Rewards: We reserve about 20% of your pledge in order to design, produce, print, sort and pack all of your rewards. And that’s not even including shipping, which we’re not collecting until after our Kickstarter campaign ends!
Dedicated Support: During our first Kickstarter, we underestimated the amount of work involved in providing customer support and creating detailed backer updates, so we had to depend on volunteers to do a lot of it. This time, we want to make sure we’re prepared, so we budgeted about 4% of each pledge for that.
Building & Running The Gizmoplex: We really want The Gizmoplex to be great, but getting it started will take some work – and keeping it running also means we’ll have some monthly fees to cover. We also need some budget to support all of the special live events we’re planning to host. So, we’re using about 3% of your pledge for that.
When you put it all together, we have to spend about 35% of what we raise just to cover Kickstarter expenses, and to keep all the promises we’re making to you.
He thinks that if they do 12 episodes, per episode cost will be down to just under $300K.
You may remember that MST3K already had the biggest Kickstarter in history up to that time. It’s since been surpassed by several smart watches and board games, among other things.
Despite the caveat that “this might not be a good time for some people to offer financial support to a robot puppet show dedicated to cheesy movies,” I expect them to blow the doors off the totals of their last Kickstarter.
Naturally I’ve already pledged.
Update: Just ticked over the first goal of $2 million.
…it’s only that his metabolism has gotten more selective.
Tony Hendra, Spinal Tap manager Iain Faith in This Is Spinal Tap, dead at age 79.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
A combination of new books that came in and filling in some collection gaps.
I will have copies of Big Lizard, The Magic Wagon and Waltz of Shadows in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog, currently in progress. Drop me a line if you want to receive a copy in email.
The Lego remake of the Star Wars Holiday Special evidently premiered today on Disney+.
Looks less a remake than a complete comic re-imagining.
I don’t have Disney+ (or any other streaming service), so I can’t tell you how good it is.
But it can’t help but improve on the original…
A perennial Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite, Space Mutiny is a grade Z science fiction film feature bad acting, a bad script, bad direction, ludicrous sets, thoroughly incompetent continuity, and special effects licensed from the original Battlestar Galactica TV series.
Here the people behind The Bad Movie Bible (which I may need to pick up) take a look at the story behind the film:
I didn’t realize that ostensible director David Winters was also the choreographer for The Star Wars Holiday Special. While that’s an awful lot of evil to pack into one career, any teenage boy whose parents had The Movie Channel in the 1980s are certainly willing to forgive a lot of sins for producing late night “classic” Young Lady Chatterly. (In the “non-evil” department, he was also a Jet in West Side Story.)
The MST3K episode of Space Mutiny is available as part of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Vol. 4. BLAST HARDCHEESE says you should pick up a copy…
Suppose you wanted to do the soundtrack for a horror film: What would you use to score it? Synthesizer? Computer?
Or how about commissioning a custom instrument to make eerie, unnerving sound?
Behold The Apprehension Engine!
The Witch is one of the films Mark Korven has scored, and I just noticed that it seems to have gotten pretty cheap as of late…
I just picked up The Vincent Price Collection from Shout Factory on Blu-Ray and had a chance to watch The Abominable Dr. Phibes for the first time, a movie that’s now just shy of a half a century old.
It’s less a straight horror film that a black comedy Grand Guignol take on a Jacobean revenge drama, in which organist/inventor/theologian Phibes (Vincent Price, wearing disguises to hide his horrible disfigurement and speaking through mechanical aids) and (never explained) beautiful female assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North) venture from their elaborate Art Deco lair (complete with a raising and lowering organ for Phibes to play, along with an animatronic jazz band) to carry out a series of revenge murders based on Biblical plagues on a team of doctors lead by Dr. Vesalius (old pro Joseph Cotton), who Phibe feels botched his late wife’s surgery. Victims are dispatched by bats (who actually look quite adorable), rats, a particularly nasty mechanical frog mask, and (in the case of British comic actor legend Terry Thomas) having their blood drained.
Police, as usual, are always one step behind the fiendishly clever Phibes.
The film it most reminds me of is near-contemporary Suspiria, in that both are completely nutso, color-drenched horror films of hallucinatory intensity. The art direction by Bernard Reeves is so striking, and so integral to the success of the film, that it’s quite surprising he never did another full-length film.
I actually tracked Reeves down and asked why that was:
Thank you for your enquiry, yes I am the same Bernard Reeves that Art Directed the film Abominable Dr. Phibes.
I did very few films in my life, basically due to the fact I was Production Designer for TV commercials and travelled abroad a lot.
These days he’s best know for his motorsports art.
Phibe’s lair is so vivid that it does a great job of making you forget the usual American International Pictures cheapness in the rest of the film. Another fascinating aspect is that while it’s set in 1925, the design of both Phibe’s lair and of Dr. Vesalius’ house is less straight Art Deco than a version re-imagined through the prism of mod London, with bright colors, wall mirrors and anachronistic red plexiglass panels on Phibe’s organ.
And you can easily imagine Diana Rigg modeling some of Vulnavia’s very sexy fashions in The Avengers.
Speaking of which, Director Robert Fuest (who directed several post-Rigg episodes of same) keeps things moving along at a steady clip, so it never drags over its 94 minutes. It’s not really scary, but it does hold your attention throughout. It’s not as good as Suspiria, manly because nothing matches the crazy intensity of latter film’s first murder, and because we root for Jessica Harper’s protagonist in a way we can’t for Price’s twisted antihero.
Some have talked about The Abominable Dr. Phibes as an example of camp, and while aspects lend themselves to that, distance and the sheer vivid weirdness of the film has given it the feel of an intense fever dream.
Still worth a look.
The trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune just dropped:
Let’s do a checklist of encouraging signs that they’re going to actually follow the book:
And it even a has a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Eclipse,” a nod to Jodorowsky’s planned but never-filmed version of Dune, which was to include music by Pink Floyd and Magma.
Only things missing: No Spacer Guild, and no Feyd-Rautha, which makes sense, since they’re only adapting the first half of the novel.
This one is still scheduled for December 18.
Mood: Cautious optimism.