Empowered Volume 4 (2008)

I’d like to issue a personal apology to Adam Warren. You see, months back I wrote a highly critical review of the third volume of Empowered, but then rolled right into volume 4, which was a massive improvement. Unfortunately, I’ve had that negative reaction sitting around the internet for about a half a year, and sat on the positive opinion I have for this edition. The character of Empowered gets nominated as “Suprahuman Most Deserving of Wider Recognition” in this story, and the book also warrants more positive word, so I feel like a jerk for laying down on the job.

The book opens by reprinting the color story from MySpace Dark Horse Comics Presents, a fairly average introductory piece for new readers. Speaking of color though, for some reason I always thought Sistah Spooky was an Asian girl that tried to act black, and it wasn’t until I saw her on the back cover here that I saw how unambiguously African-American she’s supposed to be. Call me obtuse.

The new material picks up with Ninjette recovering from the events of the previous volume. The hospital for “capes” where she’s staying offers a lot of opportunity for Morrison mad ideas, which Warren has a gift for communicating with much greater clarity and humor. The three principles (including Thugboy) then bond back at home in a more organic (and sexah) fashion than the karaoke contest last time.

Unbeknownst to the reader, those fifty-four pages of seemingly random episodes, exposition, and recovery have been lulling them into believing that the new tale hasn’t begun, when in fact Warren has been craftily threading in clues to a central mystery that will dominate the volume. Fun new characters are introduced, Empowered is subjected to her usual emotional battery, and sorting out the read herrings from the essentials may challenge the reader. Most of the cast is given an opportunity for action and character exploration. Once the shit starts hitting the fan at 17th Annual Caped Justice Awards ceremony, pay-offs come fast and furious, and our heroines truly show their worth.

I loved the first volume of Empowered because it was a collection of short stories/comic strips designed to satisfying at the end of each treat’s single-digit page count. Volume two worked because it was many of the characters’ first chances to entertain in extended tales. Three faltered because of the contempt of familiarity and meandering before the final fight, which had been teased too much and ran too long. Also, the balance of humor, tension, action and characterization was way off, feeling forced or slight depending on the individual segments.

Volume four works because Adam Warren manages to keep all of its balls in the air the entire time, an amazing accomplishment. Each chapter is fun, usually quite funny, and often enhances the characters. At the same time, the episodes are downright insidious is their stealth building of an overarching story which ties together and completes the volume. For the first time since the beginning of Empowered, Warren has delivered an edition that works in parts and as a whole, magnifying the pleasures of his work. He seems reenergized here, and the enthusiasm and focus grabs the reader by the boo-boo. Any reservations I had about continuing to follow the series were dispelled, and it is once again among my top recommendations.

Fire: The Definitive Collection (2001)

Back in the early ‘90s, I bought my comics at a flea market stand where the proprietor was savvy enough to order first issues beyond the usual speculator crap with informed judgment. For instance, there was a debut from Caliber Press called Fire with a photo cover of a floppy haired college girl with a gun, ala Le Femme Nikita. I’ve had a weakness for fumetti since that Marvel Team-Up cover where Joe Jusko dressed as Captain America, and a weakness for floppy haired brainy girls nearly as long. Surely the shopkeeper knew at least one sucker would buy the book, and that sucker was me.

The comic was about a male (drat!) university student who had been recruited by an intelligence agency. The story opened with his having run afoul of his boss, Murphy Brown, and ending up battered and locked away. The rest of the issue was then told in flashback, revolving around how the student was lured into the spy business and partially trained by a cute floppy haired spy girl (yes!) It was a pretty alright story that ended on a cliffhanger. The dialogue had a nice pop to it, with unusually strong character repartee for a comic of the time. I liked the moody high contrast art, which made up for some of the obvious photo referencing (especially Ms. Candy Bergen) with personality. The lettering was rather amateurish, though, and the writer/artist was pretentious enough to use his full name and merge the a & e in “Brian Michael Bendis.”

Anyhow, the dealer must have lacked confidence in selling a second issue, and if I asked him to reorder that half, it never got to me. I did keep up with the progression of this Bendis guy, and even tried odd issues of his crime comic A.K.A. Goldfish, but I never found anything strong enough to hook me. Bendis eventually became one of the biggest names in the industry, and I still don’t fully understand why, because even his best stuff (Alias, Powers, Daredevil) has consistently left me wanting. The worst stuff has been outright wankery, and I don’t think the guy “gets” the high profile super-heroes he now gets to write, so I avoid his stuff whenever possible.

Still, a few years back Fire came out in an affordable single volume, reedited/altered/expanded like it was George Lucas’ project instead of Bendis’. I can’t recall if I bought it myself or got a loaner, but after about a fifteen year delay, I finally finished Fire in its ultimate form. I guess after my various exposures to the writing style, a lot of the perceived originality novelty had worn off. That, and I’ve seen a bunch of Mamet and Tarantino since then. In fact, a lot of the circular exchanges of dialogue were grating as fuck today, and I hated the unnecessary repetitions of pages/sequences. I still like the artwork, especially when Bendis borrowed from Patrick Nagel for his floppy haired girl. It strikes me as a good book to show off some technical prowess and get your foot in the publishing door, but unsatisfying and derivative as a volume of some sort of froo-froo Brian Michael Bendis collection. In fact, I read this thing in the spring of 2009, it went multiple trips where I intended to get writing done, and I’ve only just now gotten around to the bother of reviewing the damned thing. I seem to recall having a lot more invective to hurl at its construction and excesses, but time has dulled that harsh critique, and I just don’t want the mediocre book hanging over my head anymore. Besides, this collected edition doesn’t feature either of the old photo covers, and that floppy haired chick was the only reason I bought the fucking thing in the first place.

A Frank Review of "His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th" (2009)

The Short Version? Slasher flick icon gets discussed.
What Is It? Documentary.
Who Is In It? All the usual suspects, plus some completely random people, like that guy from Psych.
Should I See It? Probably.



Growing up in the 1980s, and I'm sure for decades prior, there were these TV specials featuring behind the scenes footage and interviews for upcoming movies. Even though they were essentially commercials, they were still heavily advertised 30-minute-to-half-hour events with their own hosts run on network television. At the same time, UHF channels and cable television were using similar material stripped to bare basics as bumpers between movies. The public generally became better educated about the mechanics of film production, so the "specials" seemed to fade away going into the '90s. They kind of got replaced by the geek documentary: fan/creators seeking to legitimize their dorky obsessions by getting deep into the sociopolitical relevance of Star Trek and such. Between the revelatory nature of the deeper meanings found in good docs and the amusement of someone pulling imagined weight out of their assholes in the bad ones, it was a really fun period for that type of material. Unfortunately, the rise of "reality television" economics has made the cheap ass pseudo-documentary exasperatingly common nowadays, so every pop culture dead end can be counted on to receive several feature length dedications to their dubious merits.

Take Jason Vorhees, for instance. The original Friday the 13th may have been a canny spin on Psycho that paid off the insinuated gore of Halloween, but by the third installment it was just a straight up Michael Myers knock-off in a rural locale. However, the character has turned up in twelve feature films and counting, so you'd think there must be something special to warrant that kind of longevity. Watching the direct-to-DVD His Name Was Jason, I suspect it's the same base, comforting, familiar formula that kept Married... With Children on the air for over a decade. It isn't that there's anything great about Jason Vorhees as a character, and his movies are fairly consistently lousy, but his potency as an iconic image is hard to deny.

Like your typical Friday flick, His Name Was Jason is crappy in the early going. Jumping quickly between film footage and an excess of interviewees, nobody is saying anything worthwhile. Tom Savini, who famously passed on Part 2 because he thought bringing back Jason was nonsense, comes off as as a bit of a low quote sellout as the host. He's also involved in interstitials depicting victims stalked/killed by Jason on a set. The cheesy devices used to cut everything together (CGI hatchets/blood spills/sound effects) are truly obnoxious, and there seems to be a real rush to cover each shitty, repetitive sequel as rapidly as possible. In fact, I switched the movie off after about twenty minutes and let it sit for a month before giving the flick another go.

The overly busy production eventually settled down, like an ADHD kid whose Ritalin starts kicking in. The interstitials start featuring actual kills and tits. Most of the stupid transitional effects get dropped. Individuals involved in the various productions start being given space to tell their stories. That last one especially makes the difference, because you start to realize part of the appeal is the shared experience of being in a Jason movie, and the usually positive impact that association has on their lives. There's a real feeling of community between fans and the decades of performs involved with the movies that seems to enrich their lives. The movies are still dumb formula, but the relationships are almost profound.

While the documentary itself may be too crassly commercial and mainstream, the special features more than make up for its faults.

Extras?

• The Men Behind The Mask Forty-six minutes of interviews with every actor to play Jason Vorhees. Without all the garbage and quick cuts, plus full of information, I enjoyed this more than the actual documentary.
• Final Cuts Same as before, except an 1 1/4 hour with the directors. It's almost as if the documentarians knew their work was getting chopped to shit, so they indulged themselves by offering everything they could have possibly wanted in a real doc as extravagant special features. I had my favorite Jasons, and there are some directors with much more insight than others, but as a whole this is a robust pair of worthwhile features.
• Dragged From The Lake Twenty minutes of stuff cut for being too long or extraneous. Not bad, but I don't want to hear about Alice's stalker or art ever again. Too creepy and sad, not necessarily as expected. Also, I never saw Part VII, but it seems to have been the Freddy's Revenge of the series, so I oughta.
• Fan Films I had a knee jerk reaction at first glance, until I hit the sub-menu to check the marquee. Freddy vs. Jason in 30 Seconds With Bunnies and The Angry Video Game Nerd: Friday the 13th Episode have made the internet rounds for years, and are pretty good. Jason Hurts is a solid enough skit that runs a bit long. The only dud is Rupert Takes Manhattan, about Jason's unsuccessful brother who wears a catcher's mask. That gag is old as shit, and poorly executed besides.
• Closing the Book on the Final Chapter About ten minutes spent at the Jarvis house from Part IV with the director and a pseudo-Jason. After everything else, this was a bit of a drag, but not so much through fault of its own.
• Fox Comes Home I assumed this would be some lame Fox trailers, but it's actually the actress from the 3D one (which I also haven't seen) showing off the location from her film for four minutes. For the diehards only.
• Friday the 13th in 4 Minutes Three accomplished fans separately give a loose summary of the entire original series and have it edited together into a narrative. Cute. Inessential.
• Jason Takes Comic-Con Dread Central.Com interviews cast members from the reboot's marketing salvo at San Diego. Lame as it sounds.
• The Camp Crystal Lake Survival Guide Everybody offers Scream-type advise for another four minutes, run though a cheesy "dated footage" filter.
• Inside Halloween Horror Nights An tour of the Universal Studios Camp Blood attraction used extensively in the documentary.
• Shelly Lives! Sketch comedy. No, it isn't.

A Frank Review of "Return of the Living Dead 3" (1993)

The Short Version? Romeo meets Zombiette
What Is It? Horror
Who Is In It? Lady Heather, Officer Jim Reed, Ursa
Should I See It? Probably not.



Brian Yuzna directed the overrated Society, and not much else you’d want on your IMDb page. He specializes in horror movies that look like ambitious but underfunded stage plays with bad lighting, including those straight to video jobs that trailer movies you suddenly realize from their presence you shouldn’t have rented. It takes a special kind of ineptitude to release a two million dollar sequel to a classic horror-comedy as a melodrama that only recoups a quarter of its budget. Still, if only because of late night showings in my formative years, I have a very small amount of affection for Return of the Living Dead III. It isn’t in any way objectively good, but it is surprisingly watchable, and has memorable moments.

The movie opens on the set of a Wilson Phillips video-- no wait, that’s just the overpowering presence of the early nineties at work. Acid washed jeans, floppy boy hair, those stupid hats-- if such a movie were produced today, I would howl over how insanely on the nose of 1992 everything was. Anyway, this is the story of an army brat boy having fallen for a bad girl to the dismay of his widowed daddy. Pops is involved in a very loose continuation of the previous movies, his idea to have the military use zombies as weapons against enemy nations soon falling out of favor and replaced by zombies acting as meat batteries for exoskeletons controlled through medieval means. Half of what I just wrote made no sense, but there’s enough idiocy in the script that focusing on any one inanity requires an impressive amount of tunnel vision on the viewers’ part. The script is wretched, the characters are all ridiculously deserving of dire fates, and Pitfall Harry couldn’t get over this many plot holes.

The boy sneaks onto a military installation that must be run by Gomer Pyle to show his girlfriend the reanimated dead, until whoops, she joins their ranks. Forgetting all that stuff from the first movie about zombies needing to eat brains to relieve themselves temporarily of the agony of being undead, the bad girl instead uses pain to distract herself from wanting to eat whatever human body part is readily available, specifically her boyfriend's. On the run through South Central Los Angeles, the star-crossed couple run into all sorts of offensive racial caricatures, including a magical negro derelict who shelters them in his sewer home while growling every moronic line. He’s still better than the boy, an actor so bad I’m not sure I buy his respiration, much less his delivery. The girl actually went on to better things, and deservedly so, but she’s still finding her way here.

Prior to the hour mark, things start to drag, but the film seems to reach its anti-climax within a quarter past. Disconcertingly, the movie then continues for another quarter hour, which feels inorganic, but is actually where most of the money and fucked up imagery ends up. What makes it weird is that it's 9/10ths of a vampire movie, then suddenly becomes a true zombie flick about the time you're ready to check out.

In summary, the movie is a mess. Everything looks cheap, the script sucks, the acting eats dick, fans of the earlier movies will miss the yucks, and zombie fans will miss the yuck. Still, our heroine zombie serves as an early alternative culture/piercing/cutting icon, there are some clever bits, a surprising presence (if not quantity) of tits, and it's generally better than the sum of its parts.


Extras?

• Director's Commentary Film geeks always appreciate tracks that go into this level of detail... unless it's for a Brian Yuzna production. So wait, you just kept repainting the same boxes and shining different colored lights through them to give the appearance of new set locations? Who'da thunk it? Besides everyone?
• Cast CommentaryHoly shit! Two tracks for this turd? Someone's getting fired over this waste of company resources! Also, I don't know if you can technically call it the cast when one member and a technician shows up. Admittedly, it was star Melinda Clarke and Thomas C. Rainone (2nd unit/effects supervisor,) but still. It's fun to listen to the awkward silences whenever Tom hits on her or steers the conversation toward right wing politics. This would have been adequate on its own, but after a second viewing with the director, enough was enough.
• Trailers Remember what I said earlier? All Yuzna features, including Progeny, Faust: Love of the Damned and The Dentist 1 & 2

1975 G.P. Exports "Learn The Secret Powers of the Deadliest Killers in the Orient" Ad

The physio-mental powers of the ninja!

1968 DC Comics Showcase #73 "Beware The Creeper" House Ad

DC promoted the event of a popular artist moving into their stable with "Steve Ditko Strikes Again!" I suppose that would be a strike in the baseball sense, as like Jack Kirby, none off Ditko's DC creations ever caught fire like the Marvel ones. In fact, I'd say the Charlton heroes DC bought about fifteen years later have profited them far more than the Creeper, Stalker or Hawk & Dove... although the Vertigoized Shade the Changing Man had a longer run than any of them.

A Frank Review of "Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D" (2010)

The Short Version? The Matrix with zombies in 3D
What Is It? Action-Horror
Who Is In It? Leeloo, the other blond from Heroes, the Prison Break guy, that black dude who does black movies your pale ass don't see, that asshole who always plays scumbags
Should I See It? Maybe.

I slag on most movie franchises-- hell, most movies-- but I have my weak spots. Resident Evil is certainly one of them. I'm up for unpretentious cinematic badness if the formula is right. I love zombies, and adore Milla Jovovich, so I'm Paul W.S. Anderson's meal ticket. I have warm memories of playing every damned variation on the incomparable Resident Evil 2 video game I and a group of friends could manage (Hunk's Run owned me,) and followed that series through until Codename: Veronica, by which point I'd given up on all gaming. I even read a few of the comics, and started one of the books. I didn't mind the liberties taken in the first Resident Evil movie, because it offered enough respectful nods while clearly being its own beast. I say that with full consciousness that the games were little more than a mutated mating of dozens if not hundreds of zombie movies, while the movie owed outrageously blatant debts to films from other genres. They're both totally derivative, and their pleasures run to the guilty side, but I indulge in them unapologetically.

I've seen every Resident Evil film in the theater, and I've run through the first on DVD better than a dozen times. Of the many "influences" you could slap across the franchise's face, I find the closest parallel for myself to be the Roger Moore Bond movies. No one ever confused the dubious quality of Moore's outrageous '70s spectacles for the better Sean Connery material, just like George A. Romero can rest easy knowing his first two Dead films remain the gold standard. Still, Connery made Diamonds are Forever, and not having seen Survival of the Dead, I can safely say Romero went at least thirty years without producing a good zombie movie (quiet, Day apologists!) Given my druthers, I'll take the cheap thrills of RE over any additional screenings of Diary of the Dead, not to mention any Brosnan Bond besides Goldeneye.

For the uninitiated, the first Resident Evil introduced Alice, an initially amnesiac heroine who worked with a commando squad to investigate a top secret laboratory of the sinisterly omnipresent Umbrella Corporation. This was followed by Apocalypse, the messiest, ugliest, and least interesting chapter, as an outbreak of the murderous undead sweeps Raccoon City. Extinction took the franchise into Mad Max territory, involving some entertainingly goofy sci-fi/super-heroic elements. Each has ended with a cliffhanger, even though the directorial vision is quite inconsistent, and nothing is sensible enough to lead anyone to believe the continuing story is given any thought until after the box office indicates a greenlit sequel. This is especially amusing when you realize this is the rare series written by a single individual, but it's Paul W.S. Anderson, so yeah.

Afterlife picks up in Japan, as Alice leads an assault on Umbrella headquarters that recalls Kurt Wimmer's Ultraviolet (also starring Jovovich,) which effectively ended his directing career. Anyone who tells you this is the high point of the movie likes their shit dumb, extending from the lousy acting to the stupid dialogue through the questionable CGI. However, it's in 3D, and the kind Jim Cameron used for Avatar, so I suppose the gimmick of throwing stars coming right atacha does it for some people. Paul W.S. Anderson is back in the director's chair, and still desperately wants his own Matrix, but at least this is better than a Matrix sequel. The patented "homage" and magical unclear resolutions of once dire circumstances will be familiar from past entries in this series, but there's an added dose of excessive bullet time slo-/non motion. Besides the gimmickry and a desire to start things off with a bang, the main purpose of this sequence is to hit the reset button on elements of escalating lunacy from previous chapters.

From there, Afterlife slows way down, a source of complaint for some. Tonally and as manifested, it falls somewhere between Apocalypse and Extinction. A bunch of new characters are introduced as cannon fodder for cartoonish action set pieces like the second flick, but as in the third, the pacing is more deliberate, with some returning characters lending tension to situations where someone who matters somewhat in imperiled. Some new mystery/conspiracy elements are introduced that will never be satisfactorily resolved, and the appearance of any characters originating from the actual game will continue to alert viewers of a dip in the already shoddy acting standard present.

I condemn Resident Evil: Afterlife in the same way I would admonish myself while enjoying a triple meat cheeseburger. I know it will attack my heart, do damage to my bodily systems, and could be easily replaced with something better for me, but I'm not going to stop chowing down. Zombies whose mouths split into tentacles just like the genetically altered vampires in Blade 2 means idiot characters getting ate in the face. Fast zombies swarm rooftops like cockroaches in a sewer, twelve foot tall medieval executioners throw meat tenderizing axes, Milla/Alice jumps off the usual shit while things blow up, and brains hurl at the audience's altered perceptions like watermelon at a Gallagher concert. If you don't know you're supposed to giggle when Alice steps out of a prop plane dressed like Amelia Earnhardt with the full Maybelline treatment after experiencing 177 days without any signs of human life, you're just not getting it.

I continue to miss the atmospheric music of the first film. The only song here I can recall is an incessant remix of A Perfect Circle's "The Outsider." How do we go from new Slipknot and inventive old Nine Inch Nails to a tired ass single from Bush's first term (the president, although I could see thinking of the band under these circumstances.) No one in this cast makes an impression beyond Jovovich, and the villain is flat out terrible (Agent Smith by way of Val Kilmer, with a reasonable approximation of the hilariously awful voice acting of the early games.) The movie runs long at 1 1/2 hours, because that silly ending will. not. stop. There's even a mid-closing-credits tease, involving a pre-existing character I didn't recognize (six years and a dye job will do that,) building off a cliffhanger too stupid to live. Resident Evil: Afterlife is an objectively bad movie that thrilled me, and I'll be back at the trough for part five, especially if they finally work out the kinks with Smell-O-Vision. What an olfactory trauma that would be!